(Aug. 16) MOBILE, Alabama — The dread, unspoken but real, starts growing along the Gulf Coast at this time of year. The dread isn’t helped when the first sentence of a New Orleans Times-Picayune story reads: “Temperatures off the coast of southeast Louisiana hit bathtub range last week.”
High Gulf water temperatures – “the highest sea surface temperatures ever documented by a longtime wave monitoring group,” the Aug. 5 article says, and five full degrees warmer than the upper range of what is already considered seriously “above normal” – mean that hurricanes are more likely to develop, and also more likely to be more powerful.
While Gulf Coast residents are well practiced at dealing with hurricanes, the foreboding this year seems palpably more intense. One can have seen Hurricane Camille leave Pass Christian, Mississippi look like a bomb dropped there in 1969, and seen Hurricane Ivan knock out power for nine days in 2004, and seen Katrina in 2005 drown 70% of New Orleans and much of the Mississippi Coast, and seen even relatively minor storms such as Sally in 2020 leave downed trees blocking roadways for miles and for weeks while alligators swam in the middle of major highways … and, yet, still, something this year seems unusually amiss.
Temperatures always are high during a Gulf Coast summer, but this year, breaching 100 degrees, they seem unusually oppressive. Few breezes blow; the air is stultifyingly motionless, making the heat not just oven-like but somehow heavy, as if weighted with extra molecules.
So what does one do, if one senses a looming monster? One stocks up on bottled water, and makes sure a generator is in working order, and trades morbid jokes, and maybe says some special prayers: Catholics, for example insist the “Divine Praises” ward off major storms.
And, if the prevailing weather pattern makes the Gulf ripe to suction a storm right up our grill, maybe another sort of spirit will be required. Along with the bottled water, make sure there’s a stash of whiskey. Served, perhaps, with a twist – but, please, not with a major twister.
