Hurricane Season Begins

Today is the beginning of the Atlantic hurricane season--but it's already begun, as our friends in the mountains of North Carolina know.  Once again, my friends who live around Asheville are having a much worse hurricane season than the rest of us.

Let that sink in.  Think about how far inland and upland my Asheville friends are.  They are suffering massive amounts of rain, and it's not over yet.

In this same week of our first named storm, we got information about Hurricane Maria and Puerto Rico.  It did not come as a surprise that the death toll was higher than originally reported--but so high!  Over 5,000 dead.  And those who are left alive, many of them are far from back to normal.

That's true of many of us who suffered one of the worst hurricane seasons in modern memory in 2017.  Think of the people in Houston.  Think of those in the path of Irma.  And then, Maria, just for good measure.  There are Caribbean islands which will be forever changed.

In this week of our first named storm and the beginning of the 2018 season, we are far from recovered.  We've had a very rainy month of May, which has delayed our fence project.  But finally this week, the survey company came, and now we can mail the property survey and the notarized documents to the fence company--and then, they can apply for permits and buy supplies.

And we're still in the very early stages of getting the damaged floors restored.  We did get confirmation that the floor joists are Dade county pine, one of the more water/rot resistant types of wood that exists.  So we won't need to rip those up.  They've been here since the house was built in 1928, and they will probably be here long after the Atlantic reclaims the coast.  Two hundred years from now, divers may swim in the wreckage of my house, and the floor joists will likely remain.

Regardless of where we live, today is a good day to think about our emergency plans:  count your supplies, take some pictures of your valuables, put those pictures with your insurance and other important paperwork.  You do know where those important papers are, don't you?  You could grab them at a minute's notice, if you had to evacuate?

And while we're at it, we should back up important papers and important pictures.  If you can't afford cloud computing, you can e-mail files to yourself.  Or put it all on a data stick and ask an out of town person you trust to hang on to it.  That way, even if you don't have access to your hard drive for whatever reason, you've got your important stuff.
We live in a time where it's good to have some skills that lead to self-reliance.  Until recently, we assumed that our government could save us from anything that might go wrong.  Believe that at your peril.  At least realize that it might take awhile for your government to ride in to the rescue.  Could you eat in the meantime?
You might think that you have nothing to worry about.  Until recently, most of us assumed that we lived in a world with stable, predictable weather patterns.  Surely no one believes that anymore.  And even if your weather is stable, disaster is never out of the realm of possibility:  a house fire, a water main break, all sorts of things can go wrong.

It doesn't hurt to have a plan and some supplies on hand.