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| LeClaire Bryan, in red shirt, mother of country singer Luke Bryan, is overwhelmed after seeing her home, wrecked by Hurricane Michael last October. Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images |
Despite all the predictions, we can't tell for sure how this hurricane season will play out. After the 2017 and 2018 seasons, we can only hope this year is a dud. That's only hope, though.
To give you a preview of how harrowing these hurricanes are, the Tampa Bay Times put out an article and released audio of 911 calls at the height of Hurricane Michael last October in the Florida panhandle.
They're hard to read and even harder to listen to. But you ought to, as they give you a very good motivation to do what meteorologists and emergency managers tell you to do in a weather emergency, be it a hurricane, tornado, flood, winter storm, or whatever other bad stuff comes our way.
You can listen to some parts of the calls in the videos at the bottom of this post, but even the text is scary. People were calling 911, but no paramedics, no ambulance, no firefighters, no police could come to the rescue. The winds were too relentless, too powerful, too dangerous.
Says the Tampa Bay Times:
"A man stuck in a collapsing trailer begged for help. 'Please come get me, ma'am.' The dispatcher broke down, sobbing. A colleague took over for her. 'Sweetie, I would come and get you right now if I could, I swear. I need you to just stay with me.'"
The man later cries out, "Oh my God, help me please!" The dispatchers could do nothing but urge him to find a (probably nonexistent) interior room in the trailer.
Another 911 caller said, "There's 10 of us in here and the roof's gone." The dispatcher could only tell the to move into an interior space near a load bearing wall. The dispatcher said the calm eye of the storm would move over the caller's location in minutes, but the 10 people had to stay put anyway. There was no time to flee to another shelter before the winds came roaring back.
Another caller was outside, in the terrible storm, on the phone tellling dispatchers a man - his neighbor - had collapsed. He didn't think he was breathing. Didn't know if the man's heart was still beating. Dispatchers tried to coach the caller with CPR and mouth to mouth resuscitation. The caller tried.
We later learn the man who collapsed didn't make it. The 911 caller who tried to help the dying man survived.
It's unclear what happened to the man in the collapsed trailer, or the ten people in the roofless house.
All this is to say: Even if the storm doesn't look bad on paper, that you think you'll be fine, do what the weather people and the emergency workers tell you. If they told you to leave, do it. If they tell you to hunker down, do it. If they tell you to hide in the basement, do it. If they tell you the roads are too dangerous to drive on, stay home.
The hardest part of all this to take is reading the comments section of the Tampa Bay Times article. As many commenters pointed out, lots of people don't have the money or the means to evacuate. So they hunker down and pray for the best. I wish we were better at making all socio-economic classes safe in emergencies.
Here are some of the audio tapes. They should all scare you straight. Remember them the next time you face a weather emergency, be it a hurricane or anything else.
The first one is the man in the collapsing trailer, and the sobbing dispatcher and the rising panic in the man's voice, as the trailer blows away and he's out in the storm. I wish I knew what happened to him. Listen:
This next one is the 10 people in the roofless house. The caller asks if they can make a run for it when the eye comes. Should they try piling into a four-wheel drive vehicle and go somewhere? The dispatcher adamantly (and correctly) urges them to stay put in an interior room, even though the roof is goine. Load bearing walls would help. Still sounds awfully scary, though:
Finally, this one is the caller trying to help the dying man with coaching from 911 dispatchers:
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