I guess a lot of people on the southeast coast of the US watch the weather forecasts pretty closely in September, the height of hurricane season. I had been checking the progress of Hurricane Matthew fairly compulsively since it formed and for a quite a while it seemed as if it would pass close by, but not dangerously. Indeed, the first I found out that it might be more serious than I expected was when two friends cancelled going to the pub, because they had heard that an evacuation order was imminent. All of a sudden, this shit got real.
Sure enough, the next day, the State Governor announced that the entire coastal region was going to be evacuated. Some people left immediately, whilst others, including us, decided to watch and wait. In fact, we were um-ing and ah-ing right until the last minute, finally leaving Charleston the morning before the storm was due to hit. Never having experienced a hurricane before, our preparations were a little shambolic: completely over-prepared in some ways (rope, gaffer tape and a Stanley knife in the car – check) and completely under-prepared in others (it took hours to close the storm shutters, as the staples didn’t line up with the bolts and mostly had to be unscrewed and re-attached).
Some people used the evacuation as an excuse to visit relatives, or for a holiday in the mountains. We settled for a couple of days in Charlotte, NC. This was far enough away from the coast to be out of the reach of the wind and flooding, but not far enough away to avoid the rainfall. We didn’t spend a great deal of time outside.
We weren’t the only people in Charlotte: we bumped into Alice’s science teacher in the Lego store and Charlie’s employer in Whole Foods, amongst others. A number of our friends and neighbours had stayed, though, and they kept us up-to-date with the storm.
Why did it take us so long to decide whether to stay or leave? Partly because we’ve only recently bought this house, and wanted to stay here and look after it. Partly because – slightly embarrassingly – we were interested to know what a hurricane would be like. And partly because the forecasts didn’t look too bad. But the reasons we left, in the end: we knew that a slight change in the forecast could make a huge difference to the wind speed, the expected flooding, and so on; we had to think about Alice; and we are lucky enough to be in the situation where we have the choice to move to safety.
So here comes the serious part of this blog: I can’t begin to describe how lucky we were. We live in a rich, developed country. We have the means to flee from an advancing hurricane, and we have a place to go. Our houses are built to withstand storms, and we have the technology to forecast them. If there is damage, we have insurance, and the government, to fall back on. Meanwhile in Haiti, the death toll nears 1,000, and around 175,000 people are reported as being homeless. It’s times like these that show quite how large the gap between the first and third worlds still is.
South of the Mason-Dixon line 