Living through the hurricanes

When my family first moved to Louisiana, the scariest folk tales we heard were about seeing alligators crawling in the street and mosquitoes the size of a Volkswagen.

Hurricanes were way down the list, and neighbors had hurricane parties when weather forecasters said a storm was coming through.

My dad would put masking tape on the windows, we'd put our Eveready flashlights on the kitchen table and fill a bathtub up with water, but that was about it.

That was until Hurricane Katrina.

That was before forecasting the weather became a science, not a guessing game.

That was before we saw the devastation a hurricane, even a Category 1 storm, can unleash.

Thanks to biting my nails through some terrifying storms, I've now become a weather junkie. I watch The Weather Channel and weather station Websites are bookmarked as favorites.

I'm a frequent visitor to the Weather Underground Website, and I know the difference between a tropical depression and a tropical storm.

I have some fellow weather junkie friends, and the minute we read about a tropical storm brewing, we're emailing and texting each other.

"Gotta go," one will abruptly say. "Steve's on."

Steve Lyons with The Weather Channel is the granddaddy of weather reporting. If Dr. Steve says get out, then people, get out.

Same goes with TWC's Jim Cantore. Although he looks more like a body builder, meteorologist Cantore makes it look easy standing on a pier, pelted with wind and rain, while talking about 80-mile-per-hour winds.

Although Isaac isn't slated to affect southeast Texas, forecasters on the Houston weather stations are going into overdrive, covering everything about the storm from hotel occupancy rates to the rising price of gasoline to what weather gurus Neil Frank, Frank Billingsley and Gene Norman think every hour on the hour.

As the storm makes landfall, thousands of Gulf Coast residents who haven't lost power yet are glued to the television, watching Isaac bully his way up and over the Gulf Coast.

My family members in Louisiana were prepared – they've been stocking up on supplies and they made sure their generators were gassed up and running. One of my sisters lives in Alexandria, a good distance from the coast, but she and her family stocked up with everything they thought they'd need to wait out the storm.

They have good reason to be a bit skittish. After Katrina, my sister and hundreds of weary residents in northern Louisiana worked in the shelters as dazed evacuees from the New Orleans area poured into their cities. Volunteers rallied around those who'd lost everything, finding them food, clothing, toys, furniture and money to start over.

Neighbors in Houston and other parts of the country reached out, but people affected by the storm didn't travel very far. They yearned to stay close to home where creamy white magnolias dot the country side in the spring and where Spanish moss hangs lazily from the limbs of centuries old oak trees.

Those who live in Louisiana and along the Gulf Coast know they take the good with the bad. Living close enough to the water so one can fish whenever one wants means those waters can occasionally turn ugly and mean.

We accept that contradiction, turn to our masterminds on The Weather Channel and weather-junkie Websites and wait for them to tell us when we can start cleaning up and get back to "laissez les bons temps rouler" – let those good times roll.

This article was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.