TheBanyanTree: From Jana Ducret re: Fl;oridians

[Theta]

At 07:34 PM 8/13/2004 -0400, Linda wrote:
>Hi all ... my name is Linda DiMaggio (some of you may remember me as 
>'l.d.' and it's been a long time since i've posted .. i will try to send a 
>story this weekend but right now I'm copying this post from Jana Ducret ...
>
>I know I haven't checked in for a long, long time (it's a long, long 
>story) and this is not a story, but I'm concerned about Sachet, Dan, Janie 
>and our other Floridians.  Has anyone heard from them?
>
>Thanks.
>Jana
>Indiglow at sbcglobal.net

It's good to hear from you, Linda, and from Jana too.  We've all been 
keeping a close eye on the hurricane news.  Julie and her boys are in the 
Grand Caymans on a snorkeling trip (I don't think they are doing much 
snorkeling!) and we are waiting to hear from them, hopefully with a funny 
story about their adventures.

I've never been through a hurricane.  I've been close to a tornado but 
luckily it was a brief experience.
"Aaahhh!  It's a funnel cloud!  No, wait, it fell 
apart.  Whew!  Aaaahhh!  It's dropping again!!  No, wait, it fell apart 
again.   Whew!   Well, here it comes again.  Is it going to stay formed 
this time, you think?  No, there it goes back up into the clouds.  You 
think we should be down in the basement with the neighbors?  Nah.  The 
cloud's blown over.  See, there it comes peeking back down again, but it's 
all falling apart."  Then we went and told the neighbors they could come 
out of our basement.

My big natural disaster experience was the tidal wave that hit Oahu when we 
lived there, about 1986 it was.  What?  You never heard about the tidal 
wave of '86?  There was an offshore earthquake up Alaska way, and the alert 
went out.  A tidal wave was headed our way and we only had a few hours 
before it hit.  (Those things move FAST.)  The alarms went off all over the 
islands and the tidal wave emergency plan went into effect.  All the 
businesses shut down and everyone was sent home or, on the military bases, 
to their emergency positions.  That was when the local authorities 
discovered that the tidal wave evacuation plan, written some 20 years 
before after the big wave that wiped out Hilo, had not been updated to take 
into account the increase in traffic.  The entire island of Oahu 
immediately went into traffic gridlock, and a significant part of the 
highway system then ran right along the shore, about 12 inches above sea 
level.  No one could move.  Tens of thousands of people, stuck in their 
cars, dead stopped on the roads.

What to do?  What to do?  All those people in their cars!  Call out the 
Coast Guard!   Except they are all out looking for the wave or moving the 
boats to the other side of the island.  Call out the helicopters!  Yeah, 
only so many of those and how many people can they evacuate anyway?  There 
was a lot of running in circles and "oh my God, what are we going to do?", 
at least at our base command center.  I hear it was even worse at the local 
emergency services command center.

And then...

And then...

The mighty wave struck.

All six inches of it.

The most significant thing that happened (other than the big committee that 
was formed to write a new tidal wave emergency plan) was that the t-shirts 
saying "I survived the tidal wave" were on the street about 2 hours after 
the big event.

Now, that's the way to have a natural disaster.

Theta