Ed. - Since I wrote this, Tropical Storm Fay has turned her eyes towards a Cat 1 Tampa landfall. Ironic.
Great NYT piece today about the general weather amnesia setting in over in Florida, only four years after we got our collective asses kicked by five hurricanes in six weeks.
“Officials tell us that they are really quite worried about people who would not cooperate, who are not aware of what was about to happen,” said Robert Blendon, director of the Harvard report. “And just thinking of the mobile homes, if people stay and they really are blown all over, public officials, ambulance services, Red Cross units have to go find these people and provide them with support and services.”
The public cost could be significant. Miami-Dade County has spent $250 million in local, state and federal money cleaning up from the hurricanes of 2005, Katrina and Wilma, and officials say that when people are unprepared, the expense rises substantially.
That is partly what worries Larry Gispert, director of the emergency management office for Hillsborough County, on the Gulf Coast. Mr. Gispert says the questions he has received at preparedness seminars this year — like “When is the next hurricane coming to Tampa?” — show that residents are woefully uninformed.
I used to live in Tampa, so I can tell you that folks there live in their own special breed of hurricane denial. But still, you have got to be kidding me.
When Hurricane Charlie zeroed in on the Tampa/St. Petersburg area in August 2004, a friend of mine who lived in Clearwater Beach (only a mile from the projected coastal impact zone) insisted to me that she didn’t have to evacuate. She was new to Florida; we hadn’t been hit by a hurricane in a long while, and in fact had been in a drought for most of the last six years or so. My friend figured that she was far enough away from the beach - distanced enough not to fear the storm surge. At the time, like many recent Florida transplants, she didn’t really know what a hurricane was.
Hurricanes are rated in terms of five categories, much the same as tornadoes are. A “Cat 1″ is an excuse to stay indoors, bring in the lawn furniture, make sure your insurance is up to date, and stock up on batteries, candles and bottled water. A Cat 2 ramps that up a notch; you might lose some shingles, a tree might fall, things get knocked around. You’ll probably still lose power for a few days, but a Cat 2 is hardly the end of the world.
Things start getting serious at Cat 3. Now the winds are well about 100 miles per hour. Coastal regions are hit with up to 12 feet of storm surge flood. Buildings start taking damage. So do power grids. Cat 3 hurricane winds scream past your windows with an unearthly roar. If you’re caught in a Cat 3 storm, you know it.
Cat 4 was Charlie. Up to 155 mile per hour winds. Storm surge flooding as high as 18 feet. A Cat 4 storm destroys things. Homes. Buildings. Churches. It relocates trailer parks quite effectively. Being in a Cat 4 on Monday means living in a FEMA trailer on Friday (or whenever they can bother to show up).
A Cat 5 is simply the end of the world. The finger of God. Apocalyptic damnation. Death and destruction, devoid of hope or honor. If you find yourself in a Cat 5, you’re an idiot for not getting the hell out. If you survive, plenty of people will be on hand to tell you so. (But don’t worry - you probably won’t live to hear it.)
So anyway, my friend was new to all this and decided not to evacuate ahead of Charlie. Again, a strong Cat 4. I told her: this isn’t a joke. It’s not an excuse for a party. If Charlie stays on course and hits Clearwater head on, there’s going to be nothing left of it. You’re not going to be inconvenienced: you’re going to be dead. Get. The. Hell. Out.
My friend got lucky. A bunch of people in Punta Gorda didn’t. Charlie turned a few degrees east at the last minute and landed a bit south of Clearwater, an area that it promptly then destroyed, before marauding his way through the state, crossing Orlando and punching out through Daytona Beach.
“When is the next hurricane going to hit Tampa?”
Lord, oh lord.
