Hurricane | Disaster Event | True Story
Standing Firm Against the Storm
Mutual aid saves lives.
Back in 2014, Hurricane Arthur ruthlessly battered the coast of my province and took out our power. That is not unusual in and of itself, storms happen, and power outages inevitably follow. What was unusual about Arthur was how severe the damage wound up being.
The suburb I live in is fairly small. It’s more of a village in its own right, with about four thousand people and a few small businesses like daycare, a vet’s office, a few convenience stores, and the like.
By the time Arthur hit, many of the homes in our suburb had added generators and other self-sufficiency bits and bobs just in case.
We weren’t expecting that much of a problem. We’re far enough away from the coastline that post-tropical storms usually just lash us with a day or two of bad rain and winds, and maybe we get some downed trees and flooding. Nothing serious as far uphill as our home is.
Arthur came in like a killjoy of a wrecking ball and completely smashed out half of the power grid for our little neighborhood. He was a jerk.
By smashed out, I mean totaled. Obliterated. Demolished. Several blocks of our village went down, and hard. By the time we got out to the…