There’s a good chance things are going to get worse before they get better.
A Facebook memory popped up today to remind me that three years ago, I was covering Hurricane Harvey. The wind blew out the windows of the news car.
Luckily, I was stopped at the time. I was, however, on the phone with another reporter who later explained he suspected something had happened because he heard a loud crash, then he heard me yell, “[expletive]! I gotta go.” Then I hung up the phone.
Then water rose up and knocked out the engine. Perhaps even more luckily, I had the sense to get out before I had to swim away.
Today, Texas and Louisiana are preparing for another direct hit. My news director texted yesterday and asked if I was available to go to Beaumont.
“Why not?!” I really did reply.
“It’s not as though I got fired from my last job for ‘wanton destruction of company property’ because a car got water damage in a hurricane,” I declined to reply.
But maybe he was getting that vibe from the first text. A few hours later, he told me the network was not going to pay for a trip to the coast after all.
That freed me up for microphone shovin‘ right here in North Texas. I talked to the matriarch of a family who had driven up from Beaumont. She explained, succinctly, that we sort of had enough goin’ on even without a hurricane.
Evacuees have been arriving at a couple places around DFW. They can pick up supplies and sign up for a hotel room [Because of COVID, people can’t sleep on a cot in a large gymnasium. They’ll have to make do at a hotel paid for by The Man.]
Another gentleman from Beaumont also explained the position of a lot of people, including those of us who were not particularly excited to drive another station car into areas expecting a 20 foot storm surge.
Expectations were low. The lady from Beaumont says she knows she may come back to a flooded house, but she had an attitude reporters hear a lot after a natural disaster: You realize then that you’ve been worried about your house or your job. Only in a disaster do you realize those things can be replaced as long as you still have your family.
At the risk of editorializing, we DO gotta encourage one another. She wasn’t flippin’ out about a having to wear a mask. She was just glad to be out of an “unsurvivable” situation.
The li’l kids, however, seemed more interested in the supplies than the adults. In the kids’ defense, who could expect name brand frosted flakes in the middle of a hurricane AND a pandemic?! But the dad was rootin’ through the bag at one point, too, when his daughter walked up.
“You need some grub, too,” he explained to her. And they had store brand Pop Tarts together. As a family.
