9-11 Seventeen Years Later- a State of Emergency
While the country remembers that horrible day, September 11, 2001, another kind of menace looms on the southeastern horizon- one that has the potential of widespread suffering, damage and destruction.
Not the actions of Islamist fundamentalist terrorists, but rather the anger of Mother Nature who stirs her terrible tempest, yet again. Hurricane Florence approaches- inexorably, certainly and with dastardly intent on a waiting populace.
It has been sixty-four years since a hurricane of this magnitude struck the mid-Atlantic, when Hurricane Hazel came ashore near the coastal border between North- and South Carolina. Hazel resulted in as many as 1,191 deaths, mostly in Haiti, but including 95 here in the United States. An additional 81 souls were lost in Canada as the storm continued on a northern path, eventually making its way toward Hudson Bay. In Norfolk, Virginia wind gusts of 100 mph were recorded, while in Richmond, 200 storefronts were damaged and the steeple of the old Trinity Methodist Church was toppled. Damages amounted to $382 million- a considerable sum of money then and equivalent to $3.5 billion, today. Half of Virginia’s residents were without electricity for an entire week, and those who remember the storm- now well into their seventies at least- still remember cooking over candles and fireplaces in a very darkened Commonwealth of Virginia, at a time when residential emergency power generators simply didn’t exist.
Virginia would face its costliest hurricane in 2003, when Hurricane Isabel ravaged the state resulting in 22 deaths and more than $1.8 billion in damages. I remember the storm quite well, living as I still do in a house about a mile from the Virginia Beach oceanfront. The storm arrived here in the third week of September, and though merely a category 1 storm, with sustained winds of 72 mph when it hit, it would be eleven days before our electricity was restored.
Now, we are facing the prospect of a Hurricane Florence that might well reach category 5 status, prior to hitting landfall somewhere along North Carolina’s Outer Banks, some sixty miles due south. Worse, the contrivances of an angry Mother Nature have apparently conspired to make this storm stall, once making landfall- the perfect recipe for disaster as this area has never before seen. States of emergency have already been declared in Maryland, Virginia, North- and South Carolina, and this particular storm has the potential of redrawing coastal maps- especially along the Outer Banks, which begin in the Sandbridge section of Virginia Beach and extend southward to Cape Fear in the southern reaches of the North Carolina coast.
This “stalling” will also result in record amounts of rainfall throughout the interior sections of North Carolina and Virginia, with a potential to dwarf the amounts of rain that resulted from the aftermaths of Hurricanes Camille in August of 1969 and Agnes in June of 1972, resulting in hundreds of deaths here in the Commonwealth.
With nowhere to go (as the storm will adversely affect at least a hundred miles in every direction), we’ll have no choice but to ride out the storm where we are right now, at this very minute. With a case of bottled water, and two bathtubs filled to enable the flushing of toilets in the event water supply becomes disabled, we find ourselves somewhere between the emotions of dread, despair, denial and, in the end, prayer- prayer for a miracle that somehow, some way the storm decides to make a drastic U-turn, and head back towards the sea of its origin.
While the country observes the seventeenth anniversary of the horrible events of September 11, 2001, another national disaster looms large in our psyche. God willing, we’ll return to post yet another day, once the seas are calmed and a normal state of existence returns.
Fare thee well, my good friends, and may God help us all.
-Drew Nickell, 11 September 2018
© 2018 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.
author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”
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