It was one year ago today that we were sitting around with no electricity on what turned out to be a very nice evening outside after Irma came through. We fired up our grill and started to cook our quickly thawing meat from our freezer. The days leading up to it remind me of Florence heading towards North Carolina! In fact the morning of the 10th last year the NHC prediction was for a Cat 3 to basically go up our street here in Gulfport by the end of the day. Whew! We were actually very scared. What would we do if we lost our home??

So we were lucky, as many in the current path of Florence will be. (Some will not be so lucky.) But even lucky means no power for days or weeks (two weeks for us last year), throwing out spoiled food, cleaning up debris, cutting trees that have been damaged, suffering with no A/C, nowhere to buy gas for your car, NO ice anywhere to be found, etc. We had a Laurel Oak that fell on our house that our favorite Tree Service Company removed on the 11th last year. Our roof was OK, but we miss the shade it provided over the years!

It is exciting to have a storm approach. Some of us watch the spaghetti plots and wish for it to be closer, BUT not close enough to knock our power! Sick indeed. Yet we all know the cost, suffering, inconvenience, and even loss of life is a serious consequence for these storms.

We know some are skeptical and being slow to prepare for Florence, but with a storm like this, even the outside areas will have to deal with a lot of results that can be costly and inconvenient, and dangerous.

Supplies will run out quickly in the next day or so, if you want to board up your windows, do it now. We paid high dollar at the last minute for cabinet quality wood to cover our windows as all the plywood was sold out by the time we decided to do it. Glad we did too! Even the expensive wood had dents and scrapes that prevented our glass windows from breaking!

Take action now.