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Alberto Turns Out to Be Splash in the Panhandle
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"I don't think I could be considered a foolish person or one to take chances," said Daphine Spivey, 66, a native of the area who stayed home with her husband, a building official. "If it had been a bad one, we would have left."
She said the predicted storm surge of eight to 10 feet was less than what her house withstood in the "No Name" storm of 1993. So the couple thought they could ride out Alberto, too, and they did.
"I think you have to use common sense," she said, noting that her grandfather used to get a sense of storms by observing cows, pigs and other animals.
"I guess the Lord gives them the sense to know," she said.
Michael Webster, 35, his wife and two kids didn't evacuate for Alberto, either.
Webster said he has new respect for hurricanes, having worked a front-end loader during Katrina cleanup in Bay St. Louis, Miss. But he said he would leave Horseshoe Beach only if the storm winds exceeded 100 mph.
"This is nothing," he said after lunch with his family at a restaurant.
Outside, college students were checking a wind gauge built atop a 30-foot orange crane they had deployed. One of them said the strongest sustained winds measured were 30 mph.
Experts, nevertheless, say that defying evacuation orders and hurricane warnings is risky.
"When people try to gauge their actions on what happened in the past, disastrous things can happen," said Eric Blake, a meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center.
The trouble is that most people's storm experience is limited, he said.
"There hasn't been a major hurricane there in most people's lifetimes," Blake said, referring to the Big Bend area. "There are always uncertainties in the forecast. People are taking a chance with their lives, and we'd like to discourage that."
But Billy Rollison, 74, a Navy veteran who was out watching the tides as the storm passed Tuesday, questioned whether people who don't know the area can judge.
"They sit up there with their computers and checking the winds and all that," he said of the county's emergency managers as he watched Gulf waters cover part of the road. "Ain't none of them have been down here for a storm."
