Shortly after writing my first entry in my journal, we had a hurricane. It was like that too.. Like someone flipped a switch and turned the thing on. It had been so long since I had experienced a hurricane that I must admit it was exhilirating. The wind was roaring and with each gust the house creaked and groaned a bit. It was difficult to see what was going on through the sidelights of our front door -- but it was enough to hear the wind. We quickly called for the boys and brought them into the room with us and I busied myself moving our big pile of blankets and pillows closer to the hallway.
Within a few minutes there was a loud bang and we realized the wind had taken one of our plywood shutters off a kitchen window. That shutter had always been a nuisance when we boarded up the house -- it never quite fit as well as we wanted it to -- so it was no surprise that the hurricane found its weakness so quickly. It was near dawn then and though it was dark our outdoor floodlights allowed us to see just to the edge of our yard. We couldn't help but watch. I brought each of the boys to the window very briefly and said to each of them "There. Now you can say you've seen a hurricane."
Soon the sun came up and the wind continued. The boys complained that they were hungry and we decided we could make something to eat while we still had electricity. I started cleaning out the freezer trying to make good use of the food that was probably going to go bad within the next day or so and started to preheat the oven. In the meantime, we continued to watch the news as they reported from New Orleans and I checked the buoy data while chatting with our friend, Luba, via MSN messenger. The morning was long and we were all starting to whine.
I suppose the first odd thing I noticed was that the biscuits didn't cook. Three, four times I put them back in the oven but they simply would not rise. What a fine time to find out the oven is broken -- and it was a fairly new oven too. And of course the boys were devastated that we would not be having biscuits -- I had to offer them cereal just to stave off a mutiny... And then back to the computer to check buoy data. But the buoy data was weird. All night and all morning the seas were averaging 8 to 10 feet at the buoy 65 nautical miles south of Dauphin Island, AL. Suddenly, I saw what appeared to be a 38 foot wave... and a few minutes later, another. I was busy trying to recheck the math in my head when the power went out.
I was trying to work the whole thing out in my head -- why such a big wave and why so far southeast of the storm center? The news said Hurricane Katrina had already made landfall at Buras, Louisiana.. I certainly wasn't expecting any activity at that buoy. It had to be a mistake.
Ah, well... There were blankets to spread and radios to turn on -- and children to herd into the hallway. Now that the power was off it was time to get to our safe place and stay there. Our two year old wanted no part of it so we loaded her up with stuffed animals to try to entice her to stay on her blanket. We lost the local radio station about that time and tuned into a Pensacola station for information. It's very frustrating to not have local news in the middle of a natural disaster and we were only half paying attention but started hearing muffled accounts of people calling in saying they were trapped on their roofs in Diamondhead, Mississippi. The DJs were mildly dismissing it as wild hurricane rumors and I suppose we did the same at the time. But then we noticed the water.
The street started to flood -- if you want to call it that. It still was not really raining outside .. a light mist with the occasional drizzle but for some reason the street was filling with water as if there was a flash flood. With each passing moment there was something new to report: the water is completely covering the street, now it's in the front yards across the street, it is actually covering our sidewalk, and wow! I've never seen it come this far into our yard.
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