Love thy neighbor as thyself, and push hard for local organization and preparation - particularly for those with the least ability or resources to respond to a crisis.

painting, i meant, sorry.

I ditto Molly here Belle. You have lived it, seen it first hand and lost part of yourself and your belongings.

Community first.

The painting is a portrait by Alfonso Grosso, which I bought at an auction because she resembles my aunt, and I thought her too elegant to be homeless.

She is lovely; she reminds me so much of one of the famous southern writers, but I just can't place her. I am so sorry you lost your home.

The person who told me about it was upbeat about the value of the training, albeit long after Katrina.

I'd like to think it would help me help a neighbor or two. If you enter your ZIP code in the site's search engine, you can find training in your area.

Thanks to you, I will contact them this week.

Thank you, Molly. I'll see where the closest training is. One Charleston-specific evacuation tip that I hope is now advised is to look for alternative routes out of town. That's because most people head for Colombia to go on from there to Charlotte or Atlanta. There is a good evacuation plan for I-26, but if you don't get out really early, you can be stuck in bumper to bumper traffic all day. One alternative is to head for Atlanta the back way, on 17S to Walterboro and then northwest on 65 (?) through Aiken.
Of course it all depends on the storm. Here's hoping you won't need that training or evacuation routes.

Yes, for the 1999 mandatory evacuation for Hurricane Floyd, I urged my husband to drive south but we went north, and it took 14 hours to reach Charlotte. There were gas shortages north of Orangeburg, and no motel rooms that night. We had two kitties in the car, and it was a restless night in the Astrovan. I think taking Route 78 to Augusta would be a good idea.

Thank you wwstaebler for this heart touching post and warning. Life seems to have it's own various hurricanes no matter where we live and who we are. Whether we are battered by natures wildness or by man's harshness we all find ourselves needing one another eventually.So your survivor's mantra is also a good one to practice before the storm.

mantra: love thy neighbor as thyself, no matter what.

Hey Bwak: I don't have TheraP's email address so the easiest way to communicate about art therapy or anything at all is by contacting me here: [email protected].
Hope you have a great trip and that your weather is fine.

I will be sending you email.

Wendy, being a South Floridian, I guess I missed most of FEMA's Ivan screw-ups. It's a surprise to hear that the Panhandle didn't receive the Royal FEMA Election-Year Treatment that your southern neighbors experienced. Going above and beyond the call of duty that year, FEMA handed out over $30 million in Miami-Dade, a county where the winds didn't reach 50 mph in all four hurricanes. Apparently M-D never even lost electricity, but FEMA paid for ice and snow damage, anyway. And three funerals for folks who died of something, but not anything hurricane related came to $15,743. Yet you're saying they were worried about bottled water resales after Ivan? [Testimony from Sen. Nelson and the DHS IG.]

I'm with you on the preference for a hurricane over a tornado or earthquake. But I remember reading about a guy that moved from California to Oregon to get away from the earthquakes. Within a couple of years he moved back - he said the floods in Oregon were worse than earthquakes. So I think it's all in the devil you know ... :-)

Thanks for posting this Wendy. Hadn't heard your story - before my time here. I'm sorry about your house. I do hope they've got their house in order at FEMA and co. Unbelievable what they let the insurance corps get away with. But they are state-regulated, no? Which means, largely unregulated, I guess. Stay safe.

Thank you for the link!

Excuse me - the houses were razed! not the land. The land was restored. ;)

Flannery O'Connor?

WW, I didn't know you were in the cross hairs of Ivan. When he entered the Gulf, the bulls eye was initially on our area. It was terrifying, the intensity of that storm -- then he turned. I can only imagine what you went through.

Starting June 1st of every year I go to the NOAA website several times every day. I have my hurricane charts out. So far this year, watching the satellite loops, the air currents are all competing with each other. Hopefully this will continue.

Though we try to be prepared where I am -- on high ground, such as it is -- I remember hearing about what one Cuban woman did during a storm. She hunkered down under a bed. That seems like a very good idea. When Charlie had us in his sites, I was on the bed with a blanket pulled over my head after downing a pint of Ben and Jerry's Chocolate Fudge Brownie Ice Cream (a rare occurrence to pig out, but it took my mind off the impending doom). And then he came in well to the south.

We were without power for a week after Francis or Jean. The worst part of that was the fumes from all the generators in the neighborhood. I don't have one. I cooked on a Svea backpacking stove.

We've been lucky, apparently since 1925. However, I'm looking into CERT today to see if I can get that done before reporting back to work.

Thanks for the nudge -- and the reality check.

Cindy

I do agree with you about that, TheraP.
As much as l loved living on the waterfront, I was only 10.1 feet above sea level at high tide, so that a 19' tidal surge was bound to destroy the house.
I also think -- as much of a sacrilege (as well as a practical impossibility) as it seems at first glance -- that in principle, New Orleans "should" be moved, because it is a city that is well below sea level, protected only by a levee system that has deteriorated badly and which will only suffer additional stress with global warming causing rising water in the best of times and increased numbers of storms in the worst.
Easy for me to say. As fond as I am of New Orleans, where I have family ties, it does not have the heart hold on me that Charleston has. So, if you asked me to support moving Charleston -- which is, after all, only three feet above sea level -- I'd say "Never!" just as the defenders of New Orleans do.
Home ground is home ground, even when it's under water.

