Sunday, September 29, 2024

Understanding what real people are going through from Florida north up into N. Carolina and further

Friday since my wife is visiting a friend who will have an operation soon and because one of our housekeepers had a birthday this week, she came and visited me on Friday.

However, in the middle of this visit she got a text from her best friend. Her best friend is around her age 45 or so and she texted a message something like "We don't know what to do because we are stranded in N. Carolina. We weren't sure where her friend or daughter were but they were there visiting from Montana where her family lives now. Her daughter was interviewing for a job based upon her college degrees in Asheville, North Carolina. However, then we couldn't contact her friend and our housekeeper really started to freak out because she knows her friend and her daughter don't do well with a crisis like this because they both have problems with anxiety on a normal day. So, because our housekeeper is the opposite of this and able to deal with any situation much like myself and stay calm enough for everyone to survive she was very concerned about her best friend and daughter.

Then we couldn't get a hold of her friend but our housekeeper was able to get a hold of the lady's stepmother who lived normally about 2 hours by car from Asheville where they were staying. However, there was the real problem. All the roads had washed away pretty much from Asheville to the 2 hour away location where her father and stepmother now live.

So, now there was no power and possibly no gas stations open either unless they had gasoline or diesel generators to run the pumps to pump up the gas into gas or diesel tanks of cars and trucks. But, also now the distance and time to get to her relatives in North Carolina would be 6 hours instead of 2 because 80% of the roads no longer existed and had been washed away completely. So, it will be months or longer before these roads even exist once again. So, even if they drove the 6 hours to get there to their relatives they might not be able to buy gasoline for their rental car either.

This is just one story of the millions of people caught by this Hurricane as it devastated whole states and now many people either have no potable water or they have no food to survive this. One person said they didn't have any food and went to the local market which had a generator to keep food from spoiling but then they had to wait in a line of 400 people to wait their turn to even enter the store. And the problem with this is that eventually there will be no food at all because of all the roads being washed out like this in the area of Asheville, North Carolina. And this is just one story of the millions of people from about Kentucky south all the way to Florida who have been completely wiped out by this Hurricane and tropical Storm Helene.

Also, we are having a heat wave in the South West and it was 115 degrees in Phoenix, Arizona the other day and even Santa Rosa north of San Francisco where my wife is visiting will be 103 on Tuesday. So, the whole inland of California and Arizona are either in  a big heat wave of temperatures over 100 degrees inland or they will be soon.

So, the weather (for this time of year) is getting pretty scary everywhere now.

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