Hurricane prep in Florida can bring out the best and the worst in people.
During hurricane prep, Floridians can be summed up like this: "At a pizza party, one type of person will take only one slice of pizza in case there isn’t enough for everyone. Another will take three slices for the same reason."
It's the Three-Slicers who race to the nearest Publix six hours before it opens so they can buy up as much toilet paper as they can.
Then, they leave their shopping carts in the parking lot.
Because Three-Slicers also fail the Shopping Cart test. (You can tell if someone is a good person or not by whether they return their cart to the corral or just leave it.)
I'm writing this week's column on Tuesday instead of my usual Thursday because Hurricane Milton is going to come barreling across Florida this week. In case the power goes out, I don't want to write this on my phone in the dark.
To help you non-Floridians understand what happens in the Sunshine State during a hurricane, let me answer a few questions and helpful hints I've seen on Facebook.
Have you been preparing for the hurricane?
Of course, we're prepared! In Florida, hurricane season runs from June 1 through November 30, and you start prepping every June 1st. The goal is to get enough canned food to build a cool castle on your dining room table, complete with gravy moat.
Then you spend the off months eating canned food until you're so sick of green beans that when the next hurricane hits, you decide to go outside and let nature take its course.
Are you going to evacuate?
No, because it costs a few hundred dollars to evacuate for a couple of days. Plus, my family doesn't really want to spend three days in a hotel room together. We already live in the same house, we don't need to be closer.
Also, we're in one of the safer parts of the state where evacuation is not necessary. We don't need to use up the fuel and rooms that people in the dangerous parts could use. (Read that part about the Three-Slicers again.)
But you can stay with us.
Thank you, you're very kind. But I'm worried you're trying to weasel a place to stay for Spring Break.
More importantly, there are millions of people evacuating all at the same time, so I-75 looks like a mall parking lot at Christmas time. A friend took five hours to drive from Tampa to Orlando, which normally takes 90 minutes. Others are saying it took 16 hours to get to Atlanta, which normally takes seven hours. I hate driving in traffic, so I'll take my chances here.
Plus, if everyone else already evacuated, it's a lot easier for me to break into their houses and take their stuff.
Are you going to be safe?
Yes. For one thing, Central Florida usually doesn't get direct hits from hurricanes. Plus, as of Tuesday evening, the hurricane has shifted to south, so we'll be OK.
Also, Florida is a very long state. It's the dachshund of America. For example, it's 300 miles from Orlando to the Florida Keys. So when a hurricane is skating along the bottom of the state, we're perfectly safe.
It's like if there was a storm in Nashville, Tennessee, and I asked my Indianapolis friends if they were getting wet.
In this case, Milton is heading west to east and will shoot straight across Florida, and a large swath of Florida will be covered. But it's Tuesday night, and we're still not completely sure where Milton will make landfall. Right now, Sarasota is the likely target, so be prepared to send help and donations there.
I saw on Facebook that—
I'm gonna stop you right there. Were you about to tell me about how bad things are going to get because one of your friends is a "weather expert" who shared their hurricane "research?"
Maybe. . .?
We ignore any weather info unless it comes from actual experts: the National Hurricane Center, the Weather Channel, or local Florida weathercasters.
We believe the Hurricane Center and the Weather Channel because it's their literal job, and they all have degrees in this.
We believe the local weathercasters because they know how to report hurricanes. They know better than to over-inflate and exaggerate what's going on with the hurricanes because they have to face their viewers when it's over.
I wouldn't trust your friend to predict the color of orange juice.
How can we help you?
Donate to the American Red Cross for areas hardest hit by hurricanes. Send your friends and family digital donations via PayPal or Venmo. Don't send old clothing or food, though; that gets piled up in the warehouses and never gets distributed.
And please, stop being a Three-Slicer. Think of others more than you think of yourself. If we're really in this together, then you'll make sure everyone is taken care of, not just you.
Photo credit: VIIRS imagery from the NOAA-21 Satellite (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Public Domain)
My new humor novel, Mackinac Island Nation, is finished and available from 4 Horsemen Publications. You can get the ebook and print versions here.