Of all the natural disasters mankind has faced, the one we understand the most and can best predict is hurricanes. Other phenomenon are still largely nebulous to our understanding. Hurricanes, however, are pretty much not only understood but the one disaster you’d have to be an idiot to die from because you get days, even weeks, to get out of the way. And with this great understanding we get the next great thing mankind has discovered:
Media circuses.
Now that we understand these great behemoths we do to them what circuses do to lions, tigers, bears, giraffes, elephants and the like: we put them on display. With 24 hour media coverage we can watch, moment by moment, as various reporters, who seem to think themselves brave, sit themselves in the path of the storm to give us such great moments in videography such as the destruction of hotel signs.
But I can’t say they are alone. There are, inevitably, the fools who sit in their houses and go “Aw, it ain’t gonna be THAT bad”. I’d love to say that this time around it was the fact that a hurricane hit The South (not to be confused with the direction or Florida) but people in Florida appear just as foolish. My favorite from Katrina has to be the guy whose house, which is now probably underwater, who called New Orleans 911 begging to be rescued from the seemingly inevitable flood that New Orleans (which is below sea level) would get. He wasn’t alone either. The Coast Guard is having to use helicopters and boats to rescue people from , you guessed, it, themselves.
Katrina spared us this go around. I guess she heard about Ivan too. So far there’s no damage here or power outages (even my mother, who loses power anytime some sneezes, has power) but that’s probably because Ivan cleaned everything out. So no need to trek down there and pull out the chainsaw (Erin’s favorite power tool :p ) or generator. We’ve just had wind and rain plus the occasional tornado warning. I’m waiting to see how well Tia’s brood fares when the air raid sirens up there go off the first time. Chris was actually entralled with ours at Easter when we had a major system move through (of course that was like 3pm in the afternoon). Erin doesn’t like them but they do serve a purpose.
That purpose being to drive you nuts. Montgomery, like so many other Southern cities, has sirens because we’re modern but we lack the ability to sound them separately. So you could have a tornado 20 miles away and have sirens wailing. And the one here is this electronic sounding wail. The first one I ever heard was in college and that wasn’t nearly so pleasant. Imagine finger nails down a chalkboard. Now imagine it deeper. Deeper. Good. Now imagine you’ve got one of those SUVs next to you with the spinning hubcaps and the 15 amp drivers for the twin 20 inch subwoofer playing that sound. At full volume. The kind of sound that reverberates through your being and would even make the hardest core hip hopper go “What IS that noise?” I mean it makes puppies cower, children cry and encourages you to go outside armed with a large calibur weapon to put stop to it. Which I was inclined to do, being that it was 5am. Except that I was out of ammo and most ammo shops wait until at least 6 to start up. My roommate was from rural Georgia and he had no idea what to do so we turned on the TV. People set up chairs outside (I kid you not) to watch for it.
In the end we got hit by no tornados (then or now). We had no real flooding. Katrina, to us, was like Dennis, Cindy, etc. It had a lot of bark but no bite. After Opal and Ivan it’s old hat now. My grandfather said they didn’t call them hurricanes, just really long storms. And they didn’t have sirens either. Ah the good ol days…
