Scenes from this Side of the Bridge: Are We Prepared?

We had been hearing about Hurricane Irene all day at work last Friday. Several mass emails were sent out by my company’s security group advising us to stock up on water, batteries, canned food, and anything else that would help us survive the mighty hurricane. When I got back home to Fort Lee, my wife and I strategized about the best way to go about preparing for the storm. We decided that we would wait until later in the evening before heading to the A&P supermarket. This way, we figured, we would avoid the crowds.

At 11 p.m., the checkout lines at the A&P on Lemoine Avenue stretched from the cashier counters at the front of the store all the way back to the frozen food and ice cream freezers. So much for avoiding crowds, I thought. I was feeling more than a little grumpy as we walked into the store, which would normally have been deserted at that hour, and were forced to dodge shopping carts, small children, and frantic shoppers hurrying to purchase anything they might possibly need over the next couple days. One woman passed us with a shopping basket holding six or seven large boxes of cereal. My stock purchase of General Mills earlier this year suddenly seemed like a wise decision.

As I passed the liquor aisle and glanced down it, a man stepped in front of me. The panic on his face was immediately apparent.

“We can’t buy any beer!” he exclaimed. He sighed in frustration and turned his head longingly toward the shelves of beer. He frowned and looked at me helplessly.

I glanced at the sign next to the entrance of the aisle.

“No, you can still buy beer until 2 A.M.,” I told him.

“No, no,” he insisted, shaking his head vehemently. “They won’t let us buy any alcohol!”

I pointed at the sign which read “Wine and beer sales: 10 AM – 2 AM.”

“See? You can still buy beer until two.” I said. He looked at the sign again. I could see the skepticism on his face as he read it carefully once again.

“Oh yeah! You’re right! I thought it said two in the afternoon,” he said, grinning happily. “Thank you!” he exclaimed as he hurried back toward the beer cooler. My wife and I chuckled and made our way through the crowd toward the juice and water aisle.

“Let’s just get a couple gallons of water, just in case. I don’t think we’ll need too much,” she said. I nodded in agreement as we walked toward where the plastic bottles and jugs of water were usually placed. The shelves sat completely empty. Not even a single, eight ounce, child sized bottle of Poland Springs water remained.

“Oh wow! I can’t believe there’s no water left,” I said. Panic started to fill my mind, and I probably sounded a little like the man we’d just met in the beer aisle. Perhaps he had the right idea. Were we too late to buy drinking water? Would we have anything to drink during the hurricane?

“It’s ok,” my wife said. “Let’s just go to CVS.” After driving to the CVS near Linwood Park, we quickly walked toward the drink section only to find the story repeating itself. There were no gallon jugs of water to be found. There were, however, a few, small bottles of Fiji water left in the refrigerator. We quickly grabbed them and grumbled about their price as we paid and hurried back to the car.

I closed my eyes for a moment as we sat there, trying to think of other stores  that might still have water. “How about H-Mart?” I asked. Susan shook her head. “I doubt they’ll have any water left.”

“Okay, tell you what. Let’s wake up early tomorrow morning. We’ll split up and go to different grocery stores. Maybe they’ll get more water tonight.”

The next day, we found a place in Bergenfield, bought a little too much water and paid a little too much for it as well. As you know, the hurricane turned out to be merely a tropical storm here in Fort Lee and many of us now feel a little sheepish yet relieved as we look at our large containers of drinking water sitting in our homes and taking up too much space.

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Last Wednesday, my wife’s best friend, whose name just happens to be Irene, sat at our dining room table eating a late dinner as we discussed the earthquake in Virginia which had sent out shockwaves felt all the way up here in Fort Lee and the surrounding areas. As we talked, a news report on Hurricane Irene’s path was being shown on the television. When had an earthquake and a hurricane ever happened in this area during the same week? It was quite a coincidence, we decided.

“So, if you knew that the world was ending in a month what would you do differently?” Irene asked.

The question, or some form of it, is a cliché that most of us have heard at one time or another. Many of us have probably answered it by listing the people we would want to see and the places we would want to visit before that time came.

In this area, most of us were spared serious injury or loss from the weekend storm. However, as I heard about some of the damage it caused in Vermont and other less fortunate places, a question came to my mind: If you knew that a potentially dangerous and life-changing occurrence was approaching, what would you do differently? In other words, how do we react to warnings about hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and other unfortunate events? Do we panic? Do we ignore the warnings, thinking that we won’t be affected? Do we prepare and respond the way we should?

Based on what I saw over the past weekend, we residents of Fort Lee at least prepare for hurricanes by arming ourselves with plenty of drinking water and at least a few of us made sure that our refrigerators were stocked with a sufficient supply of beer. However, beyond that, if the hurricane had hit, would we have been prepared?