Hurricane Milton

This is a little bit of a sequel to my post from earlier in this year about the book Five Days at Memorial. That book detailed the harrowing events in the five days after Hurricane Katrina at one New Orleans hospital where patients and doctors were stranded by the storm and floodwaters. 

As readers may know (well, if my blog actually had any readers...), Hurricane Milton is approaching Florida in the Gulf of Mexico as I write. It is forecast to make landfall in the middle of the night on Wednesday (tomorrow) into Thursday and is currently rated a Category 5.  

This is an extremely severe, strong hurricane that's going to do a lot of damage. As I await the arrival of the storm (from multiple states away, well north and out of its path), I have a certain morbid fascination about what will happen with this hurricane. I just know that things are on the precipice of something major with this hurricane. On a trivial note, I also think the name Milton is interesting, and most likely it will be retired from the list after this storm hits.  

I was in elementary school and too young at the time to be completely aware of all the details and metaphorical weight of what happened with Katrina, so my memories of that are more simplistic. I remember watching the nightly news about it and being aware that it was a significant thing that had happened. I also think I found it somewhat interesting, in that it was something different and unusual (to see/hear about on the news), and it caused me to wish something "interesting" would happen...  

So now, with full adult awareness of this, it lends an interesting mood. I think this will be like the Katrina of the 2020s. It is a little strange to me to think that I could be on the brink of observing (indirectly) the Katrina of the 2020s. It's also kind of strange to think about how Katrina was almost 20 years ago by now. Damn, I'm getting old. I heard Coldplay's song 'Paradise' in McDonald's last week and I said "I remember when this album came out," which is a thing that people say when they're Old. That album was Mylo Xyloto and it was released in 2012 [actually late 2011], if I recall correctly. 'Paradise' was on the radio a lot back then. The album artwork was this bright blue graffiti design. I digress.

This hurricane also could potentially result in another 'Five Days at Memorial' scenario occurring somewhere in Florida in the hardest-hit area(s), so I wonder if that will happen. While we're on this topic, I do think it could be fascinating to have a career in emergency management, since I'm a meticulous, resourceful, logistical planning person and like figuring out what the best way to do something is.  

On TV, the news is showing a chyron with current hurricane status information, like the category and position of it. As of this evening, it was saying it was a couple hundred miles away from a place called Dry Tortugas. This name sounded interesting to me and I wanted to know what/where exactly this was. It is a tiny cluster of islands off the tip of Florida, west of Key West. It is also a national park. 

I was looking at Associated Press photos from the prelude and preparation period for this hurricane. Some show massive debris piles from a recent previous hurricane, others show people trying to make preparations and/or evacuate. Seeing the preparations gives me a foreboding feeling because I think about how the preparations may pale in the wake of the storm's impact and things will just get destroyed anyways. It's a very strange feeling to see the photos and know that a bunch of things will be severely damaged and destroyed in just a day from now. 

The level of destruction will probably be apocalyptic. Some portion of what I see in the photos from today will be destroyed by the hurricane and will look very different by the end of the week. The photos depict things like people boarding up windows, trying to clean up debris, empty shelves at stores for items like bottled water and food, gas stations that ran out of gas, and heavy traffic from people trying to evacuate. 

There is a photo showing a man carrying his friend's cat in a cage to evacuate it [AP photo ID 24282650725969]. This photo was from an island outside of Bradenton (slightly south of Tampa). Last week, I saw a video showing a group of people sitting (?) in a flooded living room somewhere after hurricane Helene. Among the people is a cat sitting on a floating sofa cushion. There was also a dog sitting on another floating cushion.    

So all in all there's an intriguing-foreboding feeling for me. It's sunny and clear this week here, which is an interesting contrast to the meteorological horror that awaits Florida tomorrow. In a way, it's as if I'm watching things in a snow globe. 

Society's normal functioning will break down in the areas that get demolished by the hurricane. It's strange to think about. A lot of human-nature-y things will be laid bare in ways that don't typically happen during regular everyday life. People's will (or lack thereof?) to survive, and the anguish of experiencing something like that firsthand. How does that affect someone on the individual level? How does it affect the country at large on a broader level?

And of course people will die, perhaps quite brutally. The potential for a Five Days at Memorial situation to happen again. There are a lot of facets here that I find rather intriguing/morbidly fascinating from a sociological, anthropological, psychological, even media analysis lens. Especially since I'm now able to be fully aware of the gravity and complexities here in a way I wasn't back in 2005. 

For another little digression, I've thought about and discussed recently the concept of historical awareness, let's say. One's perception and conceptualization of events. "Living memory." 9/11 as a "real" thing in my mind, even though I was too young to remember it actually happening. To a 16 year old today, it's not a real thing to them. It's more of an abstract notion, if that. Katrina isn't a "real" thing to a 16 year old today either. This tangent is pretty meta.          

Also thinking about hurricane Milton in general makes me wonder what I would do if I were in a scenario like this. I live in an area that's blissfully not prone to natural disasters, so I've never had to seriously think about emergency preparedness. Earlier this summer there was a serious tornado scare, but even then, that's just a matter of sheltering in the basement. 

In a hurricane, I suppose I would try to evacuate if possible, if I lived in a mandatory evacuation zone. If I lived in an area without mandatory evacuation orders and/or was unable to evacuate, I guess I'd have to do the best I could at surviving in place and preparing for the immediate aftermath. Stockpile food, clean water, other necessary supplies... 

How things would go in the immediate aftermath, assuming I survived, would depend on whether my home is severely damaged/flooded by the hurricane. If the only place I could evacuate to was a government-run shelter, what would I do in that case? There would only be so much that I could bring with me -- what would it be? I find it all interesting to think about in a theoretical sense. 

As usual, but especially so now, I'm going to be keeping an eye on the news because I want to see what happens. I wonder what Anderson Cooper is thinking about this, as he covered Katrina on location back then. I wonder if he's seeing the (probable) parallels too.