Disaster du Jour Brings Deluge of Calls

One thing about having your very own county on all the network news shows: friends and first cousins from the Midwest you thought you had drifted away from call to ask if you are still alive.

“Are you still alive?” asked my old friend Suzie when she called Tuesday morning from Eudora, Kan., the tornado capital of the world. Suzie and I were cheerleaders together in Kansas in 1959. She had just watched a piling tear loose from the Ventura Pier on ABC or maybe CBS, so she had called to pep me up. “Hit ‘em high, hit ‘em low, Ventura County, go, go, go!” she said.

“Have you drowned yet?” asked my Aunt Ruby, calling from Neosho, Mo., where they often take to the root cellar to wait out that day’s cyclone. Aunt Ruby can’t understand why I don’t move back to Missouri, where they are safe from floods and fires and earthquakes.

“Boy, that old ocean looks mean on Dan Rather,” hollered my Uncle Martin, calling from Tulsa, Okla. (He hollers because Tulsa is a long way from Ventura County.) Tulsa is, however, quite close to where Steven Spielberg filmed last year’s disaster movie, “Twister.” For reasons of verisimilitude, too.

Personally, I love all this attention, but one does eventually become blase about the spotlight. I mean, one place or other in Ventura County gets singled out for its allotted 15 minutes of fame every February as the top flood disaster in the United States.

Usually it’s because we were the top fire disaster of the previous October, which burned up all the little green growing things that otherwise would have kept the hills from washing down to the ocean and making us the top flood disaster of February.

All householders in the county have a different routine when dealing with a flood, depending on what is vulnerable--leaky roof, flooding garage, hillside, etc. I always prepare by setting out my California rain boots--two plastic bags with matching rubber bands--by the back door.

On Monday my husband carefully placed 33 sandbags across our driveway. We have learned the hard way that our street’s storm drains back up during downpours and jump the curb by our house.

There is an art to sandbag placement, he says.

“You tuck in the tops like little blankets--it says to do that in the brochure the city of Ventura hands out with the sandbags,” he informed me.

My husband is the only person I know who reads sandbag literature handed out by the city. And he reads it before it floods, too. Unlike him, I don’t start looking for my earthquake preparedness handbook until the fourth aftershock.

He has cleared the roof gutters and even, he says, installed gutter guards, which I heretofore did not know existed.

Since we are coastal dwellers who live on a Ventura County hillside, I worry about losing even an inch of our piece of earth during a storm. That is why I have set out in our yard three spaghetti pots, two muffin tins, seven plastic paint buckets, a full set of stainless steel mixing bowls, a lasagna pan, a salad bowl and two dog’s dishes. I want to catch every drop I can.

Six doors down, a piece of our neighbor’s same hillside plot slid down the hill Tuesday morning. Need I say more?

Storms can also cause tempers to flare on the domestic front.

“Every time I want to have a salad or some soup, there’s no bowls,” my husband said in exasperation Tuesday afternoon.

And I admit that I spoke sharply to him Tuesday morning.

“Don’t lay our good towels on the windowsills, for Pete’s sake--just use the old faded ones, “ I chastised him.

Nerves are fraying. And we haven’t even lost electricity yet, like some people I know.