To Arms! To Arms!

Hurricane Strike Force Action Team: ASSEMBLE!


We've been teased by storms before, so everyone is preparing for this one while trying not to get too worked up into a frenzy. But it does certainly appear Hurricane Hanna (Carroll) is on track to jam herself right up our noses by the weekend. Everyone here is amping up towards full newspaper disaster battle mode — filling the car with gas; buying bottled water; sending templates to our sister paper in Columbia; sparring each other in preparation for a bare-knuckle fight with Geraldo, the usual. Then, when Go Time arrives, everyone gets sent off into their different teams and battle stations to form a perimeter of reporting around this tropical beast. It's kinda like Voltron. Five teams of reporters, each with their separate missions, dispatched to locate the five hidden robot lions in Beaufort County that will join together to form one newspaper. Go team!

I've been meandering through thoughts all day trying to figure out what I would take if we have to evacuate. The good thing about being young and perpetually transient is you don't have much stuff to worry about. I know I'll grab my computer, photo albums and journals. I might also want to bring to safety a few of the more irreplaceably ironic thrift store T-shirts, my Super Nintendo, some Kerouac, paper versions of clips (though who knows why) and the rest of the bottle of Absinthe sitting in my cupboard. It could, after all, be a very boring time sitting in the emergency operations center waiting for the storm to clear.

Then again, business reporter (and apparent amateur meteorologist) Jim Faber keeps telling me this storm is a piece of trash that he won't even think twice about. He's predicting light rain, tops, just like what happened with Ernesto in 2006 when everyone freaked out only to be greeted by a sprinkling of a storm. He will not, he informed me, be packing up his life-size George H.W. Bush cutout, because he refuses to give this storm the satisfaction of watching him evacuate.

But I'm packing up my Voltron lion key anyway. Just to be safe.