I would say I can't imagine that kind of heat with no air conditioning, Strato... but of course I can. Although I'm sure we didn't suffer as much at night as you are now, because, with only a partial roof and no windows or doors, we were able to enjoy serious cross ventilation while camped out, inside. ;-)

We need to resist the tendency we have developed to agree the dollar is almighty and therefore so are the CEOs who have the most dollars, and their heartless corporations. We have sacrificed the priority of people before profits. We have a developed a disturbing acceptance that we will abandon people if the price is right. We have come to accept that if the percentage is minimal, it is insignificant. Nothing less then 100% survival should ever be tolterated. We should never stop aiming for perfection.

It seems to me Cheney is the example of this flagrant disregard for people's lives and he represents many CEO-types. You know the ones, with their exploding vehicles and tainted produce. These people are criminals and should be treated accordingly. We should not defer to them or show them any respect whatsoever. They truly have no character.

What bothers me the most about this post is that I see the American people have come to accept these heinous practices by insurance companies. That these companies have disintegrated wholesale into these parastic organisms who take out money with no intention of being there when a need emerges is deplorable. One would have thought maybe one or two comapnies would rise to the occasion and shame the rest into providing the services they insured people they would. Instead, it seems they all abandoned their responsibilities at once. Conspiracy?!? Or have we fallen so far as a society it has become common and tolerable?

Interestingly, my neighborhood isn't in an evacuation zone which has made me acutely aware of the topography of the area. It's become a bit of a fascination.

Thanks for sharing the story about your friend. Funny how those close calls can bring people together!

Gregor, in 2004/5 I did not think it was an industry conspiracy because: a) my experience in 1989 had given me faith in the industry so I suffered a period of denial; and, b) I had no time to think because I was either making a new claims binder (they were never forwarded from one adjuster to another, as yet another delaying tactic) or, I was on the phone, sending emails and writing letters to try to get my claim paid. Everyone else I knew was doing the same -- each of us, because it involved money, in isolated bubbles of negotiation, and so, for all of us, collectively, the nightmare of across the board insurance malfeasance unfolded in slow motion, one week and month at a time.
It was only after six months, when the local paper and the engineers and other local sources started keeping statistics on who was being paid and who was not that the pervasiveness of the pattern was revealed.
I personally knew only one woman who was paid within that time frame -- an 83 year old widow whose insurance agent had been her college sweetheart. The rest of us did not have such a sweetheart deal.

And even more is the way the Corps has botched where all the sediment goes. In the Mississippi delta all of that dirt shoots straight out into the Gulf. It used to build up the delta every time it flooded and kept up with subsidence. Without the dirt every year, there's only subsidence happening. Combine that with sea level rise and there's a grim story. I hope we can come up with a plan that brings the dirt back to at least some of the delta.

Wendy - Congress had given FEMA $13 billion for the '04 hurricanes. By August of 2005, only about $6 billion had been spent, so it wasn't lack of funds.

But like the article said:

Now that President Bush has won Florida in his 2004 re-election bid, he may want to draft a letter of appreciation to Michael Brown, chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Seldom has any federal agency had the opportunity to so directly and uniquely alter the course of a presidential election, and seldom has any agency delivered for a president as FEMA did in Florida this fall. [Government Executive, Nov. 3, 2004.]

For New Orleans, the population numbers were there, but it is a blue city and poor. No votes or money were going to be given in gratitude to the Republican party, so why bother to get all excited about it in the first place?

For those wondering about flood insurance in the US, would you believe it is offered by the US government through private sector insurance agents? It is much cheaper to insure your house and the contents against flooding than it is to visit a doctor and buy medicine for bronchitis.

So it turns out that the federal government is already in the insurance business. Does that mean we're all socialists now, even though most of us didn't know it? :-)

Seashell: Thinking I was getting the best policy available, I bought a flood policy, not from FEMA, but from Lloyd's of London, with no coverage for contents. I would be embarrassed to tell you what I paid for that policy, thinking it was worth it. I then bought wind and contents insurance in combination from a company (one of many) that declared itself "insolvent" immediately after the hurricane, which automatically triggered a shifting of all its claims into the state pool. The state sent notices right away that "the number of claims in the pool will result in no payment, at all, for personal possessions." Period end.
However, the nicest person I met in the entire process turned out to be the adjuster from the state pool, who turned up one day, unannounced, eleven months later, in July 2005.

He was the wind guy. But he was so angered by the obvious flood damage he saw (which had been denied by their adjusters as wind damage, although there was a waterline at 8') that he not only approved the maximum allowable payout from the pool for wind damage (although nothing for contents) but also personally called the latest adjuster from Lloyd's of London on the spot, informing him that he was on-site and could affirm the flood damages and that they better pay up.
Four months later they paid, though only 70%.
I truly think that all my months of phone calls, emails and documentation would have been for naught if it had not been for that single encounter with a good man who believed in doing the right thing.
I was far luckier than most.