J.M.Lamoreux's BLOG: 09/11/2005

Sam put the hot water on the stove and turned up the heat, a feathery orange flame daubing at the pot's metal under belly. He lit a Marlboro and leaned on the counter next to the sink. The smoke trailed upwards and through the kitchen window's screen. Outside the bird feeder was empty, no sign of birds in the trees. The air was thick with something hot, tight, and angry. On the TV, the weatherman was pointing to a jumble of smeared clouds whirling in a kind of lazy vortex coming up from Cuba. Sam dragged on the cigarette again and exhaled at the window screen, the smoke drifting out into the drizzling, grey front yard.

Next door Al Bennington was in his garage. His family was marching in and out of the house with clothes, pictures, and albums. Then Amy's clock radio came on. Amy was in the back bedroom with Tiger, the black terrier. She was trying to reach to turn off the radio when city officials came on. They announced that the hurricane just off the coast was upgraded to a category 4. Evacuation plans were in effect. Then Amy found the snooze button.

Sam came into the bedroom and stood by the bed for a moment. Amy was still waking up. She was sprawled in the sheets like a sleepy flower. Sam looked at her in the half-light of the morning and saw her once again as that frisky little thing he had kidnapped from Carl's Ice-cream Parlor one hot, summer afternoon and took for a giddy boat ride on Lake Osenaw. He let her merge with the morning at her own pace. His cigarette lay wet and out in the kitchen trash can. Amy was on oxygen, the pale tube under her nose and across the top of her lip (slightly wrinkled with her 54 years of living ) vibrated with her breathing.

Tiger wagged his tail but didn't move from his place next to Amy. Outside Sam noticed an unusual amount of traffic noise. Everyone was headed away from the storm. Good choice.

"I'm going to take Tiger for his walk," he said. "Need to hit the can?"

Amy tried to focus. "Have to pee like a race horse," she said. She held up her arms to him. Sam lifted her and slid her over to the seat of the wheel chair, checking the brake with his thigh. He settled her into the chair, released the brake, and wheeled her around to the bathroom. Inside he lifted her again settling her on the toilet, drawing her nightgown up before, she sat on it. She rocked slightly, settled in, and looked up at him.

"Thanks, I'll get it from here."

Sam gently mussed her hair and went to his own bathroom, relieved himself and then went back out into the kitchen where his coffee had gone warm. He usually let Amy read on the toilet while he walked Tiger on the beach. It took her a while to get things going because of the operations and drugs and she had all her "Women's Day" magazines in there anyway.

Hurricane winds battered the isolated weather buoy miles off the coast. It bounced and wiggled on wave swells, winds beating it like a playground bully. It was sending back readings of wind velocities at 115 miles an hour just before a 68-foot wave crushed it into the churning water. An anemometer at Strafford Cove pointed at 75 miles an hour wind speeds. At the Mt. Cahill radar Station, winds were advancing to 86 miles an hour. Anemometer's official and unofficial were mapping the growing storm and sending a shock of alarm throughout the entire meteorological warning system. Local officials ramped up their storm hazard announcements as roads out of the city were choked with residents fleeing the advance of the hurricane.

The mix that went into the driving forces of this storm included a sea surface temperature above 26.5 Celsius to at least a depth of 50 meters. In the upper levels of the storm thunder rumbled. Temperatures decreased with height, the mid-troposphere relatively moist fanned on by tropical waves, areas of thunderstorms that don't rotate sucking up their power from tropical oceans all over the world. The storm had to be ten degrees or more from the equator so that the Coriolis Effect would be strong enough to initiate rotation. There can be no vertical wind sheer. Hurricane's can form without some of these aspects in place but this storm was packing them all...and meteorologists were calling the alarms all up and down the coast.

The monster gaining momentum and moving towards the land was a large, rotating mass of clouds, wind, and thunderstorms. Its life force was the release of the heat of mass condensation from water vapor at high altitudes. Conditions for its creation consisted of pre-existing weather variables, warm ocean water, and high winds aloft. What the storm would bring with it was very high waves, rains, and floods. By noon that day, the hurricane was raised to a category 4. The evacuation order went to "mandatory."

