Saturday, September 03, 2005
Hurricane, part one...
I first got interested in hurricanes and meteorology when I was thirteen years old. I was on vacation with my family and some friends in Ocean City, Maryland, and about halfway through our trip Hurricane Bob had formed. It was the first time I had ever seen waves so high or the ocean so menacing off the beaches of eastern Maryland. After returning home I quickly began learning everything I could about hurricanes and essentially every other kind of natural disaster that could occur. But my particular fascination was with hurricanes. I could remember the scenes from the news of Hurricane Hugo's demolition of Charleston in 1989 and quickly was filling my head with images of past disasters like the Galveston hurricane of 1900. A year later it was Hurricane Andrew that came and devastated south Florida. I can still see the pictures of Homestead in my mind, flattened, timber everywhere as though a giant hand had come down and swept everything off the land.
Like anything you discover at thirteen it does at some point begin to tail off as you grow up, but it always stuck in the back of my mind. Whenever hurricane season came around I would watch with avid fascination the development and results of these storms. My interest would be stoked again once I got to college and two smaller hurricanes affected even the Richmond area where I was in school. First Fran and then Bonnie, they came and it was my first experience with even the outskirts of one of these powerful storms. The longevity of the wind and rain were an experience unlike any thunderstorm I had ever experienced. It was only a few weeks after Bonnie that Hurricane Mitch roared through the Carribean and slammed into Central America. One of my best friends was from Honduras and the category five storm slammed into her country and brought devastation the likes of which we now witness here. I remember the efforts that were coordinated to send any kind of aid we could down there, and hearing the stories of washed out roads and missing friends that came in from her family down there afterwards. It was my first brush with the fringes of the human toll that these storms can take.
And for awhile, my contact with these storms, thankfully, was limited to the occasional television coverage. Then in 2003, Hurricane Isabel came ashore and roared well into Virginia as a category one hurricane. It was with a certain mixture of curiosity, excitement and fear that I waited along with my roommates for what would happen. We happened to catch a few lucky breaks. Our power lines were buried and we never lost power throughout the night but for a few brief interruptions here and there. We had alerted our landlord to some of the dangerously tall and dead trees that loomed over the house and had the worst one cut down. While we sat in the family room and watched the news coverage of the storm that night, we all at one point felt suddenly compelled to check outside. The winds had shifted no more than thirty minutes before that and as we peered outside, one of the other gigantic trees in the yard had finally given way and toppled over across our yard and the neighbors. But for thirty minutes or not having the foresight to get that one tree cut down, either one would have come crashing down into that family room where we all sat. Providence was all around us that day. We did have the water cutoff and it would remain off for several days following the storm. My parents and my brother and his family had lost power in their part of the city just eight miles to the south and it would remain off for even longer. Driving north with my brother in the days after the storm up to Washington, D.C. and then on to New Jersey, I was astonished by the destruction Isabel had wrought as it travelled up I-95. The trees knocked down, the flooding in Baltimore and Alexandria, the power off for as far as we had driven, stopping in towns up and down 95 trying to find a place to get a hot meal. Things that you imagine being simple, like a salad, you couldn't find because there was no water to wash the lettuce.
The scummy feeling of not having showered for days and not being able to enjoy any of the comforts of life that we take for granted every day is something I still remember. It would not be long before I would be reminded again of nature's inherent power. My parents purchased a home on the west coast of Florida, south of Tampa, in the spring of 2004. It was a house directly across the street from the same family with whom we had been vacationing in Ocean City back in 1991 when Bob loomed over the east coast. In the middle of August, Charley appeared and took direct aim at that area, veering instead at the last moment to the south and bringing great destruction to Punta Gorda and trailing across the state. We breathed a sigh of relief that our friends and the house had been largely spared. A week later the remnants of Hurricane Gaston, barely a tropical depression, moved slowly out of North Carolina into Virginia. I had just returned from Las Vegas and a friend's bachelor party about fifteen hours before when I saw the story about the storm coming toward Richmond. I knew it would be a lot of wind and rain and decided to leave work early so I wouldn't get caught in the traffic on my way home, downtown.
