This Week in Awkwardness: Hurricane Shelter Edition

My shelter experience & aftermath of the storm can be read here.

Most of you probably know that we’ve been watching Hurricane Irma barrelling at us for the last week or so.  I was going to ride out the storm in my mom’s house in Hernando, figuring with the path she was taking she would have slowed significantly by the time she got so far north.  Then she decided to swing to the west & pummel Tampa instead of Miami.  We can’t drive north because the entire population of Florida is already out on the roads and taking a direct hit from a Category 2 hurricane in a manufactured home isn’t really an option so we’re in a high school gymnasium for the duration.

It was a total zoo getting in here, literally and figuratively.  We came here because it’s a pet-friendly shelter so my mom’s dog and a couple hundred other pets are here, stacked in their crates in a hallway around the corner.  We waited in line for an hour to get her registered, alongside many other barking dogs, yowling cats, and even a handful of screeching parrots.  Then we had to take her to another building because the first one was full, and send her away with some guy because the new pet area wasn’t ready for the public to be in yet.  But I’ve seen her since & she’s alright, aside from I’m sure being very confused & trying to bury her food so the dogs in the cages around her can’t get it.

Besides being in an open gym with a hundred strangers this isn’t so bad.  They’re feeding us 3 meals a day, there’s wifi, & we have air mattresses to sleep on.  It’s kind of amazing how many people are here thinking they’re going to sleep on the hard floor with only a blanket under them.  Little tip – air mattresses, flashlights, batteries, bottled water, & bread all fly off the shelves during a disaster, to the point where they are totally unavailable, so stock up early.

Every store I’ve been to the shelves are picked clean of emergency supplies.  I’m not totally sure why, since most people have perfectly good tap water to fill containers with & generally buy more than one day’s worth of food at a time, but I guess panic begets panic.  In one Winn-Dixie I was watching people snag cases of water off of a couple pallets they’d just put out, then when I wandered back to the meat section I found gallon jugs of water that everyone was ignoring.I heard stories about trucks getting mobbed when they brought more water to the stores & somebody getting stabbed for gasoline.  There’s a bunch of National Guard people here at the school so things shouldn’t get too crazy.  See you on the other side!