Surviving A Cat 5 Hurricane – Part II

The Event

If your hide-hole is a hotel, try to secure a room on the second or third floors.  First floor rooms are likely to be the recipient of flying debris such as fence posts, tree limbs, and signs. Selecting a hotel that claims to have a generator can be misleading.  Their generator will probably only power their offices, refrigerators, and computers, not the guest rooms.Elevators are quite likely to stop working and all that stuff you hauled into the hotel may need to be carried out in multiple trips down the stairs.  Also, wind velocity increases with altitude.  A cat 4 at ground level is a cat 5 on the twentieth floor.

EDITOR’S NOTE: SEE PART I OF THIS AMAZING SERIES BELOW

In The Aftermath Of A Cat 5 Hurricane

You have spent a lot of time, effort, and money to stay safe.  Standing in front of your hotel room window with missiles flying by is not a good decision. Options in order of safety are: Put a mattress over the window; Go into the bathroom; Go into the hall; Go into the stairwell. Yes, I know, it is mesmerizing to watch roofs of nearby buildings peeling off.  You see canopies flying by like colorful witches released from Hell.

Neon signs exploding are very entertaining, as are cars doing a tumbling act in the parking lot.  Then for your further entertainment you can watch concrete blocks spreading out along the street as a strip mall literally explodes, transformers exploding, and power poles falling with their lines snapping around like deadly whips. However, if you haven’t figured it out yet, it will probably occur to you that the window view should be abandoned when your concrete hotel begins to shake.  You retreat to the bathroom and you fear what is happening to your house.

It is pitch black except for an occasional flash of lightning and the last transformers exploding.  The moaning and howling increases as the wind velocity ramps up to a frightful level.  There are increasing frequency and volume of bangs, crashes, booms, and ripping sounds.  Your hotel shakes with more gusto and with a periodic shudder as pieces fly off the building.  The North wall of the eye is now upon you.  Winds register as a strong cat 4/cat 5 with gusts much higher (think over 200 mph).

Then, nothing!  You are in the eye of the storm along with seabirds that were captured in the eye and only now can land.  The silence, after four hours of noise, is so complete that it almost makes your ears hurt.  You will now have a 15-minute reprieve before the South eyewall engulfs you.

You venture a quick look out the window to see a totally foreign landscape.  Nothing looks the same as it did just four hours ago.

The South wall is nearing as foretold by the leaning trees a few blocks away.  Four hours of howling wind from the East has wreaked havoc.  Now you will have 3 hours of only slightly lower winds from the West.  Anything weakened before will now fail as the stress and pressure reverse direction.

Now the 10-12 hours of storm surge (up to 12 feet above normal dry land), torrential rain, and screaming wind are over.  You stay hunkered down for another night.  No choice really.  All roads are impassable and the highway by your hotel is knee deep in water.

Your night is spent in brief periods of fitful slumber.  This is punctuated by longer stretches of children, and some adults, sobbing in the hall.  No A/C and no water to flush the toilet.  You haven’t eaten since breakfast, but you have no appetite.

Part III will address stress and the aftermath.