Officer Alex can’t protect you from everything, you know
Natural disasters are one of the most reprehensible and downright disturbing events imaginable. Earthquakes, floods, or (as with today’s topic) hurricanes? The loss of human life, and even property, is absolutely nothing I’d wish on anyone, anything, anywhere.
That established? If it IS going to happen, I want a front row seat during and after. I love...that, um...stuff.
I’m not a sick man. Not even unwell. (I mean literally, I’ve been tested, it’s mandatory after the first five or six awful things you’re exposed to at my agency.) But there is something so incredibly primal about walking through a disaster zone, the first few hours in particular.
It both allows you to do what you signed on for in the first place (to help those when they desperately need it the most with all the free coffee in the world) while also having life in general VERY much put in perspective in a millisecond.
Nothing says, “I don’t have any real problems now that I think about it” like seeing a child’s toy dangling from the splintered limb of a 100-year-old tree that is currently protruding from the living room of a modest two-story home where it was hurled into it from a hundred yards away.
“How’d that get impaled like that?” you may fleetingly consider before reaching the next logical (and much darker leap) of “Where’s the kid that owns it?” That’s what’s on your mind while seeking buried and partially dismembered human beings, which is quite frankly a lot to wrap your brain around while trying not to get injured in the process as well.
The time I’m writing this column ironically marks the 14-year anniversary of volunteering to go down with a crew for post-Katrina clean up. State after state, it was like driving through a war zone...clear for miles, and peppered with jagged snapped tree trunks between the foundations of rubble-strewn houses, some marked with spray paint to indicate they’d been checked for survivors (and cadavers), with only the occasional semi-truck with essential supplies or a fire truck to break up the monotony.
It was both the worst thing I’d seen on such a scale while at the same time the biggest improvement I’d seen to Mississippi as a whole after many years of unfortunate trips through that particular crap-box.
I’m a “glass half-full” guy, what can I say?
We stayed until we risked being an additional burden on resources ourselves, but it was an incredible trip despite the helplessness of trying to do some good, any good, on such a large scale.
And so, my thoughts now inexorably turn to the coming days of Hurricane Dorian easing up the Eastern coast of the U.S. like an over-sized child having a horrific temper tantrum. The thoughts of driving east to view devastation fourteen years after having done so to the west are heavy ones, but we’ll wait and see and heed any calls that are made for assistance (if any).
Apparently if the Bahamas were within driving distance THEY would call, Dorian having sat on top of that beautiful island and pulverized it like it had pissed off the 1983 Oakland Raiders with hour after hour of 160 mile (plus) per hour winds doing the dirty work alongside 20-foot tidal surges...but alas, the Department still refuses to give me a boat despite my detailed pleas.
Locally we can only expect another massive snowfall circa 1993 since we’re mercifully landlocked when it comes to coastal storms, and the fault lines we are subject to are not likely to make any comparisons to Haiti 2010 or 1906 San Francisco, but it still begs the question... how prepared are you for, say, 14 days without power and essential services?
In fact, how would you do after just 48 hours? 72?
Water, food, first aid? Heat? Warmth? We take so much for granted. Don’t survive an unpreventable roof collapse only to die from preventable temperature exposures. We survived an ice age as a species, for God’s sake; don’t wait on a volunteer fireman from eastern Kentucky to bring you fast food and blankets.
Here’s to going back to the cable weather channels until the worst is past, but until then? Google “bug out bags” and “sheltering in place”. Just humor me. And maybe, just maybe, Be Prepared.
When officer Alexander D. Teach is not patrolling our fair city on the heels of the criminal element, he spends his spare time volunteering for the Boehm Birth Defects Center.