Katrina and Edward

The news from the South has been devistating. Words cannot even begin to describe what we are seeing.

This is the first hurricane that has hit since my Dad, Edward, died. For most this would seem a useless point of information, but to me it is significant. When hurricanes would develop we would chat about strike probabilities, storm surges, damage estimates, recovery efforts and the like. Not because we reveled in others' misfortune, but because my father's specialty was disaster recovery.

We'd always talked about those who wouldn't leave, about New Orleans' particular concerns, about disaster preparedness. But even my dad, the disaster master, was caught unawares in a minor brush with Ivan this same time last year. He remarked to me, after my mom had been caring for him and my very ill grandfather (who was stuck in his reclining electric chair) without power for five days, that he just didn't realize what that really meant. What they would need, what they might have thought to gather.

His disaster recovery training was on large scale issues, often on corporate recovery, on coordination of major services. This micro-level had caught him off guard, much the same way in which Katrina caught the South. When one evacuates and returns to nothing there is one sort of devistation, when one remains in a seemingly safe area and crawls through their roof to find themselves surrounded by water there is no way to prepare for that.

There is more to say, but no need to say it. It is too late to say "Get out!" to those who we love, too late to plead, "Please, get out!"

I miss my father more these past days then I have in recent months. No one else wants to talk about hurricanes the way he did.