I have been surviving hurricanes all of my fifty-five-year life, and as an adult, doing that in a most unconventional way, by getting out into the storm and into the deepest water I can find. My first resort is your last resort, but when all else fails, my way will work for you and your loved ones, even your pets, IF you plan ahead and remember this unconventional advice from a storm-chasing, thrill-seeking, ex-Green Beret party animal, student of emergency management.

Many survivors are here to tell their tale, because when all else failed, they recalled someone's good advice and applied it to their desparate situation. In that spirit and in the memory of my deceased, storm-chasing, thrill-seeking, Green Beret, party animal bros (John R. Jones, David Mixter, Frank Celano, Don Bemis) I offer you Sonny's Hurricane Survival Tips with this VERY CLEAR understanding:

• First and best option--Evacuate the threatened area.
• Second best--Get you and your family into an approved community storm shelter.
• Third--Ride it out in a good, stout, big, concrete building.
• Fourth--Hunker down in your storm-shelter home.
• Fifth: Go out in the storm as a LAST resort.

If you are out in any severe weather, you are at great risk. I know how to greatly reduce that risk, but I never have discovered a way to eliminate the risk. Even the first option has a travel risk.

Face it. The nature of life and the key to long life is successful risk management. If you are a parent or head of household, YOU are the risk manager, the family emergency manager, their first line of defense, and YOU are their first responder on the scene. Depend on anyone else at your and their great risk.

If you have made a decision to stay and ride out a tropical storm, then you must know the track of the storm and track the storm's center until that storm has left the area. This will tell you where the winds and water will be attacking you from, what might threaten you, what may shelter you. You don't need anything but a left arm and an imaginay flag. Hold your flag out on your left side into the wind and adjust your stance to get your head directly under the flutter. Look straight ahead, you are looking in the direction of the storm center.

Do that every fifteen minutes and you can see where the storm is tracking. It is useful to know if the pupil of the eye will pass to the right of you, or the left, or right over you. You want the pupil as far to your left as you can get it, and if moving is an option, MOVE!

In the northern hemisphere, a cyclonic storm that will pass over you or on your right brings the threat of storm surge and moving is never a good option once the sustained winds reach 50mph.

To plot the exact location you will need to estimate the distance to that center. To do that, you'll need to know the diameter of the eye, the wind speed in the eye wall, and how far out the hurricane force winds are reaching. If you can get all that, then wait for the exact current location.

Let us assume you can't get current storm updates. You'll have to go on the last info you had and the line made by the last projected track you had. Now you need to be a good guesstimator of wind speed, but few are. If you are, then your guess will be relative to the storm's radius, so guess where that is and run that out the number of miles along the direction to the center.

It really doesn't matter how big the freight train is or how fast it is moving. You just want to know well in advance if that train will pass by on your right, on your left, or is on track to hit you. Knowing direction to center mass gives you that in two fixes. If your most recent makes you turn to the left, the central part of the eye will pass to your left. If you have to turn to your right, it'll pass by on your right.

If the direction to the center remains the same as the winds intensify, guess what? Right at you, and that was what I had in Waveland for Katrina, storm of the century headed right at us, steady from due south with a building easterly wind. After the eye passed, the winds came from the west.

After the passing, when I checked center, I'm now looking north with my left arm pointing west. Keep in mind that a hurricane spins counter clockwise as God sees it and makes a path like a lawn mower. The trees that fall will fall in the direction the wind is pushing. A survey of all fallen trees will imprint the eye and show the exact point of landfall.

As you stand at that point facing inland, the greatest destruction is to your immediate right and doesn't get any better until you get well outside of the eye. From there, things begin getting better and better. For Katrina, you'd start very near the Louisanna border and things don't begin looking better until you get very near Alabama. The very worst is the very center for that is the point of highest surge.

To be honest, I stopped doing checks hours before the front center eye wall hit us and the Gulf of Mexico arrived like a fast tide rising from three directions, north, east, and south, all merging to go west where the surge waters were far less. The surge water within the entire eye will eventually be equal and uniform, but stuff gets in the way at first. The dome of water will reform and be two-thirds what the surge was at point of landfall. In Waveland, surge water covered everying that was below the twenty-two foot elevation, but the beach saw between thirty-two and thirty-four. For the record, 32'.

