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Hurricane Guide 2006	Hurricane Preparation Guide 2006

Forget the mythology

Save yourself a bit of useless work next time a hurricane threatens: A lot of battening-down wisdom is nothing more than wishful thinking.

By Times Staff
Published April 16, 2006

-- Crisscross your windows with masking tape. It's a waste of time you could spend doing something that might actually protect your home. All you'll get for your troubles is windows covered with hard-to-remove gunk. Tape does not protect your windows. Don't believe us? Tape up a window, then hit it with a baseball bat. Told you.

-- Park your car inside the garage with the front touching the garage door as a way of keeping the garage door from collapsing. (Variation: Park a second car outside nose-to-nose with the car inside.) If this really worked, we'd never see another collapsed garage door. It doesn't work. You want to protect your garage door? Reinforce it with struts and long-stemmed rollers and add brackets to hold the track to the wall. Or get a hurricane-rated door.

-- Drill four holes in the center of the plywood panels you put over your windows. All this does is give high winds a way to get at your windows.

-- Run around the house during the worst of the storm opening the windows on what you perceive to be the "wind" side (or the non-wind side, depending on which myth you buy into) at any given moment. This is bad advice for several reasons: (a) The wind is roaring from all directions; there is no one "wind" side. (b) You want to keep the wind out of the house, period. There is no circumstance under which letting 150 mph winds inside your house is a good idea. (c) At the height of the storm you ought to be in a protected room, not running around the house opening windows.

-- Protect only the windows and doors facing the ocean. Bogus. You need protection on all sides. Winds can come from any direction or angle and may quickly change direction.

-- Do nothing. The county will come take you off the barrier island if it gets really bad. Sorry, folks. Evacuate when you're told to. Emergency-management directors say every year that they won't send "first responders" into life-threatening situations to rescue you as the hurricane makes landfall. The more complicated your rescue (you're elderly or disabled, or you require complicated medical equipment), the sooner you need to leave.

[Last modified April 13, 2006, 16:18:21]