How about a thread to share hurricane stories? We already have several good hurricane threads, including What is it like to be in a hurricane? and How Best to Handle Post-Disaster Looters?, but I thought that it might be worthwhile to have a separate thread for stories. These could be personal stories, family lore, or whatever (mods, if this is more suited for MPSIMS, so be it.)
Here’s some of mine:
As mentioned in the GQ thread, my parents and siblings went through Carla, staying in their home, one and one-half blocks from the Galveston beach. My sister remembers watching through a window as the waves hit the seawall; the tops would shear off and fly through the air until they hit the house. My brother tells of walking to the garage at one point to check on the dog. As he was crossing the backyard, he was leaning over so hard that he could reach forward and touch the ground.
Mom’s strongest memory of Carla was of stepping outside after the storm and seeing jellyfish floating down the street. This was on the high side of the island, almost on a hill. The business district and harbor were under three feet of water.
Mom also talks about the time when she and Dad were dating that they went to a movie during a hurricane (this was probably 1947.) The power was off in Galveston, so they went to Texas City. After the movie, the car died while they were crossing the bridge, so they got out. They were walking to town when Dad grabbed Mom, held her tight and kissed her hard. She was suitably overwhelmed and didn’t know where a quiet man like my father had been hiding such passion until he told her days later that a hunter’s shack was spinning through the air about one hundred feet away and heading towards them.
My father lived in South Florida from the mid 40’s to the mid 50’s and he went through 8 hurricanes. He said that during the eyes people would paddle canoes and rowboats around on the flooded streets.
My mother grew up in Ocala, Florida. She never mentioned directly experiencing a hurricane. She did say she was terrified of them as a child because her mother had told her that in 1928 a hurricane had blown all the water out of Lake Okeechobee and drowned a bunch of people.
My sister went off to college in New York in 1985, right about the time a hurricane hit there. I don’t think it did much damage. Later when I asked her what she thought about it she said, “It was fun.”
People paddling canoes and rowboats around on the flooded streets? Are you sure it wasn’t a Southern Florida whitewater club??
I went through Alicia in 1983; we were on the northwest side of Houston so it may have been down to tropical storm strength when it reached us. Right before morning, my brother in law and I decided to visit his mother, about five miles away. :rolleyes: We stopped at a Stop and Go, whose rotating sign was flipping back and forth in the wind. Lightning would light up entire halves of the sky, but we couldn’t hear the thunder over the wind or see the flash through all the water in the air.
After a while, I layed down for a nap; the wind was calming when I woke. My family said that the eye passed overhead shortly after I went to sleep. Evidently, I can sleep through anything.
After Andrew a co-worker brought in a picture of her bedroom. The pressure had sucked a curtain between the glass and the frame of the sliding glass door. The only way to remove the curtain was to break the glass.
Someone else had a pair of candlesticks that were top heavy and always tipping over, so they never lit them - they were just for decoration. After the hurricane they were still standing on the coffee table despite the fact that their living room was missing an entire wall.
I had a very narrow “just for looks” front porch. The previous tenants and set some small sea shells on the railing and I just left them there. After the hurricane my house was missing its entire car port and two front windows blew in, but the sea shells were still there, untouched.