If you know exactly where you are in a cyclonic storm, you'll know these things in advance and not be surprised by the currents you face. When the forces that brought the ocean to you rapidly diminish, it all returns to the sea by the path of least resistance in a wind that can be the exact opposite of the wind that brought it. Be prepared by getting pre-positioned. Strap in, hang on, hunker down, because it goes out much faster than it came in.

For those in the eye, the danger will seem to have passed, the worst weathered, and a sense of it being all over can make some people giddy and quite stupid. There is a euphoria in the calm eye as the water is clearly seen to be going down. Celebrations can get out of hand and any are premature.

You or your group now faces the most dangerous and deadly part, a storm surge undertow and the other half of the hurricane you saw the front half of. Keep control and remain in survival mode. Celebrate when the water is all gone and your imaginary flag hangs limp like an imaginary old man's penis. There is no need to fear this water, but never lose respect for it or forget that all that water is there in defiance of gravity. It is trespassing. When gravity returns, beware.

In my late teens and throughout my twenties, I was a hurricane party animal (a strange critter that goes to where a hurricane is tracked to make landfall, then looks around for a party) and storm surfer. If I have any phobia it is a surge sucker phobia. I had it so bad at one time, if a starship is being sucked into a black hole, I had to leave the room or do some channel flipping. I once screamed like a little girl and wet myself in a swimming pool when a pool vac hose latched onto my leg.

While stationed in Hawaii in the mid seventies, I became obsessed with a cove called the Toilet Bowl, because it was a giant surge sucker. To overcome my fear, on a calm day, I leaped in wearing SCUBA gear and let the undertow suck me out through the subterrain passages to the open sea, then did it again, and again, and again until I could do that with mask, fins, and snorkel on a high-surf day, then free style in storm surf, just a swimsuit. Unfortunately, that won't work for storm drains. Toilet Bowl therapy just helps you stay and watch starships go into black holes.

Note: Just around the point at Hanama Bay is a place called the Witch's Brew, which served me well as a training area for storm surge swimming. Around the point in the other direction is Sandy Beach, a body surfing Mecca known for all the bodies it produces from a shore break that is very much like hurricane storm waves which rear up and then slam down in shallow water. Four years of frequent visits made me drown proof and gave me insights into dynamic water you just can't get except by emersion experience and becoming one with the water. In my mid-twenties, with flippers on, there wasn't a great deal of difference between me and a dolphin as far as being at home in the ocean.

All I had learned in Hawaii was put to a real test in Florida in 1979, blown off a submerging dock and into the storm surge of Furious Frederic. Thought I was a dead Fred for sure, but that water only looked violent, mean, nasty, vicious--not surging at all, not even moving. The surface was, but those were only wind-whipped waves making the water appear to be in motion as was any floating object, for that flotsam moves right along like jetsam. I found the dreaded deadly surge to be much like being in my mother's womb at a wild party a snake got loose in.

I was sure an observer gave it the name, surge, but hurricane storm surge really is a tide that rises and falls, and does over a period about as long as a lunar tide with half of it arriving ahead of the hurricane-force winds. Because of cyclonic wind effect and the forward speed of the "dome of water" raised by reduced air pressure, the storm tide will rise slowly and ebb fast.

Not at all the tidal wave most imagine the storm surge to be. The two huge masses of water do leave the land in much the same way, (too fast) which gives storm surge a tidal wave look aftermath-wise. Both produce a packed wall of debris that is dragged back and dropped all along the way back to the sea, but what the tsunami does fast and furious, the hurricane does slowly and steadily.

Hurricane storm surge of the forehand variety is quite survivable, especially if you wear flippers and cling to a surfboard or kayak or inner tube. On the backhand, you'll want boots, a helmet, and a big rock, but backhand surge is generally half what it is in the dome within the eye and very rarely something you can't stand up in. For Katrina, eleven feet for those west of Slidel, Louisianna, a small town on the western edge of the eye like Bay Saint Louis sits on the east edge, the two roughly thirty miles from each other but worlds apart in degree of destruction.

