Like many families, we did our part to try to get prepared in advance of the storm. With forecasts prognosticating that our region would be hit on Saturday night and Sunday morning, I brought my son to the supermarket on Friday and Saturday and used the event as an educational tool, explaining to him why we were getting jugs of bottled water, canned food and Steno cans. And it dawned upon me that the activity of preparing for the hurricane was actually sort of exciting and fun for my sun. It was akin to the movie Hope and Glory, where a young boy finds the blitz of London during WWII simultaneously terrifying and electrifying. And it was hard not to see the energy and anticipation as we filled the bathtub with water, bottled up extra clean tap water, cleared away loose toys from outside, and locked down our bikes on the porch. We charged up all the electronics and had extra batteries ready, and checked all of our flashlights.
And after we prepared, we waited. And we waited. And we waited some more, to the point that it started to feel like the way you would wait for an upcoming dentist procedure. You know it's coming, you've done all you could to prepare for it, and now you just want to get it over with.
When Irene rolled through Saturday evening, my wife and I sat in the living room watching a DVD waiting for the power to go out as the rain grew progressively harder and the wind blew increasingly stronger. By the time we hit the hay, both of us had trouble sleeping - maybe it was the paranoia that we could be waking up in a couple of feet of water, or the "pre-leaving the house before vacation"-phenomena of mentally agonizing over forgetting something important. By 2am, my wife had found leaks coming from our chimney into our fireplace, and when I woke up early the next morning - even with the sump pumps running every 15-30 seconds and miraculously not losing power - water had seeped into our basement carpet.
As the hurricane itself departed the area, we were able to take stock of our personal impact, and while it wasn't zero, it wasn't bad considering the fate that many of our neighbors and friends in the area endured. Yes, we'll need to get more effective waterproofing done in our basement, and we'll likely tear up the existing carpet and install floors and we did need to deal with not having potable water for a few days. However, we never lost power the amount or endured significant amounts of damage to our house. We lost no basement or kitchen appliances, and most importantly, nobody got hurt.
There are some other positives I drew from the experience. I appreciated how members of our church rallied around each other and look out for each others' needs. There was a great degree of care offered in word and deed as people reported different degrees of impact. I saw similar attitudes among people in our neighborhood. As a family, I thought we did a good job in terms of all pitching in to do our part, which gave further credence to my belief that crisis is fundamentally energizing and exciting for kids. Okay, maybe many of us adults also get energized by crisis, too.
As I look back at our Hurricane Irene experience, I think it was a good wake-up call around everyday things that we take for granted, and assessing our preparedness to live without those things for several days if necessary. Power and clean water are things that almost all Americans can rely upon without fail, but Hurricane Irene provided just a small sample of the reality of life for many in the third world. We ought to be grateful, yes, but there's probably an opportunity to increase our own preparedness.
Beyond that, the power of the hurricane and the powerlessness that we felt in the midst of it is a humbling, yet healthy reminder of our mortality. With all our technological advances, we still very much live under the mercy of a sovereign God, which was abundantly merciful to many of us last week.
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