Tiger was sniffing at everything. The air was thick with strange scents and distracted him. Off shore, in the distance, Sam saw lightening stab at the broiling ocean. The wind blew Tiger's hair and sometimes toppled him off his footing. It was difficult to find a place to do his biasness but he finally settled on an area behind a toppled wastebasket wedged between a damaged gate. Sam held onto his glasses as he watched a traffic light bob over one of the main streets by the beach. It danced madly, the red light sputtering...then it flickered out.

He turned and walked towards Clancy Street and had to stoop to get Tiger who was unable to keep his footing in the wind. Rain pelted them both. Sam saw the Carter's brown SUV wending its way towards Rainer Drive and the freeway exit. A police car sat in the McDonald's parking lot. No one was in it. Sam turned the corner and crossed the street to his home. He battled with the front door and Tiger for a moment, and then blustered inside.

"How is it out there?" Amy called from the bathroom.

"It's a shit storm," Sam said chuckling as he wrestled out of his jacket and Tiger shook himself on the kitchen floor. Sam went to his bedroom and sat down in the chair by the closet. He kicked off his soaked Nike's.

"The whole place is deserted," he said. Dylan's Café is a mess. The tables are everywhere. Dale was nowhere in sight. News papers and crap are glued to everything."

"Should we get out Sam?" Amy said, adjusting her oxygen hose. Sam just looked at her for a moment, and then stood up.

"I'm going to you back in bed and get us some breakfast. How does some Captain Crunch sound about now?"

"Sam, do we need to get out of here?"

He looked at her in the bathroom, his eyes glancing over her oxygen tank, filters and inhalers. "How far do you think we'd get with this stuff?" he said, his hand waving at Amy's medicines, hypodermics and health measuring devices. "Where do we go? No one has rushed over here to see how we're doing. No one from the city has come by to see if we need help. We can weather this, we don't need the government to help us with anything but your medical bills and home care," he said. "This old house has stood up to this kind of hurricane bullshit before, I have the portable generator in the basement, I have the canned food and dry stuff, and I have water. I got all that because I could afford it better on my fixed income than insurance." He leaned over and patted her cheek, "I'll take care of you button," he said.

As if in answer to him, a wind gust rumbled across the roof and startled them both.

Tropical waves are westward moving convergent winds. This assists in the development of thunderstorms insiade the Hurricane. Decaying frontal boundaries may often stall over warm waters and produce lines of active convection. The storm inhales its power from the converging weather elements, puffs itself up, and begins its onslaught on the land. Pressures in the center of these storms are the lowest that occur on the earth's surface at seal level. The core is warm, the storm driven by the latent heat of condensation. This hurricane is strong and well developed. It officially makes landfall at 2:30 AM. The dish at the Mt. Cahill radar Station clocks 155 mile an hour winds until it is torn from its brackets and tossed over 100 feet into a Denny's parking lot.

Sam hauls the generator up from the cellar one step at a time, his hernia screaming at him all the way. He drags it into the kitchen. Just as he does that, the refrigerator goes off and the electric clock stops. Lights sputter out all over the house. Amy calls him from the bedroom.

"Give me a minute," he says.

He goes back down the cellar to retrieve food and water. After a while, he has everything upstairs, a lesson learned from the flood that came after the last category four hurricanes that blustered through the city flooding his basement.

Amy screamed as the wind ripped shingles from the corner of her bedroom, like a demon was tearing through the materials trying to get at her. The bathroom window vibrated, rattled, and then broke all over the floor. Something large blew through the living room window and tumbled across the coffee table. Transformers exploded somewhere, a tree toppled across a neighbor's garage. The house groaned as the wind battered it outside.

Sam knelt and held Amy's hand and she cringed at every blow on the house. "I can fix it," he said trying to shout over the roar of the storm. That's when the wall of his bathroom caved in and the rain burst into the hallway in a rush of wind, plant debris, and water. Tiger yipped and hopped between Sam and Amy nervously licking both their faces.

