Hurricane Harvey Blog: Planning

It all starts with a pithy one-sentence note from T&D World Strategic Director Rick Bush:

“Feel like chasing hurricanes again?”

I get this as I’m set to tee off at a Fantasy Football Weekend Golf Tournament at a college buddy’s place at a northern Minnesota resort on a beautiful late August day. And so Bush has done it again — instead of concentrating on my upcoming fantasy draft, picturing the perfect drive to split fairway #1 or even just enjoying a spectacular day at a gorgeous lake resort, he’s got me thinking of chasing down torrential rain, fierce winds and widespread meteorological havoc in Texas. And of course I can’t wait.

Well, I have to wait a bit. It is still a day or two before Harvey will wallop Texas’ Gulf Coast, and no one yet knows the historic rain totals, seemingly ceaseless pluvial assault or widespread damage the enormous flooding will entail. For now, I just tell Rick I’m interested and ready to go, but in my mind it’s more probability or possibility than certainty.

Then Harvey bangs into Corpus Christi. It runs up the coast to Houston and then day after day after day dumps more water — historic levels of water — on an already saturated city. This takes place all weekend and into the following week.

Back at T&D World, "Hurricane Rick" (Bush) is simultaneously churning up story ideas and article topics about hurricane recovery and electric utilities’ tremendous storm response efforts in the face of natural disasters such as Hurricane Harvey. And just like Harvey, all the guy does is come back and back and back, every time with another idea, another concept, a veritable storm surge of ideas on how to communicate the recovery efforts.

And lucky for me, I get one of the most interesting, engaging, challenging and (for me at least) rewarding of the assignments —  head to south Texas with a gaggle of GoPro cameras and other video recording equipment, capturing for all to see what great work electric utilities can and will do to restore electric power to those who need it.

So stay tuned, if you will — starting next week, will be sending back blog entries and video clips from The Lone Star State, well into mid-September….