Is a Storm Surge the Deadliest Part of the Hurricane?
In this blog post, I want to give you a quick story about my experience with dealing with a storm surge, as well as two of the most fearsome hurricanes that ever hit land in the state of Florida. My journey back in the state of Florida started in 2017 when I was visiting my parents house home from college and we were hit dead on by a cat five known as hurricane Irma. Luckily we only hit sort of the medium outer bands, but we were still hit dead on with 130 mile an hour winds, with scattered tornadoes and horrible rain, and wind, and with some mild flooding, with water pressing into the house. it is to this day one of the scariest nights of my entire life, I don’t ever wanna have to go through something like that again, and luckily, I no longer live in the state of Florida, but it was a life experience indeed, and one that I felt suitable to post to this blog. And so, without further ado, let’s look at is a storm surge the deadliest part of a Hurricane?
Why The Storm Surge is So Dangerous to Humans
The second storm, that I’ve been physically in, would’ve been even scarier, except for the fact that where my apartment happened to be, I was about 30 miles away from the coast, and we did not 
get hit with the brunt of the storm, nor the storm surge. This is the hurricane known as hurricane Ian, this hurricane made national headlines, it caused a flooding and storm surge in the south west Florida area unlike anything we had seen in recorded history in any recent sort of timeframe. I remember looking out my window as I was playing Monopoly bored out of my mind with my roommate, While we sat and watch the storm. He kept saying he thought everything was gonna be fine, and I kept saying shit was probably going to hit the fan soon. We were both right, in that our apartment, dodged the blood of the storm, but we soon found, as our power came back on, that, as we were watching TV our Nearby, neighbors weren’t so fortunate.
We watched as what looked like essentially the ocean plowed through the city of downtown, Fort Myers, and the city of downtown Naples, turning, what was once a great strip mall, and place to go have a drink, into essentially a barren wasteland. It was very eerie seeing this kind of destruction, just 30 minutes north of my home, and talking to so many friends, who literally had their car picked up by the ocean and thrown out into the middle of kingdom COM never to be seen again. Dealing with the insurance companies, dealing with loss of property and vehicles, dealing with injuries, dealing with being worried over love, ones, friends, family, business, partners, and clients. All of it combined made this an extremely difficult period of time to endure emotionally, Add this to the fact that it happened right around September 11, and you have yourself one heck of a bad month.
In a nutshell, storm surge is so dangerous to people because there is muddy water, tons of debris, electricity, and just generally a piece of the ocean where it shouldn’t be!
My Story Surrounding the Hurricane Ian Florida Storm Surge
Having been in Florida for the last 28 years of my life or so, I find that I have been in, probably about a dozen or so major hurricanes, and that the most recent to have by far been the worst. The list of hurricanes that I’ve been in, nearby, or had close family relatives involving is as follows.
Andrew
Ian
Wilma
Irma
Charlie
Jean
Ivan
Rita
Katrina
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And yes, a handful of others, that I can’t even think of, including one tropical storm, that I believe was the name of a Greek alphabet letter, because they were just so many hurricanes and tropical storms that year, that they literally ran through the phonetic alphabet, and had to start using the Greek alphabet to title storms. I believe in 2004, which was the worst hurricane season in recorded history, and this was also the season, where hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans, we got all the way up to something like tropical storm, iota, a few letters into the Greek alphabet before the season finally ended. I even remember at one point in grade school, we had a play, where we sang a song about not wanting any more hurricanes.
More Storm Surge Info
So yes, I am extremely familiar with storm surges. Let me tell you how often the storm surge happens, what you can do to get your mind right if it looks like a storm surge is coming, and a little bit about this most recent storm that hit Florida in September 2023.
A storm surge is most likely to hit when you have a strong hurricane with heavy winds and rain, and you were on the coast line right by the ocean. We see this a lot in areas like southwest, Florida, Tampa, and other areas in the coast like Miami, Miami, Dade in the Florida Keys. Will also see this more middle states in the Gulf of Mexico, where you have Hurricane Katrina, and a host of hurricanes that hit the state of Texas in recent years and caused a bad storm surge. Storm surge typically will come off the Gulf of Mexico. And it is even more disastrous than the heavy winds and bad flooding, that you typically see in a hurricane. Tornadoes don’t even come close in terms of the damage that they can cause, as with the storm surge, you have loss of property, possible injuries, or loss of life, and mandatory evacuation alerts.
Final Thoughts on Is a Storm Surge the Deadliest Part of a Hurricane?
The main thing you want to do if you need to ride out, the storm surge is to seek the highest ground possible, and try to wait it out, and avoid being in the water, as this water contain things like debris, powerlines and electricity, that can cause grade in fatal injury. Obviously evacuating is the first Way to go, but if, for some reason you need to wait out the storm, this is a general rule of thumb. You also want to hang onto something that could possibly be used as a raft, mattresses tend to work decently well for this, as they tend to flow fairly well, aside from that a good prayer and some bottled water maybe your best friend.
Our thoughts and prayers go out to her friends in Florida that are currently dealing with Hurricane Idalia currently, I will post links below where you can go to donate to the cleanup efforts, and I’ll be reaching out with additional content on what happened in the storm.
Sources:
https://money.cnn.com/data/markets/
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