Hurricanes, Part 2 of 2

7 Responses

1. Most of this just follows what you already talked about – just wanted to give my first-hand experience with typhoons.

   When I was a child, my family was stationed on Guam for 3 years during the 1990’s because of my Dad’s military service. We experienced typhoons every year. The homes on the base were like big concrete bricks with typhoon-proof windows built into the walls that could not open or close. If a typhoon was about to hit, our neighborhood would have a massive cookout beforehand so food wouldn’t go to waste.

   We even had a super typhoon during our stay:

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Omar

   Before a typhoon would hit, we would fill all the bathtubs with water since we were often without power or water for days. After Omar, we didn’t get power & water back for weeks, though I don’t remember how long.

   During the storm, we would have to be on the lookout for water leaks so that we could mop them up with towels. One time we had to push our entire entertainment center in front of the sliding glass door in the living room. Although it was made of typhoon-proof glass, it was about to buckle in at the frame due to the force of the winds outside. If it hadn’t been buffered, our entire living room would have been cleared out.

   The eye of the storm normally lasted around 30 or 45 minutes if I remember correctly. My parents would make me run our dogs out for a quick walk before the back-end of the typhoon would hit. It would still be very windy outside, but not dangerous. It was pretty common for people to leave their homes to assess damage or check up on their neighbors during the eye. Then everyone would go back inside to prepare for the second half.

   In the days or weeks following the storm, we would run outside in our bathing suits to take baths during the rain. We also would leave our trash cans or other large containers outside to catch rainwater, so we could continue to flush our toilets in case the water we’d stored in the bath tub ran out.

2. So…if that hurricane in the Philippines spread that rice all over the town would Kevin have to refer to it as a rice-burg?

3. For the record, the Huggasaurus’s smarmy hipster voice is much easier to follow than the 50s news reader voice. Just my 2c. 🙂

   Amazing stories and edumacation, guys. Thanks!

4. In Australia we call them cyclones, contra your pont in the first part. Probably the most famous in my lifetime was Cyclone Tracy, which basically turned a city to rubble: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Tracy.

   In recent years there have been examples like Cyclone Larry which totally fucked the sugar harvest for a year, and Cyclone Whatever-They-Called-It that left me confined to quarters for four days on a minesite in the Pilbara a few years ago.

   Everyone had to move into shared accomodation in the middle part of the camp because those were the only dongas rated for cyclones. I was on the same swing as my missus at the time, so I was confined to quarters with someone I actually wanted to spend time and share a bed with.

   Most others didn’t have that luxury. Spending three days trapped with another bloke with only a single bed? Utterly counter to the overwhelming heterosexual masculinity inherent on minesites.

   Some of them probably fucked though. Just quietly.

   1. Aussie as! 🙂 +1 for Cyclone Tracy – completely wiped out Darwin on Christmas Day 1974. 30k of 47k residents evacuated, only 7k still had homes left. Big mess. There’s a really interesting museum devoted to it now, if anyone’s ever traveling there – and it’s a great place.

   2. It was a cyclone through Up North (WA, I think? Or was it QLD?) a few years back that wiped out the banana crop and meant the price of bananas went through the roof here in Aussie. My friends I visited in the USA couldn’t understand why I got excited to see really cheap bananas while I was there.

5. I immediately thought of The Martian and Dune. I can’t remember if there were crazy winds in The Martian, but the coriolis storms on Dune were pretty nuts, if I remember correctly.