After Tropical Storm Fay, and before Hurricane Gustav
Things here in Tallahassee have gone completely Fay-wire. Depending on where the measurements were taken, we received anywhere from 12 to 26 inches of rain from Tropical Storm Fay. For a while there, we were getting two inches an hour—hour after hour.
Last Friday, during the first hours of the storm, a lineman died when a tree fell on him while he worked to repair a downed power line. Another man was killed in a storm-related car wreck. Just a few miles north of us, a 12-year-old Georgia boy—a member of a local aquatics team--drowned in what would ordinarily have been just a dry, shallow ditch. Small businesses are still closed while the owners slog through knee-deep water trying to save undamaged inventory. Farmers have lost their crops and livestock.
Five days after the first of the tropical storm hit town, the rivers have finally crested. We still have major flooding and road closures. Exploding sewer mains have closed several of our main roads, and just today, a hole four feet around and 10 feet deep closed another. There has been major flooding, voluntary and mandatory evacuations and prolonged power outages.
We were lucky at my house and suffered no damage. Immediate neighbors have trees and limbs down. The power in my neighborhood was off for only three hours on Saturday, but because my husband is obsessed by solar power and alternative energy sources, we didn’t suffer a bit. We had lamps, fans, computer, and TV service throughout. It wasn’t a great way for my son to spend his 7th birthday, but it could have been worse.
Not everyone we know was so lucky. One of my husband’s coworkers has (so far) been four days without power. Another of our friends lives in one of Tallahassee’s prettiest neighborhoods, directly across the street from a pond that is the centerpiece of one of the city’s prettiest parks. But until the floodwater recedes, he can access his house only by parking on a side street, and cutting across three of his neighbors’ back yards.
And here comes Hurricane Gustav, slowly building momentum as it heads into the Gulf of Mexico. There’s no telling where it will make landfall, but all indications are that it will be at least a devastating Category 3 hurricane; Hurricane Katrina made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane.
I keep thinking it surely won’t land here; we’re still slogging through a slow recovery from the last storm. It just wouldn’t be fair—as if tragedies ever are. South Florida and the southern Gulf coast have been hit by so many storms, and the mortgage crisis has already crippled that region, so they should be spared, too.
Then I think, maybe it will hit Texas, but they already suffered record-breaking flooding earlier this summer. Louisana? Mississippi? If the weather gods are in the least compassionate, those states should never again be targeted by another storm.
Tallahassee usually escapes the wrath of hurricanes; the last was Hurricane Kate in 1985. Maybe it is our turn. Maybe we were blessed with a tropical storm as a warm-up exercise --no way could you call it a dry run. After Fay, more people will take the warnings seriously and lay in provisions, head for the shelter, or leave town all together.
My genius of a husband has already rigged another portable power supply to keep the refrigerator up and running. And he’s busily putting together similar appliances for four of our friends…just in case. I’m stocking up on canned goods, tarps, etc., but what I really want to do is take my family and head for my friend’s cabin in the mountains of North Carolina.