Shucking and Jiving with the Weather

Well, in case you live in a cave or otherwise don’t watch television, Hurricane Season is off to a roaring, early start this summer.

I ask that everyone that doesn’t enjoy our geographic proximity to the Atlantic and Florida Gulf Coasts wish us all good luck, if you will.

I, personally, have a broad range of interests in the goings-on in the southeastern tropical weather department.

We currently live one hundred yards from the salt marsh connected through rivers and creeks to the Atlantic Ocean less than two miles away, four feet below the official Army Corps of Engineers flood plain, and I have several rental properties situated below the flood plain in the nearby city of Brunswick, Georgia that could be at risk.

Likewise, my lovely mother resides in southern Alabama within one hundred miles of the Florida Gulf Coast and is at slightly less at risk from flooding, but she has way too much prior experience with high winds from Hurricane Eloise in the 1970’s (100 mph) and survived a solid pounding by Hurricane Opal (120 mph) in 1996. Most recently, hurricane Francis trashed her property last fall and left her running the generator a few hours each day for a week while the local electrical company repaired the power lines.

Having grown up with hurricanes as a yearly natural phenomena, I tend to look at them with a dispassionate attitude until the last minute when our modern weather forecasting can actually tell me where a given storm is going to make landfall. We had a total of FIVE storms pass within 100 miles of our home last August and September and I expect that this year is going to at least exciting—in a not so nice way.

In the words of Lieutenant Dan in the movie Forrest Gump…”is that all you got?”