Sam nodded to the hallway full of tree limbs and wooden siding. "That might take some work he said." The living room windows blew out at that moment and the storm over turned furniture and ripped pictures from the wall.  Amy cried and buried her face in Sam's shoulder, screaming. Sam covered her head with the quilt just as the bedroom window exploded...Tiger barking and then barreling down the hall shuttling into the safety of his little "Sleep Igloo." The wind tore pictures off the wall, toppled the antique lamp and overturned the bedroom side table knocking Amy's medications all over the floor. Her oxygen tank danced in its frame.

But Sam was listening to something else. It was a noise that he couldn't quite make out yet. It was at the level of the house's foundations. It seemed to be commanding the wood and cement to do something. It wanted it out of the way. Just then, Tiger came racing and barking down the hall and landed like a bomb in the middle of the bed. Behind him, a copious wall of water followed.

The eye of a hurricane is an area of sinking air at the center of circulation. It is calm, there are no clouds. It's cold in the eye at surface level. It may range in shape from eight kilometers to two hundred kilometers (5 to 125 miles). The eyewall is a circular band of serious convection and surrounded by winds. Eyewall replacement cycles occur when outer eye walls move to replace inner ones. No one understands why. In the center of the eye, you get a short respite from the winds.

The water churned the furniture, clothes, shoes, and file boxes, in a dark, smelly soup. Sam groaned as Amy's bed lifted and turned. Tiger clung to the wet quilts barking at the rising water. Sam stood up, the flood ascending to his mid thigh. Amy was screaming hysterically for him to not let her die. He looked out the bedroom window almost by accident, his jaw dropped, and his heart sank. His back yard was a sea of oily black water. The lawn furniture swirled around in it while the little Saint Francis shrine torn from the tree in the middle of the patio bounced against the wall of the kitchen. There was no wind, just the sound of rising water growling and gurgling all around them.

"Let go Amy I have to do something," Sam said pushing her away. She shrieked at him grappling with his hands and arms. He turned and waded into the hallway. The water was over the toilet in the bathroom. The hallway dresser drifted towards him lazily, he pulled out the drawers tossing them back into the living room and sank the dresser just below the attic entry in the ceiling. He climbed on the dresser and finally pounded the attic door open with his fist just as the water tore the dresser out from under him. The ladder slid forward and splashed into the dark water locking on the dresser ending its escape into the kitchen. Sam struggled to his feet. The flood level was now about six inches above the door handle to the bathroom. Amy screamed from the bedroom. Tiger was dog paddling in front of the closet.

Sam waded to her and lifted her from the bed. She was dead weight, wet, shivering, terrified. He dragged her over the floating boxes and closet debris and pulled her around to the ladder. Holding her weight under the arms, he tried to find the ladder rungs with his heel. The water was two thirds up the door now and they were both floating. It lifted them closer to the open attic door but also threatened to shove them away from it. Sam struggled to hold onto the ladder with his legs and Amy too. Her air tube was around her neck and she was panting for oxygen. He knew he would never be able to get them both into the attic. The ladder began to break apart with the force of the water and their bodies struggling to use it to lift them both upwards.

"Amy, I'm going to lift you and you'll have to use your arms to get into the attic. You're going to have to help me get you up there," he shouted. He raised her up while submerging himself in the cold, oily water. It seemed like time had stopped for Sam while submerged. His lungs screamed for air but he told himself he would stay down there as long as he had to...so Amy would be safe. He felt Amy try to pull herself upward with little effect. After what seemed like hours, she got her belly over the attic entry. Sam pushed her the rest of the way up just as the water was lapping inches from the ceiling. He scrabbled onto the attic floor after her, kicking away insulation, holding her in his arms waiting to see how high the water would go. It lapped around the hole and threatened to come into the attic. There was nowhere left to escape to.

After some hours, the water hadn't risen any more, and Sam settled down into problem solving. Amy was breathing hard and couldn't talk. He dug around in the attic boxes and found a tarp that he wrapped her in. He was looking into the attic opening trying to decide how he would get Amy's oxygen when the body of Tiger drifted and cart wheeled past it. He looked away just as Amy burst into tears.

