Editorial: Mother Nature Triumphant

There’s nothing like a weather-induced emergency to remind us all how fragile man’s plans and creations are, even when the situation involves the behemoth that is the American freight delivery system.

An unwelcome visitor named Floyd shut down a good section of the East Coast last week as it meandered up the Atlantic seaboard, fostering what President Clinton called the largest peace-time evacuation in U.S. history. The giant storm was so fearsome that officials not only vacated the usual low-lying and coastal areas, but entire cities, such as Savannah, Ga. States of emergency were declared in some states before the first drop of rain fell.

Interstate highways were turned into one-way exit roads, airports throughout the Southeast were closed, railroads canceled schedules and CSX even abandoned its national rail dispatching center in Jacksonville, Fla., slowing trains throughout the eastern half of the nation.

Trucking from Florida to New England was severely affected by the evacuations as well as the powerful winds and drenching rains that accompanied Floyd on its march. And another hurricane was looming just days behind Floyd, also seemingly aimed at the East Coast.

As we make this observation, we are certain that before Floyd’s last raindrop and tree limb has fallen that the trucking industry will be called upon to deliver emergency relief supplies wherever they are needed, and to restock the shelves of depleted stores in the storm-struck areas.

And we can be just as certain that the trucking industry will respond to the challenge, as it has so many times in the past, such as when Hurricane Andrew devastated south Florida in 1992.

Floyd even affected Transport Topics. In an attempt to insure timely publication, we closed this issue late on Wednesday night, a day earlier than usual. Since Floyd was expected to pass over us and the rest of the Washington, D.C., area at midday on Thursday, and given the high potential for power and communication outages, we were concerned that the storm could have prevented us from electronically transmitting the content of the newspaper to our printing plant outside Louisville, Ky., if we kept to our usual deadlines.