I was living on the fifth floor of a restored warehouse at the time. I got home at about 2pm that day, and at 3:15pm the power went out. I watched out the window as the sky grew dark, and darker, almost impossibly so. And the rain started coming down, steady and droning against the top of the building over my apartment. It drummed on the roof as I waited, thinking sooner or later the power would come back on. Then the wind started blowing and then blowing harder. I could see out over part of the city from my window and as I watched the impossible seemed to be happening, the storm was getting stronger over land. The winds were howling and the rain was coming down in sheets and I started receiving calls from friends in other parts of town. One of them asked me about the flooding downtown that her brother was stuck in, and I, having not ventured out of my apartment yet, had no idea what was going on. I got off the phone and decided to head out to see what it was like. I opened the door to the stairwell and water was pouring down from the roof to the lobby. There was about an inch of water when I got to the first floor and headed outside. My building overlooked a canal off of the James River, and I-95 spanned over the river about a quarter mile away. Traffic was at a dead standstill, and the canal had spilled over out of its banks and there was about four feet of water on the road below. I walked a few blocks to the east and suddenly I could not go any further as there was what I would later find out twelve feet of water piling up at this end of the city. A flood wall had been erected to prevent the James from again flooding the city as had happened many times in Richmond's past. Only now, as water poured down from the hills surrounding this part of downtown, the flood wall was keeping the water in.
I went back to my apartment for a while and the realities of what a storm is really like started to hit home. During Isabel I had never gone through the uncertainty of being completely unaware of what is actually happening. In the dark, alone, listening as the wind whips across the roof of the building above me and wondering when is it going to stop. I called my parents who were visiting family in New Jersey to let them know I was okay because I was certain it would make the national news. They hadn't heard about it yet, but fifteen minutes later it was on the national news. Parts of downtown Richmond were under twelve to fifteen feet of water and throughout the area flooding was causing widespread panic and damage. People had been caught in the evening drive home and had been forced to abandon their cars on the roads and walk home in knee or waist deep water. The rains finally began to taper off around nine o'clock that night. I decided to try and get out and head to my parents' house just outside the city. I got in my car which I had for some reason not parked in the garage but on the street by the building, which meant that my car was not flooded in. Unfortunately, my part of the city was.
There had been fourteen inches of rain in around one hour at the height of the storm. All that water had runoff from the hills of the city that surround the Bottom and piled up. Emergency crews were launching boats to rescue people trapped in offices and restaurants. A mudslide had blocked four roads that led out of the area with about two to three feet of mud, a sinkhole had wiped out two more, and all the other roads were underwater. One road was clear the next day and I got out to my parents' house, along the way passing the destruction that the flood had wrought. Cars piled on top of cars piled on top of buildings. Trash and debris everywhere, some roads still impassable and dramatic stories of overnight rescues filled the news. People who had been trapped in their car by suddenly rising water or at home when a lake spilled over its banks and the courageous rescuers who plucked them from danger and delivered them safely.
And now I sit and watch the news of the last few days and my greatest fears of what might happen seem to be unfolding before my very eyes. When the storm was about a day from making landfall and was a part of many conversations I was having with friends, I was saying that I believed it would be a disaster that would prove worse than September 11th. In the shock of that day it's so hard to imagine anything could ever be more devastating. But when the death toll is finally released, I firmly expect casualties to be double or more of that day of tragedy. A major city has been lost to flooding, almost a million people are suddenly jobless and we face at least a temporary energy crisis of some kind. There are lots of fingers pointing and I'll probably get into that stuff in my next post, as politics runs up there in my top five topics of conversation, but I am still stuck thinking about all those people, and the fear they must have had as Katrina came ashore. Suddenly realizing that this storm was going to be completely unlike any they had been through before and now there was nothing they could do about it. I take the fears that I had during Isabel and Gaston and multiply them by about one thousand to try and start to process how it must have been for those on the Gulf coast.