A hurricane develops an eye at the center of its circulation. You can see it from satellite shots. Around the eye, the strongest winds and thunderstorms circulate. The strongest winds there have been measured at 190 miles per hour. The eyewall top can sometimes curve in ward creating what is called a "stadium effect." As 180 mile an hour winds rose up and removed the windward roofing material of Sam's house while the hurricane eye passed over him, he could look up and see a wall of clouds rising hundreds of feet into the sky churning and growling over his head. Amy screamed into his neck that she couldn't take this any more. He wasn't sure he could either.

The house was collapsing from the wind damage and rushing water. The attic started slanting down into the blackness threatening to dump them into the soup. Debris blew past the exposed roof struts. Sam was moving into shock. As he started into the water across his back yard, he could see something bumping against the wooden fence. It seemed like it was trying to knock down the fencing. But the thing itself was lifeless. It was a body. Sam couldn't take his eyes off it. Amy was gasping into the muscles of his neck. She was not in good shape.

A hurricane can dissipate in a matter of days being reduced to a tropical storm. If it moves over land this can take a lot of its energy away. It needs warm water to live. If it gets back to warm water it may be able to revivify, but once it hits land that is pretty much its end. The problem is the dying storm can release a torrential rainfall compounding deaths from complications with water management. It can also remain in an area too long consuming the heat there and starving itself. Wind shear can also kill it confusing the convection and destroying the heat engine. It can weaken into thunderstorms. This hurricane was dying.

Lightening cracked and lit the sky. The wind had quieted. The water had stopped rising, things bumped occasionally against the house. Amy had calmed down from mental and physical exhaustion. She was still gasping for air but was somehow able to keep some oxygen in her lungs. She clung to Sam, cradled in his arms.

"Did God...do this...Sam?" she said. "Is this...our punishment? You know...for... our sins?"

But Sam was looking out across the destroyed neighborhood that once held the promise of his old age and longed-for retirement, a place that was now the burial ground of his life before today. Everywhere the neighborhood he knew was in ruins, the destruction was complete, his neighbors' home submerged to the eves in black, stagnant water. His eyes traveled over the scene of destruction.

Across Darcy Street, around the corner from the A&P, where the bridge connected the two Parishes forming the south side, the familiar silhouette of the levee that had been a part of the horizon of his childhood world for so long, showed several hundred feet of gap, over which the river waters rushed in a frothy roar. The storm was made by God, the disaster was man made.

Two days and six hours later, a rescue boat found them in 110-degree heat, his dead wife wrapped in the tarp still in his arms.

The Hurricane was devastating. Huge thirty-foot waves submerged much of the coastal towns. High winds tore off rooftops, planted cars on top of buildings and uprooted hundred-year-old trees. Loose projectiles impaled critical equipment in electrical and water cleaning facilities. Electricity was down everywhere. Thunderstorms had started fires with nothing left to put them out. Small tornadoes finished off what the hurricane missed. Disease was rampant. Injuries bathed in the fetid water festered, medical equipment took days to relieve the injured in makeshift medical facilities already over taxed and under supplied.

Sam sat on the curb outside a relief facility, Amy still in the tarp by his side. No one knew when they relief effort would turn to dealing with the dead. Five times someone tried to get him to leave her and get food, but he wouldn't do it. A man in a yellow T-shirt that identified him as a "Faith Based" relief worker came over to Sam and sat down beside him, upwind of Amy who had been in 100-degree heat for four days now.

"You ought to eat something," he told Sam.

He offered him a hotdog. But Sam just looked away. The other man glanced in the direction Sam was staring.

"God doesn't do anything without our salvation in mind," He offered for no good reason. "We are sitting here in this mess because we are all sinners, and this is how God reclaims his earth from sinners." The muscle tightened in Sam's jaw. "Liberals, lesbians and homosexuals did all this," the man said waving his hot dog in the direction of his personalized apocalyptic vision. Other evacuees watched, not moving a muscle to assist as Sam pummeled the head of the man in the yellow shirt, crushing his nose with meaty fist and a mustard and relish hotdog. Sam dragged him off to lay him unconscious under a wind stripped park tree.

He returned to his wife by the curb and sat there with her for one more day before someone finally came and loaded her in a truck to take her to the refrigerated morgue facilities in the next Parish. Only then would he take water or drink. It was at that moment he could find it in himself to cry.