Quote:
Originally Posted by Frazod
Forever is right. I remember when Hurricane Gloria was bearing down on Norfolk in '85. I was stationed on a ship, the ship was in the shipyard, and the ship's sole engine was sitting on the pier under a tarp. Every other ship based there that could get underway went to a safe anchorage spot way up in Chesapeake Bay, but we were screwed - quarter inch steel hull with a giant ****ing hole cut in the side where the engine had been removed. And I was double screwed because I was on the alpha personnel list (a member of the fire party) so while most of the crew was told to flee the area I had to remain onboard. My ground level apartment was in Oceanview less than a couple of hundred yards from the bay, so my wife spent money we didn't have to get a room at a motel in the center of town that night. Of course at its highest point Norfolk is only a few feet above sea level, and we were told that the storm surge could swamp the entire city. I was completely convinced, at age 20, that we were both going to die that night, and all I could do was wait for it to happen. My Midwestern imagination was running wild. Would I merely drown, or would the ship be picked up by some enormous wave and crushed like an empty beer can? And the news reports did nothing but predict our imminent destruction. Talk about feeling helpless and hopeless. Standing around for hours waiting to die horribly ****ing sucks.
In the end, nothing came of it. The predicted track was wrong, and Gloria moved back out into the open Atlantic. No storm surge, and only minimal damage as we only caught the fringes. But I'll never forget that day and night, along with the media's relentless predictions of doom that ended up being a bunch of overblown crap.
I completely understand why people who have been promised that the world's going to end and then it doesn't don't take these warnings seriously. You don't believe it's going to happen to you until it does.
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Spent hurricane Hugo in Charleston, SC in a submarine in dry dock with emergency patches welded over the opening that had been cut in the hull. With the main engines, ballast, and reduction gears out, they weren't sure which way it was going to float when they flooded the drydock (because the surge was predicted to come over the wall).
The USS Narwhal that, at the time, was waiting for her own drydock, actually opened the vents and they put her down in the mud of the Cooper River.. Good times.