As I sit here working, the television is on the news/weather channels. The coverage is about Hurricane Dorian in the Atlantic. Everyone from the Bahamas to North Carolina have boarded up, some have been under mandatory evacuation, and the thing has stalled over Freeport, Grand Bahamas.
My heart goes out to the Bahamas, they have been through a Category 5 hurricane, the strongest there is. Dorian is the second strongest on record for the Atlantic.
I live on the Texas gulf coast. My little town of Friendswood is about 30 miles from Galveston. We went through Hurricane Harvey 2 years ago, it was my neighborhood that got the 52 inches of rain. Thankfully our home was spared the flooding, but we had an air boat in our front yard. My oldest son, a volunteer firefighter for our neighborhood spent 4 days in a boat pulling people out to safety.
We got roof damage that ruined the carpet in the living room. We had it pulled out and put in tile that looks like wood. This is the second time I’ve had to replace flooring and I refuse to have to do it again. So many throughout the Houston area lost everything in the hurricane and the flooding.
So I know about the preparations for and fear of these storms. Drawing on those news reports, I have written three of them into the Fangs & Halos series.
After the Storyville chapters, Lilly’s Angel takes up the story in the hours after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. As the prayers went up, Heaven got the messages and sent an army of angels down to answer what prayers they could, take the souls of the deal, and other things that angels do in crisis situations. This starts the series
But the reality of Hurricane Katrina, August 29th, 2005, was devastating to the city and the gulf coast. Over 1800 people died in that few days across the gulf coast. The estimate of deaths in New Orleans was as high as 1500 and there are still people missing to this day. After it hit and the levees burst, 80% of the city was flooded. The French Quarter and most of the Garden District was spared, along with some of the downtown area.
Lilly and Sullivan end up taking refuge in what was then O’Flaherty’s Irish Channel Pub on Toulouse St. This pub was a place my husband and I loved to go to when we were travelling. Danny O’Flaherty locked up the pub before Katrina and it never reopened.
The other hurricane I have in the books is Hurricane Rita. This new hurricane was just 3 weeks after Hurricane Katrina. Many of those who fled Katrina ended up in Houston, I had a scene in Marcus’s Vampire that showed the Astrodome being used for refuges. When Rita spun up, it looked like it was headed to the fourth largest city in the U.S.. Houston, it’s over 2 million people and estimated thousands of displaced Louisiana residents panicked.
This became the “Great Rita Bug-Out” as I’ve labeled it. While the authorities were doing staged evacuations of lower areas, everyone in Houston decided to bug out also. We are in the “Category 5” and they didn’t give us the word to leave until Thursday evening. By the time we got on the road, it was full of people. Gridlock was on all the roads out of Houston. We travelled to Killeen and friends, should take us 5 hours but ended up 17 hours. Friends who lived directly across the highway from us headed to the same destination in Killeen, it took them 34 hours because they drove north on I-45 instead of the backroads we took.
The hurricane didn’t make landfall in or near Houston, but rather in the “Golden Triangle” of Port Arthur, Beaumont, and Orange at the Sabine River border. Final death toll: 120, many from heat related causes.
I had Marcus and the group bug out to San Antonio. Since Lancaster Industries owns several planes that are stationed at Ellington Air Field in Clear Lake (NASA area), he got one and flew to San Antonio, avoiding the traffic. His standing reservation in the Menger hotel served to give them a place to stay.
The other hurricane in the series is the largest, most deadly hurricane in the U.S. history: the 1900 Galveston Hurricane that came ashore there on September 8 as a Category 4 storm. While this isn’t in the main series, there’s a story about Marcus and Jesse going to Galveston and what happened in the hurricane. That hurricane came about 2 weeks after the events in Storyville and Lilly’s “death.”
Hurricanes give some reality references for the Fangs & Halos group. As I write, Hurricane Dorian has decimated the Bahamas but it looks like the east coast of Florida has been mostly spared. My prayers are with those effected by this scary storm.