My prayers and thoughts are with them all, I have already made one donation to the Red Cross and I encourage anyone else who hasn't yet to do so.
The Red Cross
http://www.redcross.org
800-HELP-NOW
Anything you can contribute will help.
Like anything you discover at thirteen it does at some point begin to tail off as you grow up, but it always stuck in the back of my mind. Whenever hurricane season came around I would watch with avid fascination the development and results of these storms. My interest would be stoked again once I got to college and two smaller hurricanes affected even the Richmond area where I was in school. First Fran and then Bonnie, they came and it was my first experience with even the outskirts of one of these powerful storms. The longevity of the wind and rain were an experience unlike any thunderstorm I had ever experienced. It was only a few weeks after Bonnie that Hurricane Mitch roared through the Carribean and slammed into Central America. One of my best friends was from Honduras and the category five storm slammed into her country and brought devastation the likes of which we now witness here. I remember the efforts that were coordinated to send any kind of aid we could down there, and hearing the stories of washed out roads and missing friends that came in from her family down there afterwards. It was my first brush with the fringes of the human toll that these storms can take.
And for awhile, my contact with these storms, thankfully, was limited to the occasional television coverage. Then in 2003, Hurricane Isabel came ashore and roared well into Virginia as a category one hurricane. It was with a certain mixture of curiosity, excitement and fear that I waited along with my roommates for what would happen. We happened to catch a few lucky breaks. Our power lines were buried and we never lost power throughout the night but for a few brief interruptions here and there. We had alerted our landlord to some of the dangerously tall and dead trees that loomed over the house and had the worst one cut down. While we sat in the family room and watched the news coverage of the storm that night, we all at one point felt suddenly compelled to check outside. The winds had shifted no more than thirty minutes before that and as we peered outside, one of the other gigantic trees in the yard had finally given way and toppled over across our yard and the neighbors. But for thirty minutes or not having the foresight to get that one tree cut down, either one would have come crashing down into that family room where we all sat. Providence was all around us that day. We did have the water cutoff and it would remain off for several days following the storm. My parents and my brother and his family had lost power in their part of the city just eight miles to the south and it would remain off for even longer. Driving north with my brother in the days after the storm up to Washington, D.C. and then on to New Jersey, I was astonished by the destruction Isabel had wrought as it travelled up I-95. The trees knocked down, the flooding in Baltimore and Alexandria, the power off for as far as we had driven, stopping in towns up and down 95 trying to find a place to get a hot meal. Things that you imagine being simple, like a salad, you couldn't find because there was no water to wash the lettuce.
The scummy feeling of not having showered for days and not being able to enjoy any of the comforts of life that we take for granted every day is something I still remember. It would not be long before I would be reminded again of nature's inherent power. My parents purchased a home on the west coast of Florida, south of Tampa, in the spring of 2004. It was a house directly across the street from the same family with whom we had been vacationing in Ocean City back in 1991 when Bob loomed over the east coast. In the middle of August, Charley appeared and took direct aim at that area, veering instead at the last moment to the south and bringing great destruction to Punta Gorda and trailing across the state. We breathed a sigh of relief that our friends and the house had been largely spared. A week later the remnants of Hurricane Gaston, barely a tropical depression, moved slowly out of North Carolina into Virginia. I had just returned from Las Vegas and a friend's bachelor party about fifteen hours before when I saw the story about the storm coming toward Richmond. I knew it would be a lot of wind and rain and decided to leave work early so I wouldn't get caught in the traffic on my way home, downtown.
