Miami will be closed Tuesday and Wednesday.
No, not just the public schools and the university, although we’re closed for two days. Pretty much the whole town.
And the joke is that
- the Ernesto forecast has (for now) been demoted to a tropical storm until it gets to points far north of us and
- the storm has slowed a bit: even on the original track it wasn’t supposed to hit until late Tuesday afternoon.
Now we’re looking at very late Tuesday or even early Wednesday. And possibly an anti-climax at that. When they close the public schools, pretty much everybody falls into line; and planners are undoubtedly still smarting from their failure to close early for one of last year’s hurricanes which meant that a lot of commuters struggled home in dangerous weather. So now we’re very very cautious.
False alarms are nowhere as bad as the real thing, but I find that the irregular procession of even false alarms take their toll — there’s something very … distracting … about the real possibility of slowly oncoming doom, even when it starts seeming somewhat less likely. And those makeup classes are a pain for all concerned.
Yesterday I had a chance to stock up on gasoline for our generator with almost no lines, but didn’t — and the storm track moved over Miami a few hours later. Today I stocked up on gas (the line wasn’t that bad, maybe 10-15 minutes) and within minutes of coming home with the goods learned that Ernesto was being downgraded.
I believe this constitutes the basis for a testable hypothesis.
Those of us living in places not affected by hurricanes wonder why people live where there are hurricanes. The regular rebuilding of damaged property, the all too frequent declaration as a federal disaster area (tax dollars, ka ching ka ching) which probably suggested building on stilts or hills and public funding for beach repairs to develop high priced land, is rather troublesome to the rest of us. I hazard a guess (pun intended) that hurricane related claims far exceed those for other types of disasters, but the doing it over and over is the sticking point.
It’s like Washington D.C. with a one-inch snowstorm.
People live where there are hurricanes because they like living in paradise all year round. The last couple of years have been very abnormal as far as hurricanes go. I’ve lived in South Florida for 20 years on and off and have never experienced a hurricane until last year. Although I should mention that I am currently renting and live in a new, secure building (so the hurricane has little effect on me), I would much rather live through a month of hurricane threats than live in the miserable northeast.
Well, we came here because it’s a good faculty and the law school had jobs for both halves of an academic couple. If you happen to know of a good law school that doesn’t have hurricanes, has good schools in the neighborhood for our children, and has two jobs available …