It’s hard to think about cyclones hitting elsewhere on the globe when you’ve lived your life generally hurricane-free, then all of a sudden the place where you live becomes a hurricane magnet during the past four years (Rita, Humberto, Ike).
Now little areas of disturbed weather — most of which are between the West Africa coast and the West Indies — are being watched for possible hurricane development. Until these storms, including Tropical Depression 2, get closer to the U.S. we will play a waiting game to see if the unwelcomed trend will continue.
But in the meantime, folks like my friend Paul and his family are having to deal both with heavy rain and thunderstorms from a typhoon as well as earthquakes.Paul, a friend from college and a de facto consultant on the quirks of Word Press which powers this blog, lives in Tokyo where he reports the worst seemed to have past from earthquakes even though the shaking there was pretty substantial — enough for his kids to get under the kitchen table.
At least hurricanes develop and move relatively slow — Humberto being an exception — so one can see them coming. But earthquakes are something else. Thankfully, we don’t have many earthquakes where I live on the upper Texas coast. I’m not going to say they don’t happen. There have been small ‘quakes detected within a 100-mile radiius of the area, but not those high up on the Richter scale.
I don’t know if any place on Earth is without the threat of some kind of natural disaster: tornadoes, sandstorms, droughts, cyclones, earthquakes, avalanches, forest fires, floods. And of course, no one is really safe from some kind of cosmic debris like a meteor. Nature has many ways to get ya!
But that’s life in the big Universe. There is nothing anyone can do about it so just sit back and enjoy the show. Be sure to board up your windows, stock up on Vienna sausages or do whatever you need to do to prepare — if you can prepare — first.
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