I was living on the fifth floor of a restored warehouse at the time. I got home at about 2pm that day, and at 3:15pm the power went out. I watched out the window as the sky grew dark, and darker, almost impossibly so. And the rain started coming down, steady and droning against the top of the building over my apartment. It drummed on the roof as I waited, thinking sooner or later the power would come back on. Then the wind started blowing and then blowing harder. I could see out over part of the city from my window and as I watched the impossible seemed to be happening, the storm was getting stronger over land. The winds were howling and the rain was coming down in sheets and I started receiving calls from friends in other parts of town. One of them asked me about the flooding downtown that her brother was stuck in, and I, having not ventured out of my apartment yet, had no idea what was going on. I got off the phone and decided to head out to see what it was like. I opened the door to the stairwell and water was pouring down from the roof to the lobby. There was about an inch of water when I got to the first floor and headed outside. My building overlooked a canal off of the James River, and I-95 spanned over the river about a quarter mile away. Traffic was at a dead standstill, and the canal had spilled over out of its banks and there was about four feet of water on the road below. I walked a few blocks to the east and suddenly I could not go any further as there was what I would later find out twelve feet of water piling up at this end of the city. A flood wall had been erected to prevent the James from again flooding the city as had happened many times in Richmond's past. Only now, as water poured down from the hills surrounding this part of downtown, the flood wall was keeping the water in.
I went back to my apartment for a while and the realities of what a storm is really like started to hit home. During Isabel I had never gone through the uncertainty of being completely unaware of what is actually happening. In the dark, alone, listening as the wind whips across the roof of the building above me and wondering when is it going to stop. I called my parents who were visiting family in New Jersey to let them know I was okay because I was certain it would make the national news. They hadn't heard about it yet, but fifteen minutes later it was on the national news. Parts of downtown Richmond were under twelve to fifteen feet of water and throughout the area flooding was causing widespread panic and damage. People had been caught in the evening drive home and had been forced to abandon their cars on the roads and walk home in knee or waist deep water. The rains finally began to taper off around nine o'clock that night. I decided to try and get out and head to my parents' house just outside the city. I got in my car which I had for some reason not parked in the garage but on the street by the building, which meant that my car was not flooded in. Unfortunately, my part of the city was.
There had been fourteen inches of rain in around one hour at the height of the storm. All that water had runoff from the hills of the city that surround the Bottom and piled up. Emergency crews were launching boats to rescue people trapped in offices and restaurants. A mudslide had blocked four roads that led out of the area with about two to three feet of mud, a sinkhole had wiped out two more, and all the other roads were underwater. One road was clear the next day and I got out to my parents' house, along the way passing the destruction that the flood had wrought. Cars piled on top of cars piled on top of buildings. Trash and debris everywhere, some roads still impassable and dramatic stories of overnight rescues filled the news. People who had been trapped in their car by suddenly rising water or at home when a lake spilled over its banks and the courageous rescuers who plucked them from danger and delivered them safely.
And now I sit and watch the news of the last few days and my greatest fears of what might happen seem to be unfolding before my very eyes. When the storm was about a day from making landfall and was a part of many conversations I was having with friends, I was saying that I believed it would be a disaster that would prove worse than September 11th. In the shock of that day it's so hard to imagine anything could ever be more devastating. But when the death toll is finally released, I firmly expect casualties to be double or more of that day of tragedy. A major city has been lost to flooding, almost a million people are suddenly jobless and we face at least a temporary energy crisis of some kind. There are lots of fingers pointing and I'll probably get into that stuff in my next post, as politics runs up there in my top five topics of conversation, but I am still stuck thinking about all those people, and the fear they must have had as Katrina came ashore. Suddenly realizing that this storm was going to be completely unlike any they had been through before and now there was nothing they could do about it. I take the fears that I had during Isabel and Gaston and multiply them by about one thousand to try and start to process how it must have been for those on the Gulf coast.
My prayers and thoughts are with them all, I have already made one donation to the Red Cross and I encourage anyone else who hasn't yet to do so.
The Red Cross
http://www.redcross.org
800-HELP-NOW
Anything you can contribute will help.