Average hurricane storm surge is twelve feet, so the eye would hold water at eight feet above mean sea level and rapidly lose the power to hold that. The backhand surge would be four and taper off by an inch a mile. For that matter, forehand surge is rarely deep enough for a one-meter diving board. It is usually something you crawl into and can never get enough of.

Katrina was very rare in that we had plenty and could have gotten by with much less. Less wind would have been nice, too. She had enough power to hold what she brought for a solid hour, plenty of time to get her massive dome of water fully on shore and settled, something few hurricanes with much smaller eyes can do. She nothing but impressed me.

I prefer forehand surge I can squat in and will move in or out to maintain that ideal depth of three to four feet which offers the shelter of deep water with the mobility option of standing up and walking out of harms way or to a better place to surge squat.

Storm surge is an elevated sea level in motion, much like a dome of elevated sea level caused by the pull of astronomical bodies. The surge dome may rise much higher than any astronomical tide and rise higher than most tidal waves, and will be on top of an astronomical tide and/or tsunami, then the ocean swells are a part of that mass with wind waves on top like a mosquito bite on a bee sting. If you are experiencing a tsunami event at the same time, we are talking a mosquito bite on a bee sting over a snake bite and proof that there IS a god and boy is He, She, or IT Almighty pissed.

Many factors go into any storm surge, but the lead factor is the storm. In a big bad storm like Katrina, the incoming tide will rush in and be quite surgie in places, but the norm is not a surge, and the eye isn't cold, usually hot and muggy.

Side note: The eye of Katrina was quite cold, not clear, nor calm--not the norm, but there is no norm for a megacane or Biblical storm. When a cat-three is bigger and much badder than a cat-five, something is wrong with the scale. Very few knew they were in the eye, and the eye was thought to be bearing down on New Orleans. Even days afterward, few knew they were ground zero. The National Guard fought and worked their way in to a staging point at center ground zero and set up in the strip mall across the street from us. That was where many Wavelanders and Bay Saint Louis refugees found out that Katrina had the bad half of its eye on Hancock County. That did explain a lot.

In the old days when I was young, dumb, seeking adventure and cheap thrills by taking on the challenge of hurricane survival (solo in many cases), I used to don mask, fins, snorkel, a shortie wet suit and wore a water-ski life vest with a safety line and snap link.

Note: A thrill-seeker taking on a survival challenge carefully picks the point of entry to go out into the storm. Smart ones pick a spot that will remain debris-free. You will likely be in a very bad place that only gets worse, so do not wear ANY nylon, dacron, or fabric that will not easily rip. Do not wear ropes that can't be quick released, nor heavy cumbersome footwear.The biggest threat to your life once you enter the storm surge is construction debris. Much of it lies hidden beneath the murky water that is rising. Some footwear is needed but swim fins are better, plus they help not hinder swimming. To become snagged or entangled is very bad, much worse than skinny dipping in a hurricane. A life vest is very good for the weak swimmer, but can become a death vest if the vest can not easily be shed. Most life vests are designed to be very difficult to slip out of.

I learned that the mask and snorkel was a useless pain. The life vest kept me up too high and made diving and staying down difficult to impossible, was a drag in currents and unflattering to my manly figure. Ropes entangle, and the nylon snags hard on sharp objects. I now wear tight cotton shorts, a T-shirt, flippers, and a ball cap. Best combo and a kayak or inner tube is the best floatation to have but not be in until safely trapped.

Yes, trapped. In a serious survival situation where you are out of a shelter and in the surge waters, you want to get trapped ASAP and travel as little as possible. You need a place of relative safety to ride out the storm, a place free of debris and protected from direct line winds. You seek out the immovable object, a short stout tree or concrete building, for when the irresistible force meets the immovable object, eddies form and the wind gets twisted into opposing vortices.

Another vortex wind forms by passing over the top of buildings. A floating anything gets trapped in the lee and held there--trapped like a fishing bobber on a windy lake. You can't get one to blow past a tree stump. Sit in an inner tube and be gone with the wind, something will trap you.

