Welch: Silver lining of big bad hurricanes

It’s an ill wind that blows no one any good.

Dare I state the obvious? It’s going to take a hurricane to bring rain to West Texas and other dry parts of the country.

When I lived in New Orleans, everybody took hurricanes for granted, especially since they hit the outlying parts of the Mississippi Delta harder than the levee-protected Big Easy. If you had real shutters, you closed them. During my time there, all the hurricanes ended up going elsewhere, especially after we closed our shutters.

People closer to the coast (contrary to popular belief, New Orleans is inland) who were in the predicted path of a hurricane (although the predicted path kept changing) would batten down the hatches and drink gin till the storm passed, especially if they were told to evacuate. I could be wrong.

RESEARCH.

I’m not wrong. Wikipedia describes this official phenomenon as a hurricane party – a chance for friends to pool resources (clean out freezers ahead of the expected power outage) and drink a lot. Evacuate and miss the hurricane party? No way.

Disclaimer: The choice to party rather than evacuate can be fatal. Just sayin’.

Besides party-goers, who else makes the best of a hurricane?

Hurricanes don’t make insurance companies happy, but they’re windfalls for out-of-work insurance adjusters who’ve been waiting for a chance to assess damages wherever, even if they have to wade through alligator-infested waters to confirm that a house is missing its roof. Or just plain missing.

Carpenters and roofers make money, industries that fabricate construction materials like shingles and gypsum wallboard (sheetrock in common parlance) see an upturn in demand for their products, and so on.

Elected officials get to do flyovers and look good for showing concern. They get extra points the more vocal they are about asking for federal aid for those affected by Hurricane Pick-a-Name. FEMA, come quickly.

Hurricane names are there for the taking for babies born during the storm. A powerful name gives a child a good start.

Or, if you’re far away in drought-stricken West Texas just hoping for a little rain, you can name a new heifer calf for the hurricane and easily remember her birth year forever. We have Katrina and Rita plus one cow named for tropical storm Sandy. We could have named Sandy’s new calf Harold but feared we might jinx our chances for some Harold-linked precipitation. We didn’t get any anyway.

Hurricanes offer stories on silver platters to news reporters, who simply capture images or footage and interview survivors. It beats covering a school board meeting. Yes, I’m remembering my reporter days, even though the weather events were just wind, hail and tornadoes.

One of my fortes was writing about drought conditions and saying no end was in sight. Sometimes the rain would come even before my story was in print.

Now I’m just a columnist, but I’ll say it anyway: No rain is in the forecast.

Here’s hoping you have to retrieve your paper from a rain puddle.

This article originally appeared on Wichita Falls Times Record News: Welch: Silver lining of big bad hurricanes