A Dangerous Season is Upon Us

By Curt Buckley

Could you tell me the deadliest U.S. disaster of all time? It was a catastrophe that claimed more lives than the attacks on 9/11 and Pearl Harbor did combined.

Stumped? I’ll give you a hint: It happened right here in Texas.


Yep, you guessed it. (Or you didn’t; I’ll never know.) It’s estimated that the Hurricane of 1900, which slammed into Galveston, killed as many as 12,000 people, with most official reports citing around 8,000. Its Category 4 winds ravaged the Gulf Coast, and the ocean surge completely swallowed the island of Galveston, leveling every structure.

We’ve come a long way since then in understanding hurricanes and how to survive them, but more recent storms like Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Ike and Hurricane Sandy show us that we’re still very vulnerable to Mother Nature’s wrath.

Hurricane season has officially begun, so now’s a great time to refresh our knowledge of how to protect ourselves from these mega storms.

Every level of hurricane or tropical storm requires different kinds of preparation and precaution, from hiding out in an interior room of your house with a day’s worth of food and water to boarding up the doors and windows and leaving town. I can’t possibly detail everything needed for every situation here, so I’d advise you to monitor your local weather service closely for instruction as a storm approaches and always keep some potable water and nonperishable food around the house.

Check your level of preparedness and find out additional information at the Department of Homeland Security’s natural disaster preparation website, ready.gov/hurricanes. I’ll leave you with a quote one of my high school coaches loved: “It’s better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.”