When that happens, get in the floatation device and relax. Watch what hurricanes do to poorly designed and/or constructed structures. See what they actually do, for it is not like a tidal wave, not a surge. The water surrounds, lifts, and floats buildings to their demise or crushes them in place from outside pressure.

A sealed house will fill far slower than the water rises outside (filling with sewage from the toilets and drains), and waves littered with construction debris repeatedly pound against one wall that is under great external pressure. If one wall goes, the structure seldom holds together even if it retains its roof and remains bolted to the foundation.

Typically, the wind took the roof and the water frees the house from the foundation. Like a box that is open top and bottom, it just folds up. Wind pushes the debris into a long pile-up at the new high tide line or line of obstructions. When the tide goes out, a lot of that home debris gets dragged back. Looks like a tidal wave did that, but a rapidly rising tide with hurricane force winds driving surface waves did that. Anyone inside a doomed structure is likewise doomed.

If in doubt, get out and into water, even a ditch or swimming pool.The biggest mistake you can make is deciding to stay with a compromised and potentially doomed structure. A shelter that is clearly failing or filling with water does help make a difficult decision much easier, but establish ahead of time who makes the call.

Don't try to hold a meeting and then vote, for the lambs, chickens, scardie cats, and dumb asses will unite to form a voting block that blocks abandoning any shelter in a storm like that, especially in the pitch dark of night with the hurricane's banshee wail wailing at its loudest. Those same lambs, chickens, scardie cats, and dumb asses will follow their fearless leader who knows what is going on, always knew that was going to happen, and always has a good plan. If you don't know and have none, fake it.

They are all looking to you to decide when to panic. When fear factors are at peak limits, a look on your face that indicates any state of concern or worry is enough to trigger a mass chickenshit clusterf**k. Trust me, you don't want to see that at any time during your hurricane survival challenge.

Don't ever be indecisive, concerned, or worried. Don't ever share what you really know with anyone who has no real need to know. If it isn't good news, it'll be catastrophic by the time it gets back to you. Wild fires travel much slower than bad news in a hurricane. Just calmly leave the shelter if the shelter is threatening to kill.

Even the lee of a big tree is better than being in a house of questionable integrity, even if that tree falls, for it will snap or uproot. Either way, you will be fine at the base. If the tree uproots or snaps low, it'll gradually bend you over and put you on your knees, a good place and position to pray. I would take that as an Almighty hint. If that tree snaps high, then it can't bend you over. Prayer would then be optional.

When surge waters come, just hold onto the trunk or structure, don't hug or climb, just float up and then float down. Keep as low in the water as possible, but keep in mind that the water will go out much faster than it came in, so plan on securing yourself or plan on doing a great deal of open ocean swimming in very nasty water.

WARNING: Greatest danger is the storm surge undertow and getting sucked into drain pipes or down storm drains. You can become sewage--look like it, feel like it, and in a day or two, smell like it. Avoid ALL whirlpools and get out of ANY current for some will lead to a whirlpool. The rest are an express to the deep sea. Do NOT go wadeing around while the waters are going down. Even in ankle-deep water you could come upon a deep-hole sucking drain that wasn't there yesterday. STAY PUT until you can see where you step and step where you look. You are in greatest danger when the waters receed. If possible, go back to your shelter or take shelter in any building or vehicle. Most will be safe from this point on. The worst is over.

My survival secret is getting into and staying low in the water, getting as close to the beach as possible to begin the adventure if on the forehand (right side looking down on the cyclone), and abandoning the attempt if caught on the wrong side (the left for storm surfers or survivalists. For everyone else in the northern hemisphere, right is bad, left is good). The beach is free of dangerous undertows during a storm except for the return of the surge, which is one very long, drawn-out undertow you want no part of.

Take it from a seasoned storm surfer, getting out to the big waves of a cyclonic storm's forehand is as impossible as staying off the beach. If you manage to get out there, you'd find waves that are impossible to ride. Surf is not only up, it is relentlessly coming in. If you are on the forehand side, the storm does all it can to push you and everything else it holds further and further inland, there to leave you. If you are on the backhand, all gets draged and blown out to sea.

