Largely Forgotten, Alabama Also Sits in Hurricane Alley

When we think of hurricanes, names like Florida, Texas, and the Carolinas typically used to come to mind. Occasionally though, and more often now than ever, we do speak of the less usual but equally threatened Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and sometimes the Northeast too. The day this article was begun was one of those days. It was the 2^nd anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which of course devastated the New Orleans region in 2005, but, which was the first hurricane of any real power to directly strike the city since Betsy roared ashore in 1965, causing flooding of the Louisiana bayou.

It proves though that these "in between" areas of the U.S. Coast, although not always under the gun, are still well within what I like to call "Hurricane Alley," and they've got to stay just as prepared as those places threatened from year to year. Because their next big storm will strike again, and probably not too far into the near future. Here we'll explore that possibility, I'll give you the perspective from the sidelines on the Northeastern Gulf Coast, and a feel for the cringe we experience too, even inland, when the tropics get cranky.

As a resident of Alabama, I am used to these monsters of wind and thunder coming ominously close and then landing next door; but I am also quite familiar with the "big ones" and the havoc they've caused when that one storm deviated or took the "turn of death" to the north, just past Cuba. All the lull-time can be dangerous to the realization of just how dangerous these storms are too, however. When something pops-up on the radar, people's initial reaction here in Alabama is "we won't even see a drop of rain."

They say that though while buying that extra jug of water at the grocery store...just in case. They know what it was like when Ivan, Opal, and Frederick came this way on a chance and cut the lights off for days on end. Even Katrina sent some of its fury this direction. We had a steady 20-30mph wind or gusts and several inches of rain from its outer bands here in Montgomery, which is in the South-Central part of Alabama, about 600 miles from New Orleans.