The title is supposed to evoke images of a woman who is a soccer mom by day and serial killing hooker by night. The coastal part of the state of North Carolina saw the second side of Florence. In Durham, which is 150 miles from Wilmington, we mostly her softer side.
In the days leading up to Sunday September 9, the storm was hyped by the weather channel and the local news stations. Florence started as category 1 in the eastern half of the Atlantic Ocean but it was predicted that as she reached the warmer weather in the Atlantic, she would grow to category 4 and smash into coast somewhere in the Carolinas (and she did). The message of a coming disaster was reinforced by our neighborhood listserv. People who lived through Hurricane Fran in 1996, saw many trees go down, and lived a week or more without power, and they were not anxious for a repeat performance. Emails were filled with long lists of things we should do in order to prepare.
Monday September 10. At my house we had our semi-annual inspection of the heating/cooling system. It is hard to get work done while the technician is in the house, so I googled “How do you prepare for a hurricane?” The answers were similar to what I had seen on the listserv, with one new funny one: remove all of the coconuts from your trees, since they can become cannonballs in a storm. When the inspection was finished about 11:30 (with no repairs needed!), I went to the grocery store with my little list: water and nonperishable foods. The store was a zoo and water was flying off the shelves, but I came home with 48 quart bottles of Dasanti, canned fruit, canned soup, bread, peanut butter, energy bars, etc.
Tuesday September 11 was the 17th anniversary of a day that changed the world. Donald and Melania visited the new memorial to the plane that went down in Pennsylvania. I came down with a cold and stayed home from school. By this time, there was more weather than news on news. I recall hearing one weatherman pontificate “at this point we are as good with predictions 72 hours out as we used to be at 24 hours.” Then he showed a track that had the eye of a category 1 storm over Durham about five days later. Tuesday afternoon Duke announced that all classes were cancelled as of 5PM Wednesday. , with no classes on Thursday and Friday. UNC and NCState also closed and in a sign of looming disaster cancelled their football games. For UNC this was a blessing. Having lost to Cal and to the East Carolina in the two previous weeks, they were happy to escape from another loss at the hands of U of Central Florida.
Wednesday September 12. The morning weather forecast announced a dramatic change in the track of the storm. It was now predicted to turn left after land fall, hang out at the beach for a couple of days and then head off to Atlanta. The new storm track was great news for Durham but not for Myrtle Beach South Carolina which was given a short deadline to evacuate. Wednesday was more or less a normal day. I met with a graduate student at 11, had lunch, taught my class, and announced the shifted schedule for the homework and exams due to the cancellation of class on Friday.
Thursday September 13 was the calm before the storm. My wife and I took a walk around the neighborhood in the morning, went out to a Mexcian Lunch at La Hacienda at the northern edge of Chapel Hill, and grilled some chicken for dinner. (In NC barbecuing refers to cooking a large piece of meat over a slow fire until you can pull it apart with your hands. Grilling gets the job done in 15-20 minutes.) Feeling more confident about the future we scaled back from cooking four chicken breasts to have leftovers that could be eaten over the next few days, to making only two.
Friday September 14. Florence made land fall at Wilmington as a category 2 hurricane, which is definitely more than half as strong as a category 4. It was amusing to see several weathermen competing to see who could be filmed in the eye of the hurricane, where the winds suddenly drop to 0. A woman on the neighborhood listserv described it as an eerie experience. Most of the other things that happened along the coast were not at all funny. New Bern was about 30 miles from the coast, but it was on the banks of the Neuse River. Rains plus hurricane winds resulted in flooding that left hundreds of people (who stupidly chose not to evacuate) in need of rescue. Up in Durham things were much more sedate. There was very little wind or rain. However since the weatherman had told us to shelter in place, we stayed in for most of the day, as did most of our neighbors.
Saturday September 15 was more or less a repeat of Friday. Twisting a line from Big Bang in which Penny is talking about here relationship with Leonard. “This is a new boring kind of hurricane.” I don’t know what normal people do during a hurricane, but it is a great chance to get some work done. On Friday I read a couple of papers from the arXiv and thought up a new problem for one of my grad students to work on. Saturday I decided I would use the lull to finally finish up the 5th edition of Probability; Theory & Examples, so I sifted through emails I had saved from readers and corrected some typos. Not everything I do is math. I watched the third round of the Evian Championship, the fifth major of the LPGA season. In more keeping with more manly pursuits I watched parts of Duke’s 40-27 victory over Baylor in Waco, Texas. The win was remarkable because Duke’s starting quarterback, a junior who might make it to the pros, was out. In addition, I watched Texas beat the USC Trojans, 37-14. It’s not just that my son is a CS professor in Austin. Having been at UCLA for nine years, when Peter Carroll was there, I love to see USC lose.
Sunday September 16. Duke’s severe weather policy (which covers not only the university but also the hospitals) ended at 7AM, so we figured that we had reached the end of the hurricane. We got up and went to the Hope Valley Diner for breakfast at about 7:30. When we first started going there it was called Rick’s. However, the owner got tired of having a restaurant named after her ex-husband. In keeping with the intellectual climate of Durham, our usual waitress is a second year medical student at UNC Greensboro. Weather was light rain as it had been for the last couple of days, so we went to the Southpoint Mall to get out of the house. Being in a Christian region almost all the stores don’t open until noon. At the mall Susan bought some Crocs, and I bought a couple of books that I read before going to sleep. However, mostly we walked around like many of the families who came there with their small kids.
Monday September 17. Our hopes of nicer weather were quickly dashed. It was raining very hard when we woke up. Curiously the direction of the flow was now from SW to NE in contrast with the last few days of SE to NW. Almost immediately there was a tornado alert on TV accompanied with its loud obnoxious noise, and robophone call to tell us of the event, which came a few minutes after channel 14 told us that the warning had expired. The tornado warning came from an area well north of us, so we weren’t really worried when soon there was a second one even further north. This was too much excitement for Duke, so they cancelled classes until noon, irritating people who traveled through awful weather to get to their 8:30AM classes. Soon after the despair of facing another day of rain set it, the sun came out and Susan and I took a walk.
Tuesday and Beyond. Unfortunately the end of the rain does not bring the end of the misery for people near the coast, as we learned with Hurricane Matthew. Many of the rivers there have large basins (of attraction). Many will only crest Wednesday or Thursday. The Cape Fear River will reach 60+ feet compared to its usual 20. But don’t worry. Trump will be coming soon to inspect the damage. When he came he clumsily read from a prepared statement, that soon we will be getting lots and lots of money. I guess his advisers didn’t tell him that the state is so heavily gerrymandered that he will probably see 10 Republican congressmen elected from 13 districts.