Inland waterways can be far more dangerous and challenging as far more debris will be encountered as you move away from the ocean beaches and dunes to get in among the debris producing matter. For those who are out in the storm, especially those in the water, a hurricane's forehand (the bad right side as one peers down from space) is safer than the backhand because the backhand is loaded with dangerous debris and the winds are blowing everything out to sea. When that tide turns, it surges out on the backhand side, pushed by a strong wind and gets retarded by an opposing wind on the forehand side.

Another hurricane survival secret is to seek the bad side and be within the eye. You get the forehand, the deepest water, and a break, but for those hoping to remain in a safe shelter, pray to be well out on the good side, outside the eye wall. Your structure will be subjected to far fewer storm stresses and fewer large trees will fall. Most of the dangerous F-type debris remains attached to the property it was stupidly used on. The RIP type (Remain In Place brick and concrete) rarely becomes debris on a hurricane's good side.

WARNING: Debris of the F-type (flying or floating) greatly complicates a cyclonic storm survival event to such a degree that I strongly urge attempting it only on the beach by seasoned, experienced, expendable, special forces thrill seekers and/or any lawyer, FEMA GS-14 or higher, also any emergency management appointee who has presided over a disaster and the appointer.

Wherever you are, wind kills, water saves. When water kills or does damage, the wind put it up to it. F-type debris is an accomplice. Hurricanes are an atmospheric event where water is an innocent bystander, about as innocent as everything else that gets picked up and hurled at you and your stuff.

The waters would be much safer if our homes and businesses didn't so easily become F-type debris. F-type debris begets debris of every type (Natural, Liquid, Airborne, RIP, more F-type, and litter). Fine and punish F-type debris doers. We currently reward and compensate them while applauding the heroic efforts of disaster area emergency managers, mayors, and governors. SHOOT EM!

I have come to think of storm surge as the womb of the hurricane, and what you don't want in any womb is construction debris bundled with barbed wire. Goes together like cactus and condoms.

We assume that storm surge comes in fast, tidal wave-like, then slowly ebbs. Exact opposite! Prepare for the rapid return to sea level. Failure to do so can put you several miles out to sea and still in a hurricane that now blows out or along, but being blown in is a lost opportunity as those favorable winds have come and gone.

Be especially aware when in the eye, for the eye's relative calm can lull whipped, exhausted, curious survivors who must brace for the rip-current/undertow and the reverse winds. Except for those on the far left or right, however those winds came at you in the first half, they will be coming at you from the opposite direction for the last half, truest for those at dead center--the pupil of the eye. What is safe for one wind direction might be terribly unsafe or unwise for another.

Be prepared throughout the storm. The dead die surprised and ill-prepared. A survival group needs a well-prepared leader who can think three steps ahead of the storm and can get a two-step group to stay one step ahead. Fall behind just once and that group becomes a cluster of victims in the hands of God. Those can't be led to anything but a line to get aid for those who advance to survivor.

Note: Staying low in a trapped float or unsinkable boat can be even better than getting low in the water, and is for non-swimmers, children, the elderly, infirm and pets. Evacuation to a safe and secure storm shelter in a safer community is still the very best for all air breathing land mammals. Considerate ones will carry their aquarium fish IN a travel aquarium.

Another Note: At Hancock County, the water went ten miles inland and piled debris on Interstate 10 which runs along the coast eight miles inland, but a debris dam formed just five-hundred yards from the shore of the Mississippi Sound which drove even more water into the bay. We were two miles from the shore to our south, but the water came to us from the north and the east before any arrived from the south. It left us by taking the path of least resistance. For us at the center, the perception was one of being in a large tub that was draining. The water level simply went down.

At the Hancock County Medical Center in Mississippi, I met other Hancock County survivors and got their stories of survival. The deceased, for the most part, stayed with their property and were crushed by it. The rapidly rising waters broke the structure free of the foundation, leading to house boatism, collision, structural failure, collapse, or a drowning in the attic they could not get out of. The houses killed those people. Cars killed some. Sinking boats killed some.

F-type debris killed quite a few, but those nestled in the water whether by intention or running out of roof were not exposed, all safe in the womb of Katrina, born again when their feet touched a parking lot, hood of a car, detached roof of a house, pile of RIP-type debris, quivering alligator, whatever, but the water came in like a tide and went out like a tide, lifted them up gently, and set them down gently, and then it got awfully windy again.

