Bloodless Coup

Gustav

As a child of the (sub)tropics, I have not been able to shake the need to know what is happening over the Atlantic as fall approaches. Even though I moved to the mountains some years ago, I still keep a keen (possibly obsessive) eye on approaching systems, waiting and watching. I still have family on the southern coast of Florida, but it's more than being worried about them.

My mom is a weather watcher. She will call me from Florida to tell me that there is bad weather headed my way, because she watches the weather channel for me since I don't have cable. She doesn't get the magic of the internets, but I don't try to tell her because I think it's cute. It's a way that she can still mother her 40 year old "baby" with a phone call. She's a "tough old bird," as she likes to say, quoting her doctor. She talks about storms of the past like old frenemies. "That damn Cleo" and what not. Wilma was the one that broke her nerves of steel. She would never admit that it had anything to do with approaching 80 years of age, and instead says that Wilma shrieked and howled so loud and for so long that she had never heard anything like it before, so now she says that as long as they aren't noisy, she can take it. She and my dad were troopers, taking cold baths and cooking on the grill for weeks afterwards. Again, for folks getting up on 80, that's pretty spry.

My dad's folks lived through the Category Five Okechobee Hurricane of 1928. It blew their first house right off its foundation, and they rebuilt the small wood frame stucco house that my grandmother lived in until she was 94. That little house - one tiny bedroom, a tiny kitchen, a little bathroom, and a small living room, plus another closet-y one for storage and laundry - stood through a lot of storms, and was finally brought down by termites in 1997 after my grandmother's death. When my parents got married, my grandparents divided their lot and my folks built (and they themselves built it, my mom hauling around concrete blocks while pregnant with one of my sisters) a small square cement block house - two small bedrooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen/dining/living room. It's also built to last, on the only high ground in town (a ridge) of low concrete block construction and a hip roof.

I worry about them a little because they are old timers, and used to riding things out. I worry that although they could ride it out and the house would make it and be above the flooding, that the aftermath would be too much, too dangerous. One sister and my brother live close by, thank goodness, and they do the lion's share of helping get things ready. If a big one was coming straight on, though, they'd all go.

Gustav isn't going anywhere near my family, but I feel worry for other places I love and other families that are in the way. It passed by the Isle of Youth and Pinar del Rio is getting hammered right now. Gustav is still a Cat 4 storm as it is crossing Cuba, and is so big that the hurricane force winds are going to buffet Ciudad de la Habana. As Dr. Masters points out, the architecture is not in good shape, and while the people will hopefully be evacuated and cared for, the beauty that remains of old Havana is in serious danger. And New Orleans. The city that has suffered far more than enough, whose collective PTSD is crashing and sparking today, is in the sights of this still growing monster. And there are several more stacked up both in the Atlantic and across Africa (look about halfway down in this post at the black and white satellite map). With the potential for some Cape Verder-type hurricanes, September looks to be a rough ride.

Still, despite the fear and worry, there is something about hurricane season that I love. The extra phone calls with my mom, as we discuss the potential paths of the storms, my folks' plans for when to put up the shutters (not so soon that it's a waste of work, not so late that they become sails in the gusts as you try to put them up), and what the rainfall amounts could be and what it would mean for the levels on Lake Okeechobee (which, in my mother's estimation was prematurely drained last year in preparation for hurricanes that never came, leaving South Florida in a bad drought). I also love to watch the storms march across the Atlantic, wondering which will get a name and which will stay out over the ocean and dissipate. I love to reload the satellite imagery, watching the bands stretch out, and the eye definition come and go.

Gustav has been a pretty one to watch, but deadly, and it's sitting over Western Cuba where it brought ~20 foot storm surge, 145 mph winds and 2 feet of rain. And nowhere to go but places it wil cause lots of trouble.

Posted by binky at August 30, 2008 07:07 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Natural Disasters