Tornadoes vs Hurricanes – Part #1
We lived in the early 1990s in New Orleans.
Having grown up in the Midwest, we were familiar with Tornados. In fact, I remember early in our marriage driving on a highway in central Illinois and looking out the window and seeing a Tornado in the field next to the highway (it was a big field so, a good distance away). Honestly, I hope never to be that close to a tornado again.
But tornados are here and over before you know what is going on. When we first moved to Kansas, one of the first pieces of advice we were given was to buy a weather radio to ensure notification of a sighted tornado. The house we bought had a tornado room feature (in case you don’t know, a tornado room is a room with concrete around it, reinforced to increase the odds of remaining intact if a tornado hit your house), that we use for storage. Of course, we’ve come to accept and ignore the tornado siren regular testing that occurs here that we never had anywhere else. Yes, I’ve been stupid enough to hear the tornado siren go off and step outside to look at the sky.
This brings me back to New Orleans. They deal with a different weather issue of hurricanes. Hurricanes have a season (June through November, as I recall). So, whenever a hurricane or a tropical storm developed in the Atlantic, the weathermen started commenting on it. Those comments increased as the storm got closer to the Gulf and would start to include probabilities of making landfall near New Orleans.
You might remember, if you’re old enough, or heard about a hurricane called Andrew. Andrew started in the Atlantic and went through Florida (causing a path of damage near Homestead) and then got in the Gulf and intensified again. The weathermen started forecasting increasing odds that the storm would make landfall near New Orleans. We, and everyone else, started checking our hurricane box. A hurricane box is a box that contains flashlights, batteries, drinking water, you know things you’d need if you had grab in an house destroying emergency. The problem was that everybody was stocking up all at the same time. Stores were stripped bare of bottled water and batteries and, as in Covid, toilet paper.
Just as you’ve seen on tv, we taped windows and hunkered down to wait out the storm.
“On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, ‘Let us go across to the other side.’ And leaving the crowd, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. And other boats were with him. And a great windstorm arose, and the waves were breaking into the boat, so that the boat was already filling. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion. And they woke him and said to him, ‘Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?’ And he awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, ‘Peace! Be still!’ And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. He said to them, ‘Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?’ And they were filled with great fear and said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?’” - Mark 4:35-41 ESV
“but whoever listens to me will dwell secure and will be at ease, without dread of disaster.” - Proverbs 1:33
“Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me, for in you my soul takes refuge; in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge, till the storms of destruction pass by.” - Psalm 57:1
Andrew did hit the Gulf coast near New Orleans in a fairly unpopulated area and died out pretty quick. We got up the next morning and found some tree limbs down but no real damage. We decided not to try to make it into work that day.
This story is only about half done so look for the next one…
