The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Surviving the Hurricane, So Far

Posted on | September 29, 2022 | Comments Off on Surviving the Hurricane, So Far

Many times, I’ve referred to my oldest daughter as living in “a swing state with palm trees,” because I didn’t want any left-wing nutjobs targeting her and her family, but I think everybody knows what state I meant.

Last week, she was planning to evacuate because the National Weather Service projections showed Hurricane Ian headed directly for their southwest Florida location, but then the projection shifted, showing the storm would hit Tampa, more than 150 miles north. So she decided to stay, rather than take to the road with two toddlers, but then on Tuesday, the projection shifted again and, as everyone now knows, the storm slammed into the area around Fort Myers and Port Charlotte, midway between Tampa and my daughter’s location.

The power went out early Wednesday morning when a transformer blew out in their neighborhood, and about half the city is now without electricity. Downtown was totally flooded Wednesday, but my daughter’s house east of the city is still above water, although they’ve kept a close eye on the canal behind their house. They’ve got a three-day food supply, so they’re in pretty good shape. Watching national TV on Wednesday, you might have gotten the idea that the folks trapped in Naples and Fort Myers were guilty of ignoring warnings or had disobeyed evacuation orders, which is grossly misleading. Rather, the fault is with the shifting projections of the storm’s track. Sunday and Monday, it looked like Naples and Fort Myers would escape the worst of Hurricane Ian. It wasn’t until Tuesday that the projection changed, and by that time, it was too late to evacuate because there wasn’t a gallon of gasoline to be had in the whole region. My daughter and her husband had managed to find gas a few days earlier, but it’s nearly 400 miles from their home to the Georgia state line — too far to go on one tank of gas — and what were they supposed to do under these extraordinary circumstances? As I say, they’ve been relatively lucky so far. Just a few miles from their house, hundreds of homes are underwater, and even the fire station got flooded.

This isn’t New Orleans in Katrina. So far, there’s been no looting. The sheriff of Collier County is a Republican, so popular he was re-elected without opposition two years ago, and so at least residents don’t have to worry about anarchy. And it ought to be pointed out that the political polarities of Hurricane Ian are reversed from those of Hurricane Katrina: The allegedly “racist” Republican president was blamed for that 2005 disaster, despite the failures of state and local officials, who were Democrats. Now, we have Saint Joseph of the Blessed Landslide in the White House, and liberals are just looking for any excuse to make Florida’s Republican governor the scapegoat for Hurricane Ian.

Probably that’s why there’s now an effort to blame victims of the storm as having ignored evacuation orders — most of them are white, so it’s OK to blame them, although it can be pointed out that the warnings before Katrina hit New Orleans were much clearer, and were even more blatantly ignored. But, as I say, by the time the evacuation orders for Lee County and Collier County were issued Tuesday, it was already practically impossible to leave, because of the unavailability of gasoline. Others have pointed out the irony that many people from Tampa, which was previously believed to be the big target of the storm, actually left that city and went south to Fort Myers and Naples to escape the storm, only to have it turn southward in the final 24 hours before landfall.

This is another embarrassment for the Trust the Science™ crowd — the “experts” who tell us they can predict the distant future with climate-change computer simulations are unable to predict the direction of a single storm, when thousands of lives may hinge on the accuracy of their projections. A hurricane that was supposed to hit Tampa as a Category Three instead hit Fort Myers as a Category Four? “Oops,” say the experts.

Anyway, I don’t care about politics, I care about my daughter and her two children, spending the night in a dark house with no electricity. She’s still able to get text messages and I told her, “You’re living in a certified disaster area now. Leave [your husband] behind to scare off the looters and come home!” Her husband has a sufficient supply of ammunition for home-defense purposes, just in case any out-of-town looters show up.

Hopefully, we’ll see those grandkids soon.




 

Category: Florida

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