It’s never good to spend too much time living in the future, as in worrying about what might happen before it materializes. My experience has been that 95 percent of what I worry about doesn’t occur and the 5 percent that does wasn’t helped by my worrying.
Still, this week’s deluge left me worrying about just how many bullets our area can dodge before we get smacked.
The storm that did such devastating damage across Pensacola and Fort Walton Beach and even Walton County seemed to steer to the northwest of us and the part that did make it here lost its “umphhh;” there is no arguing we were spared its worst.
That is a good thing, but too much of a good thing like that can make us unwary, unprepared and at times complacent.
As we watched these storms rip across the South earlier this week, at my house we were entranced and concerned for friends, but not particularly concerned about what those same storms might do here. There was an unspoken sense that they would pass to our north as they always seem to do.
When overnight storms Monday brought thunder and rain the concern was how to get to the car with dry clothes. I failed on the first attempt and got out of the dress shirt and into a golf shirt while grabbing an umbrella. That was it.
When we encountered the “usual” flooding on Beach Drive and downtown, I was prepared for a long day of work and took time to shoot some pictures and video and make sure our photographers were out and about.
They were, but the weather fizzled within a couple of hours and returned to the on and off rains that didn’t seem that bad. There was even a leak in the roof at work in my office, but that had to do with roof work and we weren’t worried.
Tuesday night we all went to bed cognizant that a storm was coming in that night but not really expecting much of it, certainly not enough for us to plan anything special. Bay District Schools Superintendent Bill Husfelt was in the same boat, I’d guess.
Wednesday morning, however, brought a thunderous assault on my eardrums and lightning lit up my bedroom, with the heavy thud of rain pelting the roof. Still, I expected a repeat of the day before, nothing special.
But it deteriorated quickly, and suddenly we were in crisis mode. Schools were closed, roads were closing and to our west it was getting ugly.
We mobilized reporters and photographers and coordinated early deadlines with our sister paper in Fort Walton Beach to give our carriers a shot at delivering Thursday’s edition on time and dry.
We streamlined and reconfigured the paper a bit so we could put storm-related news on A1, A2, A7 and A8, which means readers could pull that four-page section off the paper intact.
We watched the news — and ominously dark skies — growing darker to our west: Pensacola basically under water, bridges closed and homes flooded in Fort Walton Beach. And we prepared.
But it never got as bad here as it did to our west. It was as if some giant hand guided the storm around us. If you saw what happened only 60 miles away, it is remarkable.
That’s not to minimize the suffering here, the flooded homes of people just getting their homes repaired from last July’s flooding, or the damage to our infrastructure. But it is to say it could’ve been much worse and it was not too far to our west.
And that’s what happened with the ice storm in January, a storm that shut down Fort Walton Beach for the most part and, really, didn’t do a whole lot here except shut down our major bridges for a day.
That’s what has happened with just about every hurricane since Opal in 1995. The National Weather Service shows 15 hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico since then; none hit here. Tropical storms seem to form and fizzle.
I don’t want to live in the future, but history tells us our time will once again come and here’s hoping we take it seriously ahead of time.