My First Natural Disaster

I was eleven in 1964 when my family moved from Lexington, Kentucky to Jacksonville, Florida. My father had a sort of run of bad luck when we had an accident in an uninsured vehicle when he ran into the back of a car driven by some woman on a mud slick road. When the accident happened he approached the woman and she said she was fine but when the police arrived she started crying whiplash and to make a long story short my father was sued because he had no insurance and his license was taken away for life when he could not pay the judgment against him. He was at the time a truck driver and hauled cattle across the Northern part of the US; however, with a drivers license revoked his boss could not let him stay on the payroll and he was fired. At this time, he moved our family to Florida where he had secured a job with the Jacksonville Shipyards. We were a large family my parents, me, and 5 other siblings; my oldest sister was already married and on her own.

We moved to Florida in 1964 in June and in September we experienced our first hurricane which was Hurricane Dora a very strong hurricane that did a significant amount of damage to our area. We were living at the time about 10 miles inland and I was going to a junior high school at the beach but my siblings were older or younger and they were going to schools inland so I thought it was cool that I was the only one in the family to get out of school for over a week.

But what wasn’t cool was the duration of the hurricane and the aftermath of not having water, electricity, etc. At that time, my parents and I and my five siblings lived in a tiny three bedroom one bath home and with the hurricane coming towards us my parents invited my uncle and his brother to come stay with us to ride out the hurricane (they were at the time living at the beach). The hurricane arrived in the late hours of the night and all of us younger kids where riding it out in my parents bed while the grown-ups were bailing out the water flooding our home. I remember we were the only family on the street with lights because my father had rigged up some kind of generator situation from the car battery of their car parked on the carport. So we at least had lights. I will never forgot how scared I was when I heard the wind howling as my siblings and I laid in our parents bed wondering if the roof was going to blow off. We were from Kentucky and had never experience a real storm before.

But now I'm thinking what I went through is nothing compared to the many people who were trying to survive last week. The hurricane, the evacuation, the lack of help, the starving, the dying... it's just overwhelming and I can't imagine what might happen if there is another natural disaster or another terrorist attack in our country with such a fucked up government.