All About Hurricanes

After the Hurricane Passes

Hurricanes travel quickly once they make landfall, usually between 10 and 20 miles per hour. If a storm has gale-force winds extending out for about 200 miles from the center, the hurricane will take anywhere from 10-20 hours to blow through your area, and you'll catch the worst for 8-10 hours. Once a storm passes, however, clear skies usually take its place, and the cleanup process can begin.

Safety First!

The first and foremost thing to remember after a hurricane passes is the importance of being careful. The storm has kicked up an awfully large amount of debris in most cases. High winds may have downed power lines. Storm drains may be clogged and drainage pumps may be backed up, causing street flooding. This combination can be deadly for children, pets, and careless adults. After the storm passes, the first thing you should do is to step outside on your porch and take stock of the situation. Do you have power? Is the street flooded? How high is the water coming up? Are the cars flooded? What's the situation in other parts of the city? Once you've established the basics, then it's best to just stay put, particularly if you have some flooding or down power lines are visible. If there are repairs you can do from the inside out, or if there's stuff you can do in the backyard, attack that first. Let the water recede and give the power company a chance to come out and fix the lines before venturing out to the front and into the street.

Flood Waters

After basic local safety, your most serious concern is going to be flooding. If the hurricane has brought serious tidal surges with it, it's possible that you'll experience rising waters in the area after the storm has passed. Combine this with the possibility of stressed-out levees breaking and you've got potential for a serious problem. This scenario means that it's possible that you'll still have to evacuate to higher ground even though you successfully rode out the storm. Again, TV and radio are your best defenses here. You don't want to wait until the flood waters are on your doorstep to take action. TV stations will have helicopters and other aircraft in the air surveying the damage as soon as the weather clears. Keep on top of the reports these aircraft provide so you know whether there are additional threats to your home.

Shelter

Hopefully your home has made it through the storm OK. If it hasn't for whatever reason, you may have to evacuate to a shelter after the storm blows over. Most areas have many public shelters, usually at local schools, playground gymnasiums, etc. Start with one of these, get the family settled, then you can see about finding a motel or making other arrangements for an extended stay. If your home has sustained water damage, start the process of pulling up the carpet and drying out sheetrock and insulation immediately. Don't let waterlogged carpet sit in the house--it'll just breed bacteria and create other problems.

Power

If your home has experienced a power outage, there could be a number of potential causes. High winds could have forced a shutdown of a generating plant, knocked down lines somewhere in-between the plants and your home, a transformer on your block could have blown, or the lines on your street could be down. The basic rule of thumb to determine how long you will be without power is: the further away the problem, the quicker you'll get power back. If there is a problem with one of the generating plants, power will be re-routed from other plants. Same with power lines that feed multiple substations. Problems that are closer to home will require more direct attention by a maintenance crew, which means your neighborhood has to get in line with every other neighborhood that's lost power. Flood waters and other obstructions that hinder work crews may compound the time it takes to get you back on-line.

Food and Water

If you lose power, keeping things cold in your refrigerator and freezer will be difficult. If possible, buy some dry ice to keep the freezer cold. If you've prepared and/or eaten most of what's in your fridge, you should be in good shape. If not, it's time to start cooking. A good refrigerator/freezer unit will maintain a decent temperature for a while, so long as you don't constantly open it.

If your house has a gas stove, you should be OK as far as cooking goes. Hurricanes don't usually affect local gas lines, since they're underground. All-electric households are obviously the ones that have the most problems here. Even so, many all-electric households still have at least a charcoal barbecue grill, possibly even a gas one. Use that barbecue for boiling water and cooking.

Water can be a problem in areas where there has been extensive flooding. Sewer lines can back up into the fresh water supply, or water from the lake will contaminate the drinking water. Tainted water is the quickest spreader of disease, so it's very important to listen to news reports in case your water supply has problems. When in doubt, boil drinking water before using. This is why you filled up all of those old milk containers and your bathtubs before the storm hit. These should give you a decent supply of drinking water until you're advised that tap water is once again safe. If the water situation is not remedied in a day or two, the local government will take steps to get fresh water to you.

