HURRICANE DORIAN AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP
I live in Florida.
You may be somewhere and not Florida, but most likely, you’ve heard that Hurricane Dorian is approaching the state and Floridians are getting ready.
Two years ago, my family was preparing for a hurricane too, so this is not my first rodeo. Before the storm touched down, my wife instructed me to gather everything outside our house that could turn into a projectile, and store it in our garage.
Flower pots, fences that were lying on the ground, the shovel, the garbage bin and anything my wife told me to store in the garage.
So two days before the wind gust speed up, I drove our second car to a secure parking garage on campus, because half of our garage, is full of things from the outside the house.
EXPERIENCE HELPS
My wife grew up in the area of the Philippines that is a typhoon path. So she knows how to prepare for natural disasters like this. I’ll discuss the difference between a typhoon and a hurricane later but her experience dealing with this kind of natural phenomena lead me to follow every suggestion that she put in the table.
I remember the last hurricane, a few days before the storm, I drove to the gasoline station to get some gas around 4 AM, to avoid the crowd panic buying for gas.
Few days before, In desperation, I would sneak out from work a few days before the storm and look for water bottles in groceries because there’s none left in other stores.
Not just that, the grocery shelves that stock breads was empty too. I was joking in my Facebook feeds directly telling my Pilipino friends back in the Philippines that the good thing is that we “Filipinos are rice powered and don’t worry much if there’s a shortage of bread”.
I bought more canned goods just in case.
It was 2014 I guess when a super typhoon hit the middle part of the Philippines. The bad part is that this region of the Philippines is not the usual path of typhoons, so locals don’t know how to prepare for that kind of disaster. It’s like the state of Georgia swept with snow. The state will be in a stand still.
But going back to the super typhoon that hit the Philippines, when I was reading about the situation, one guy interviewed summed it up perfectly:
“I am a good citizen, but with several days without food, you turn into an animal in order to survive.”
That’s basically what I want to avoid, I want me and my family to be ready so I won’t turn into a raging animal. I bought more canned goods, eggs and other meat I can cook. Knowing that the stove won’t be working, I bought myself a propane gas, the one used for camping. Luckily, I haven’t used propane gas yet after a hurricane, and I’m hoping it will stay that way after Dorian.
During the storm is the scariest part, the waiting game.
You watch satellite images where the center is and then the wind will start to whistle. That means it’s speeding up. There’s an eerie feeling when you are in the middle of the hurricane or the eye, because there’s no wind gust and looks like everything is normal.
It’s a false sense of security because for a few more minutes, the wind will be whistling again and rattling windows and doors.
This is the “calm before the storm”, or the calm part before the second half of water and wind barraging the house.
My family slept in the hallway because my wife was scared of trees falling and strong wind smashing on the glass window. I heard tales from our friends that large oak trees smashing into their bathroom ceiling.
The previous hurricane was expected to hit us around 2 AM, and around 6 AM, when the wind started dying down, I went to the master’s bedroom to sleep.
Just as I thought that the wind was slowing down and the hurricane just past us, a tree fell. The good thing is that it fell away from our house, but destroyed the lanai of our neighbor.
That was a very close call.
I was sleeping in the room and not in the hallway, thinking that the storm past us already, but the wind knocked a tree. The wind gust wasn’t that strong but because the ground was so soft soaked with water for the past 36 hours, the roots can’t hold anymore.
I heard a very loud thump, and when I look at the window, it was a tree in our neighbor’s roof. I was scared.
HURRICANE VS. TYPHOON
When I first encountered hurricanes when I moved from the Philippines to Florida, I always thought that hurricanes was stronger than our typhoons back in the Philippines, but I realized they are almost the same. In addition, somebody told me before that the spin of the storms are different between typhoons and hurricanes, but it turns out they are the same.
Hurricanes spins counter clockwise, and so are typhoons. The only difference is that hurricanes form in the Atlantic Oceans and Typhoons starts on Pacific Oceans (some hurricanes I think starts close to California in the Pacific but dies down before making any damage or landfall).
Being an entrepreneur, after I prepare for hurricanes, like storing possible projectiles to our garage, and storing water and food, I prepare my mind to do things for my business.
My first order of business is when the power is shut off, I need to do things manually. My business is mostly on-line, so I charged my laptop always until the power is interrupted, if the power is interrupted.
If that happens, I’m still doing work, but not connected to the net though.
That’s how I prepare my family and my business with this kind of conditions, how about you?
