Hurricane strikes Salt Lake City?

While riding out Hurricane Frederic in Mobile, my friend John and another college student were talking about a storm that struck the Gulf Coast 10 years earlier.

The young lady told John how scary it was when Hurricane Camille hit her home in coastal Mississippi.

“Where did you live then?” she asked John.

“Salt Lake City,” John answered.

“Did it get bad there?” she asked.

Philosophers say there aren’t any dumb questions, but this one certainly approached that status.

The roomful of students who had taken refuge in the campus’ strongest building fell silent for a second. Frederic’s 135 mph winds howled outside.

Then they burst into laughter as John explained Utah’s location to the geographically challenged young lady.

Tropical weather and hurricanes are tricky, as we learned last week. They can change directions unexpectedly and leave meteorologists scrambling for accurate forecasts.

They also can be a mixed bag of needed rainfall and deadly floods and wind.

Tropical Storm Fay was supposed to bring us up to 6 inches of rainfall Monday and Tuesday. That would have cut the year’s deficit in half, but cause flash flooding.

The storm, however, shifted back toward the Atlantic, bringing most of its drought relief to the south and east of us.

The National Hurricane Center’s Atlantic map last week showed four more storms of various strength headed from Africa toward North and South America.

The vastness of hurricanes always amazes me when I see them on satellite and radar images. The world looks much smaller when a single storm blankets several states on a computer screen.

If you’re in the middle of one of these storms, they probably seem even bigger.

But there are limits to size and scope.

Folks in Utah, for example, are probably safe.