Initial Cleanup

Once the basics are dealt with, it's time to think about cleaning up around the house and yard. Broken glass, branches, leaves, and dirt are the main after-storm evils. Be very careful picking up debris after a storm; check for nails sticking out of wood, sharp metal and glass edges, etc. Double-check the power lines in the neighborhood before clearing away large amounts of leaves and branches. You don't want any electrical surprises once you get started.

Cleanup after a hurricane takes more than a day or two. If you're the type of person who doesn't work well in clutter and mess, brace yourself for this fact. Many contractors and carpet installers recommend that you wait three to four weeks before replacing carpet in flooded rooms. Old carpet and damaged furniture may sit in front of your house for days, even weeks, waiting for an insurance adjuster to process your claim. Even if the damage to the house is minor, the cleanup process can be annoying and can drag on more than you'd like. Try to keep a positive attitude.

Dealing with FEMA and Insurance Adjusters

When Hurricane Andrew hit and wiped out a large portion of Southern Florida in '92, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) caught a lot of flak over their response time. People were living in army-built tent cities because they had no place to go. While then-candidate for president Bill Clinton didn't make too much of an issue of the Bush Administration's handling of the disasters in Florida and Louisiana (where Andrew made his final landfall), it was obvious that there was a need for a shake-up at FEMA. Based on local experience with FEMA during the May 8th flood this year, those problems appear to have been pretty much fixed. If you are so unfortunate as to be so badly wiped out by the hurricane that you qualify for immediate FEMA aid, the best thing you can hope for is that the really hard-hit areas are not so widespread as to over-tax FEMA's resources. For example, if FEMA only had to deal with the Louisiana sites in '92, thing would probably have been much smoother. The level of destruction Andrew inflicted on Florida that year was so extensive that no agency could have handled all of those people in a timely manner. FEMA has been beefed up since then, what with earthquakes in California, flooding in the Mississippi Valley, and other disasters in other parts of the country. If FEMA's performance in the wake of the May 8th New Orleans flood is an indication of the agency's current state of readiness, you can rest assured that they're trying. There's no point in getting upset about the government, and just do your best to work with them.

For those with private insurance, you'll be working with adjusters from the various companies with which you hold policies. Wind damage will most likely be covered under your regular homeowner's policy, and water damage under your flood insurance policy. You don't have flood insurance, you say? You've got a big problem. Most people who have mortgages on their homes are required by the lender to carry flood insurance if they live in flood zone A, which covers large portions of metro New Orleans. Many folks who live outside of that primary zone, as well as folks who have paid off their mortgages drop their flood policies, only to have that decision come back to haunt them. Obtaining flood insurance is one of those things you can't do after the fact; you need to check the status of your flood insurance before a storm hits. Unless your home is hit by a tornado, the majority of the damage a hurricane is likely to cause is from flooding. Keep that in mind.

One word of caution to would-be perpetrators of insurance fraud: Adjusters in the New Orleans area have had their fill of attempts to defraud their companies after the May 8th flood. If this area is hit this year or next by a hurricane, you'll be doing business with insurance personnel who know what to look for and which questions to ask. This may give you pause when considering to cheat your insurance carrier.

Most people in New Orleans carry collision or comprehensive automobile insurance that will handle any damage that occurs as the result of a hurricane. This is because our street flooding situations are frequent enough that it's possible you may get water in your car at times other than a hurricane. It's important to double-check your coverage in any case, but if you've got it, your policy should cover both wind and water damage.

Getting Back to Normal

It usually takes a day or two for the New Orleans area to return to normal after a hurricane strikes. Since most storms hit during the summer, the problems of dealing with missed school days and such are not a major concern. Day-care centers being closed can cause problems for parents as more families rely on these services. Most employers are fairly understanding about the situation and are willing to accommodate their employees when disaster strikes. We clean up, fix up, then get back to work at our jobs. Some of us will stop by our churches and offer thanks that we made it through, along with a prayer or two that we won't get hit again in the near future.

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