Some got their wish (a return of the wind), but the wise settled lower in the receeding water that saved and protected them however much they cursed that salvation sewage and tried to climb out of it to be hit by something and knocked back down again.

When killer water comes, terrorized people will climb and keep on climbing, clinging tenaciously to the structure of stuff and tower of consumer trash they have faith in and stayed to defend, doing all in their power to escape the deadly dangerous water. Once in it, these people will climb a pine tree, utility pole, or get up on a rooftop, then stand on the chimney, get up on tippy toes, then look to the heavens and pray, a very bad strategy when a pine needle traveling at 150 mph is like a dart, and a green pine cone will penetrate a half-inch of plywood. Someone's improperly installed metal awning will cut a mother and child in half.

Not that you would ever want to, but you can cull the idiots out of a wise group of hurricane survivors by looking at them, or, if it is dark, asking, "Who needs a band aid?" All the idiots will raise their hands if they are able when the lady needs an answer, because she can't see in the dark. She is a nurse in the dark because the emergency generator for the Hancock County Medical Center was recently under eight feet of water as was everything else that might be of use in an emergency. One soggy Christian quipped, "Praise the Lord it wasn't a category five or we'd have no god damn band aids."

Horrific tales of loved ones lost is so sad when the water is so safe and warm like your mother's womb. No one wants to hear what they could have done or should have done after the fact. The waters, especially deep water that you can settle low in, arrests flying debris and thus protects like a womb.

My home will be far more valuable than the sum of all it contains. My home will also have wheels, a motor, a full tank of gas, and be parked where cat-five surge models predict high and dryness. The exception, of course, was Waveland. There, I left the door open to keep my rolling home from floating away. Total loss, but still where I parked it.

In the womb of the storm you are safe if you can float or cling to something that isn't going anywhere. Even an empty gallon milk jug can float you and has a handle. Connect two with a loop of belt, you have adult floaties, water wings, hurricane womb toys, but cinch a belt around the upper chest area of Granny and tie a string of three-liter pop bottles and you have a floating granny with head protectors.

If you plan ahead, you don't need to scramble for expedient floatation devices. You'll have everything ready, and those fragile people will be wearing their life jackets and know where the safety lines are to snap into. Those lines will lead from a safe egress point to a good trap. If there are no good traps near your place of last refuge, you should not be there. Be where there is at least one.

Snap-in with what?

I like a snap link on a cotton rope that ties to the life jacket worn loosely. Since anything except your naked body can get snagged and hold you, wear something you can get out of easily. Clothing should tear easy or be easy for an adult to rip off. If all goes well, a line snapped into a safety line helps the non-swimming helpless move along toward the trap, especially in poor or zero visibility conditions. You'll have your hands full with the inflateable boat or inner tubes, unless you have those things moored at the trap.

If the trap fails (as ours did at Waveland), raft-up, cut loose, and drift toward an alternate trap. If you are a great planner with lots of rope and planning time, you have a safety line going from the primary trap to your alternate trap which will be a place downwind of your primary and why you need to know how the storm center will be going by.

Note: We didn't have enough rope and had to cut loose to be a raft of people and pets, adrift at sea in a cat-4 hurricane. We lucked out and got trapped by a concrete block restaurant, but had we slipped by, our next stop was through the broken plate glass of a strip mall, assuming our skiff didn't swamp and sink in their parking lot where the paniced dogs were sure to drown everybody by climbing on them and ripping the inflateables with their claws. That open little skiff weighted down by a very heavy non-working motor wasn't my idea or my desire. A hard-headed father wanted it for his dog, kids, and wife, in that order. He just went and got the boat. I made do with it, but saw that boat as the biggest threat to the survival of the group, and just hoped it would remain afloat. Multiple inflatables rafted up have a greater advantage, and we had plenty IF adults remained in the water, which none were willing to do. The feeling of many afterward was, thank god we had that boat. I never told them how lucky they all were or how close we came to being the first looters.

Cut loose with what?

