This brings up a good point: EVERYBODY should have some sort of emergency kit, just in case.

A few weeks ago, we had a bad storm, and tornadoes in the area. My son and I scrambled for shelter, but he was the one who remembered to bring a flashlight and the radio. It was a good thing, too, because we lost power shortly afterwards.

Be careful of live wires in the aftermath. I knew a woman whose dog was killed that way–but better a dog than a child.

If that caused some to wonder “What the Hell was he thinking?”, at that time I lived in an apartment right off the Southwest Freeway, with direct access to the feeder.

No blown-over trees, tree limbs, or downed power lines there.

But, the boards with nails were there; hence my warning.

Check Beldar’s blog ( http://beldar.blogs.com/beldarblog/ ).

His latest post has links to a Houston Chronicle article with an embedded map of the surge zones.

If you’ve never been through one of these before, I’ll add just one piece of advice to all of the obvious ones: If it hits where you are at, don’t be in too big a hurry to go exploring afterward.

After Alicia hit (1983), with power out and warnings not to use the water just yet, I decided to head out west, past Katy, to hopefully eventually find a diner open for something better to eat than what was in my apartment.

I barely got into the street before noticing all these boards all over the place, probably ripped from billboards by the wind, PROBABLY WITH NAILS STILL IN THEM.

Not wishing to be in the market for a new set of tires, I decided to wait until the clean-up crews passed through.

I was lucky; the area where I lived (near Greenway Plaza) was cleared in a couple of hours, and when I got back from the diner I found (in Columbus), the power was back on again. Other parts of town took longer to get back to normal (I think several days for people in the northwest area).

Let’s hope this one turns out to be another non-event, and fodder for another of Ken Hoffman’s articles of local weather hype.