Cone of Uncertainty
The Cone of Uncertainty
The meteorologists in Lafayette all use the same graphic. It starts as a tight white dot somewhere down near Cuba and flares out into a massive, shaded cone by the time it reaches the Louisiana coast.
It is a map of mathematical probability that tells you where the eye of the storm might go. It doesn’t tell you what the storm will actually do when it gets there.
I learned the difference in October 2002, when Hurricane Lili was bearing down on the Louisiana coast. The forecasts had said it was a Category 4. By the time it made landfall, it was a Category 1.
She and I were living in the house on Sunny Lane with three housemates. Wee-Chong and Simpson were from Malaysia. Yi-Wan Chun was from Taiwan. None of us were from anywhere that had hurricanes. We didn’t evacuate. We had been on the Gulf Coast for less than four years, and we did not know where people went when the cone showed up. We thought we could negotiate with a storm if we bought enough supplies.
I went to the hardware store and bought plywood. I stood in the aisle at the grocery store hoarding cases of bottled water. I spent an afternoon taping giant masking-tape Xs across the glass windows, because someone told me that was how we could stop them from shattering. Years later, I learned tape does nothing.
We sat in the dark and listened to the wind howl. I had built a fortress out of tape and wood. I did the math; I was ready.
Then the ground became saturated, and the massive water oak in the yard leaned slowly over toward the house. A branch punctured the roof of the master bedroom, and the trunk leaned against the soffit board and stopped. The tree had been five feet from the window, but I had never noticed it as a threat.
The tape didn’t matter. The bottled water didn’t matter. The tree found the one structural angle I hadn’t calculated, and the outside came inside. That was the physical reality check. You cannot spreadsheet a Category 4 hurricane. You just sit in the dark and wait to see what breaks.
We could not stay in the bedroom. The night was hot, and the power was gone. Four of us went out to the BMW. She was in the front passenger seat, and Wee-Chong and Simpson were in the back. Yi-Wan Chun stayed in the house. We had rented DVDs from Blockbuster the day before the storm, so we sat in the car with the laptop balanced between the front seats and watched a movie. There was a curfew in effect. A cop on patrol saw the screen lit up inside the car and stopped. He walked up to us and looked in. He smiled the way you smile at people who are doing something foolish and clever at the same time. He walked back to his patrol car and drove off.
When the movie ended, we gave up and went back inside to sleep in our hot rooms. We were too tired to complain about the heat anymore.
Lili was my first hurricane. I learned the rest from watching the neighbors.
Pam next door rode out Lili in her house. Sue and Randy across the street rode it out in theirs. They did not tape their windows. They did not stockpile bottled water. They had been through Andrew and through every storm before. They knew that a Category 1 by landfall is a severe thunderstorm with strong winds. The cone is a probability, not a verdict.
After Lili, I stopped taping windows. After the next storm, I stopped hoarding bottled water. By the time my son was born in 2014, I no longer evacuated for anything below a Category 3. I had been watching the neighbors for twelve years.
I live in a different house now. I don’t tape the windows anymore.
Hurricane season started June 1. The standby generator sits eighteen inches from the wall of the house, between the electric meter and the gas meter; a friend’s firm installed it. It is a 30kW liquid-cooled unit. There were cheaper models, but they were not built for prolonged outages. The installer services it every six months. Every Sunday at 11 AM, it runs a self-test. We hear the engine come on through the walls. When the grid fails, it kicks on the same way.
We could have bought a used car for what it cost. My wife and I had been putting off the purchase for years.
Then the boy was diagnosed, and we understood what the router meant. The next August, I called the installer.
Most people buy the generator to keep the refrigerator cold and the air conditioning running through the August heat. I didn’t buy it for the refrigerator. I bought it for the router.
My son is twelve now. He does not watch the Weather Channel. He does not know what Wi-Fi is. He thinks the videos live inside the phone and inside the television. He thinks they come out of the screen the way water comes out of a faucet. He has learned, after years, that when the phone battery dies, he should plug in the charger. He has not learned what to do when the internet stops.
When the internet stops, he hands the phone to whoever is closest to him. He does not say the Wi-Fi is down, because he does not know that the Wi-Fi is the thing that is down. He just says TB, TB, TB. He cannot say TV. The Vs come out as Bs.
One night, before we installed the generator, the power went out for a couple of hours. It was not a hurricane but just an ordinary outage. The house went dark. He was afraid of the dark. He did not know what a power outage was. But he had figured out, on his own, that the phone in his hand had a flashlight in it. He turned it on and walked through the dark house holding the only light he understood.
He did not call for me. He did not call for his mother. He just walked.
He watches YouTube and Amazon Prime cartoon videos on a continuous loop. The videos keep him regulated. They keep him safe. He does not know what keeps the videos coming.
I cannot stop a Category 4 storm from hitting the coast. But I can control the router.
Even with the generator, there is a twelve-second gap between the grid failing and the engine engaging. Twelve seconds of black screen is enough time for the meltdown to start. So I bought an uninterruptible power supply, a heavy battery brick that sits on the floor. I plugged the router directly into it.
Now, when the lights go out, I don’t look out the window at the wind. I look at the router. The UPS catches it instantly. The internet never drops. The generator engine outside groans and kicks on. The only thing that dies is the television, and that just requires picking up the remote and hitting the power button.
Thirty seconds. That is the entire width of my cone of uncertainty for the boy.
I did not know I was rehearsing for my own.
Until next week,
Eddie