I tie-off with slip knots to avoid having to carry a knife. If you can tie shoes, you know how to tie two slip knots. Just tie one at each end of the rope. Put the lengthy tail through the loop as safeguard against accidental release. If that knot isn't released intentionally, it will become a bowline knot, not a bad knot to use on a wet safety line. I just prefer a slip knot, mostly because I only have one hand. You likely have two but don't know how to tie a bowline. On a fair day with nothing to do, you could learn, then teach everyone you may need to lead in a survival challenge.

Your biggest challenge will be combating fear, and you can best do that by rehearsing your survival plan and getting everyone believing in you, their ability, everyone's survivability, and in the plan. If you have anyone constantly crying, "WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!" that person is very likely right. Shut that person up.

What! Kill em?

No need if you make that scardie cat fear you more than the storm. You can also give that person something to do, something they can do that expends nervous energy. Just make that thing seem critical, like everyone's survival depends on that thing getting done.

If you can think beyond the immediate threat and actually have faith that you will all survive, you'll have plenty to do preparing for the post-survival survival challenge, and with major hurricanes, it ain't over until the National Guard arrives. If you lose your home and car, your needs will be everything humans need to live. Take a survey of your group's needs and ask yourself, "How are we going to get that stuff?"

After you do that and know, ask yourself this: "How will we keep this stuff from others who didn't take a survey and have greater needs and numbers?"

In the lawless days, and especially the three nights, Hancock County was one very scary and dangerous place dominated by looters and drunk poor people on parole. Some of them got horny, but they all got miserable and turned mean. Few got stupid enough to mess with any group that appeared organized and able to defend themselves.

Defend with what?

Add that to your survey and do whatever you feel you must do to defend your defenseless and dependent people, but NEVER take on the defeatist and helpless mentality of victims or you will surely be their leader.

Be a leader of proud survivors and lost victims will join you, stand up, be proud, and help defend your group. We added two able men to our group and became a formidable encampment intent on defending the Alamo with a flame thrower, a high-volume squirt gun filled with jellied gasoline, but before that, we used lighter fluid and a diversion, just a rehearsed plan that was never put to a test, but having that plan made the women and children feel safe and the men feel empowered, armed, and dangerous. We were. What we didn't have was a fire extinguisher.

The biggest threat, however, was from microbes. The post storm is a breeding culture for some of the deadliest microbes on the planet. DON'T drink anything you didn't boil, or eat anything that isn't properly packaged and free of possible contamination. Cook everything well and eat with clean fingers or utensils. Put a manual can opener in your survey along with lighters and charcoal lighter fluid, also dry comfort items like clothing and bedding. Put it all in twist-sealed garbage bags and stow it or bring it all along.

While there is water aplenty, fill a bath tub and use that water to flush toilets. Sanitation is vital, and human waste can quickly become a health hazzard. Toilets still bolted to their foundations and sewer systems are plentiful. Use one.

Stay as clean as possible, but don't wash with contaminated water. A bug bite or a scratch can easily become seriously infected. Bacteria that isn't normally in our land environment will be for many days or weeks. An infected cut can give you a runaway temperature that the hospital might be powerless to identify much less combat. In the week following Katrina, many people died from bacterial infections. The bacteria is now known to reside in shell fish that are not on our menu.

I have four new scars, three from deep tissue absesses picked up in the salvation sewage (storm surge) of Katrina. Upon arrival in Hawaii where I sought refugee refuge, I went straight to Tripler Army Hospital and right into surgery to have those deadly infections lanced and drained. The other wound was a deep gash on my leg that I picked up by falling through a chair I used to stand on. With that open wound, I knew I had to get well away from the disaster area. I hitchhiked to Florida, then caught a flight to Hawaii.

Take care not to get any cuts or bites, then have firstaid and bandages for any you do get. Anyone with an open wound needs to get well away from the area if the area became inundated with storm surge. For any minor open wound, I do not advise going to a local hospital, aid center, or any place that concentrates infected people. Leave the area ASAP even if you have to walk out. Simple risk management dictates you leave, but I do realize you will likely have many other factors to prevent any decision from being simple.

