Lux Lucet

A decimated ash tree in my backyard, courtesy of Hurricane Ike.  September, 2008.

“For this afternoon, a high wind warning is in effect,” said the radio announcer. “Whatever,” I thought to myself and soon forgot the comment as I drove to church that Sunday morning. The date was September 14, 2008, and I was about to get a lesson in preparedness that I have not forgotten in over seven years since that time.

Driving home, it was a pretty typical late summer/early fall day in Cincinnati. I seem to recall that it was partly sunny and generally fairly pleasant outside. When I arrived home, my family and I ate lunch. And then things got interesting. Seemingly out of nowhere, strong winds began gusting from the south. As the gusts turned into sustained high winds and the tops of the trees in my back yard bent over so as to almost touch the ground, I remembered the high wind warning on the radio from that morning. Whatever indeed. After several minutes of this, the winds vanished just as rapidly as they had appeared. It was as if a hurricane had just blown through the area, which, as I later found out, is pretty much what actually what happened.

Now if you know anything about where Cincinnati is located – we’re about 550 miles inland from the Atlantic coast – you’d know that folks in this part of the country don’t really expect to see hurricanes. Ever. And yet the sustained winds that came through the area that day were over 70 miles an hour, meeting the definition of a hurricane. As it turned out, the high winds were the remnants of Hurricane Ike, a category 4 hurricane, which had struck the gulf coast of Texas a day before. After making landfall, the remnants of the storm headed northeast. Aided by what the meteorologists call a “shortwave trough,” the winds intensified, once again reaching hurricane levels as they roared through the Ohio Valley, causing massive damage to many major metropolitan areas in the region.

At my house, the winds knocked out power almost immediately. Power outages themselves aren’t uncommon as a result of storms. But this outage was to last four days, they longest by far such outage I’ve personally experienced. A large Ash tree in our back yard was snapped in two and had to be taken down. Just up the street, a neighbor was severely injured when a tree fell on her. I drove around in my car to see what things looked like, and was shocked to find out that the power was out for miles in every direction. Much to the surprise of everyone, all of greater Cincinnati was effectively was shut down by this one windstorm.

I realize that compared to natural disasters some people have endured, my story doesn’t rank as particularly noteworthy. The house didn’t sustain any damage. And the biggest inconvenience was having to stumble around at night by the dim light of a kerosene lamp. That, and the food in the freezer going bad. But all this it did get me to thinking. I came to realize that many of the things that I took for granted – the so-called “grid,” items such as electric power, phone service, running water, readily available food and fuel – could disappear in a moment.

At the same time and about 600 miles to the east, another disaster was unfolding. The 2008 financial crisis was in full swing that fall. I remember it quite well as at the time I was working as a telephone representative for a large, nationally known financial services company. Every day I’d get panicked calls from 401(k) investors asking about their balances. I’ll never forget one call. After quoting an account balance to a lady, I was greeted with stunned silence. Finally she said, “I just lost $30,000.” Tough times those.

That fall was quite a wake-up call to me. Almost simultaneously I had witnessed the failure of both the “grid” and the financial system. Perhaps my latent assumptions that things would always work the way they were supposed to were not really warranted.

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