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A Prepper's Point-of-View on Hurricane Isaac, by Leauxryda
Many a prepper may take the time to perform a test of their personal prep systems. Sometimes, Mother Nature will force you to do just that if you haven’t put your preps in practice yet. Ours came in the form of Hurricane Isaac.
With media’s laying attention straight towards New Orleans and no one else, the Gulf Coast area residents laid their own attentions to their respective communities. And this attention consisted of hunkering down for a rain and wind event that would be nowhere near a Katrina event. How wrong were these expectations? At a seemingly last minute, Isaac became a hurricane as the winds and rain pounded Plaquemines Parish, a peninsula south of New Orleans that is split between the Mississippi River. Hurricanes are divided into 4 quadrants; Northeast side, Southeast side, Northwest side, and Southwest side. Each quadrant has its own circumstances but most notably, the Northeast and Southeast side’s as these two bring in the most damage. Plaquemines as well as those to the east felt the brunt of the later half in full force.
Don’t let a Tropical Storm or Category 1 Hurricane fool you into complacency. Hurricane Isaac broke that theory. Torrential rains, damaging winds contributed to a much month-long rain soaked Louisiana gulf coast. Isaac’s storms simply added water with no place for it to go. And with winds pushing tidal surges north, drainage canals, bayous and tributaries were compromised so, that water topped some levees that years ago protected communities during Katrina.
So, as a resident along the Gulf Coast, our preps for future uncertainties also included hurricanes. When Isaac was heading our way, the only necessary preps needing completion were the basics such as boarding windows, anchoring down potential fly-away items, ensuring generator is in good running condition, securing plants, filling our vehicles with fuel along with extra fuel cans and propane for cooking fuels, etc.
Our community was never in the projected path, but experienced residents realize hurricane path predictions are never an exact science. That’s why the projection always includes a swath surrounding it. Any area within this projection can easily be a target based on nature’s unpredictability. And this was evidenced around midnight August 29 while pounding Plaquemine’s Parish, Isaac had stalled just enough causing the eye to dance against the shorelines of southern Louisiana. Over the course of approximately 5 hours, Isaac crawled west for about 35 nautical miles of coastline before slowly edging northwest. Believe me when I say a turtle could run circles around this hurricane as this stall is what changed the expectations of a not-so-typical Cat 1 hurricane.
As of this writing, we are in our fourth day and since Houma became one of the first paths for the eye to cross over, we were actually spared the brunt of the hurricane’s impact effects. To the east as far as Biloxi and due north of it, coastal areas to Picayune, Mississippi were pounded by rain, hurricane force winds and the occasional tornadoes. In addition to this came the flooding to add to many a misery.
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