Most of our member spotlights are about someone who stayed and fixed something. This one is about a member who did the harder thing: she left, on purpose, before there was anything left to fix.
By Wednesday of storm week, local officials up and down the coast were managing an unusual complication on top of the ordinary evacuation logistics: sheltering people safely during a pandemic. Several counties moved away from large group shelters toward paying for hotel rooms instead, which meant evacuation routes were more crowded and slower than a normal storm year, and families had less certainty about where they'd end up. Our member factored that into her own timeline, leaving a full day earlier than she otherwise might have, specifically so she wouldn't be negotiating both a storm and a shelter shortage on the same night.
She runs a small farmstead operation a short drive inland from the Gulf Coast, with a single-room aging cave built into what used to be a root cellar. When the storm track firmed up on Tuesday and forecasters started using words like "unsurvivable" about the expected surge near landfall, she and her husband spent one evening deciding what to do with roughly four months of aging wheels — easily the most valuable single asset on the property that wasn't the building itself.
The math she actually ran
"You want to believe you can protect everything," she told us, "and for about an hour I was making a list of how to strap things down and keep the generator running. Then I made myself write down what the wheels were worth against what a hospital bill or a truck replacement would cost if we stayed and something went wrong. That's not a hard comparison once you write it down. It's just a hard thing to let yourself write down."
They moved what they could — the newest, least-aged wheels, which travel better than anything close to peak — into a rented cold-storage unit two counties inland, left the rest in the cave with the door sealed, and evacuated the same afternoon most of their neighbors did. The house came through with modest roof damage. The cave, as of this week, is still assessed as intact, though she won't know the real condition of what she left behind until power and inspection access are both reliably back.
What she'd tell another member facing the same call
Her advice wasn't really about cheese at all. "Decide your criteria before you're scared," she said. "The night before, everyone in that storm's path was scared, and scared people make worse decisions than calm people with a plan they wrote a week earlier. We didn't have a week. We had an evening. Next time I want a written plan sitting in a drawer so an evening is enough."
She's since connected with the same members who talked us through last month's power outage recovery after the derecho — a smaller, informal network of people who've now each lost something to weather this year and have started comparing notes on insurance documentation, generator sizing, and what actually survives a sealed, unpowered cave for a week versus two. The two situations aren't identical — a sudden windstorm gives you no warning at all, where a hurricane at least gives you a few days to plan — but she says the aftermath conversations rhyme more than she expected. Both groups spent the week after asking an insurance adjuster the same basic question in different words: how do you put a number on a wheel of cheese that was six weeks from being ready to sell, and who's actually qualified to make that call.
Her operation carries a modest property policy that covers structural damage but treats aging inventory as a gray area, something she's now flagging to every member who asks. "Read the inventory language before the storm, not after," she said. "I found out what my policy actually covers about four days too late to change anything about it." She's planning to bring that specific question — how aging inventory should be classified and valued for insurance purposes — to the next open call the federation runs on business continuity planning, on the theory that if her policy was vague, plenty of other members' probably are too.
If you've been through something similar, or you want to get ahead of the next one, the Membership & Outreach Committee can put you in touch with both networks, and can flag you for the next continuity-planning call before storm season catches anyone else without a written plan.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.