Camp outdoors rather than in as in will have a very dangerous mold trying to survive, too. As soon as possible, leave the contaminated area and stay away until nature restores a natural microbial balance, and the means to live clean are again restored. I stayed away from Waveland for three months but immediately knew I should have made it six.

Surviving the storm is only the immediate challenge. If all you do is focus on storm survival, you or a loved one may fall to the other half of the challenge. Both can be avoided by exercising your first option, or by getting your elected officials and their emergency managers to make your community a storm haven and safe sanctuary for people AND their pets, a place where law and order can never break down for more than a few hours. If you can't do that, then live where you evacuate to. Let them mismanage nothing.

Here are some tips for surviving in non-surge areas:

Conventional traditional storm wisdom applies, but to that I will add the need to have a safe room to go into for any storm. That room will likely be a bathroom. The plumbing helps hold that one room together, but help out by buttressing the walls and ceiling with steel straps and anchor bolts. Fill the tub with water and fill the room with bedding, pillows, cushions, inflateable stuff, boxes and such.

Better yet, remodel and use concrete for your safe room. At the very least, build a concrete shower the family can all squeeze into in a disasterous pinch.

If you can't or won't buttress 'n build, then you cast your lot with the structure. You will go the way of the structure. If that structure has little chance of surviving, leave it for something better. If you lose your roof, the rest is just a matter of time.

You DO NOT want to be in the lee of a structure that isn't going to make it. Go to the windy side, just inside, get low like a snake, and wait. When the building is gone, slither to a wind trap, or into a swimming pool, or ditch, or get into a vehicle and stay low. A good stout tree is generally a good bet, but don't get in it. Hang loose at the base.

If you know you won't be swimming, then dress the opposite of someone who knows he will be. Wear layers of thick, strong, padded protective clothing with boots and headgear.

The wind won't hurt you, but everything the wind picks up and throws will hurt you a lot. Debris begets debris. Debris also begets bloody wounds. You could even become debris that totals a pickup truck, so get low and stay low. You'll see very few snakes blowing around.

I have always heard that I should open doors and windows on the lee side of my home to equalize pressure?

No, don't do that. You will create more problems than you potentially solve. Seal that house tight, shutter it well, and hope it holds, then pray that no debris opens holes that wind can exploit. Invest in a hurricane roof as the main hole you want to avoid is a big one with a view of Heaven. If you can keep your roof, the rest will pose no problem. Lose the roof, you will have nothing but posed problems.

If your home must deal with significany flood waters or your home stands alone in the open, up off the ground, or worse, way up on stilts, then I advise doing the opposite of seal tight and shutter well. Open that doomed puppy up and take exterior doors off their hinges. Pull out and store the windows. Load as much weight as possible in the attic and on the roof

In matters of storm survival, you will only do as well as that thing you choose to take shelter in. We simply are not designed to weather storms outside of shelters. Trying is a formidable challenge teaming with risk and unknown variables. If you win, all sensible people will say you are an insane idiot. Same if you lose. You'll have trouble finding a date much less a mate. What I wrote at the start bears repeating, so:

• First and best option--Evacuate the threatened area.
• Second best--Get you and your family into an approved community storm shelter.
• Third--Ride it out in a good, stout, big, concrete building.
• Fourth--Hunker down in your storm-shelter home.
• Fifth: Go out in the storm as a LAST resort.

For the full story of my Katrina group survival saga in the eye of that megacane, read Surviving in the Womb of Katrina.

Also:

• Commentary on the sorry state of emergency management
• Hurricane Survival Tips
• Building Smart and Building Dumb
• The Geodesic Dome (smart habitat for coastal living)
• EPS, ICF, and Tilt-Up Homes (Fancy Bunkers, a return to the home that really IS a castle)
• Smart Roads and Bridges (also piers and docks)
• Independence from the Utility Infra-Structure (the neighborhood co-op; or, take these wires and shove it!)
• Stand or Run?
• Wind or Water--What Damaged my Castle?

Sonny's other writing:

• Vietnam Essays
• Commando Grammar Guide
• Student's Guide to the Internet (very dated material but amusing for that reason)

Waveland

Mississippi Coast

Email  George "Sonny" Hoffman