Some of us have good luck, some of us have bad luck.
And some of us have such incredible, long-lasting bad luck that they end up on this show.
Like the individual who’s been called America’s unluckiest woman: she lost her home five times thanks to five hurricanes.
Her name is Melanie Martinez.
The school bus driver has lived and worked in the rural community of Braithwaite, south of New Orleans.
It’s a flood plain, so maybe it’s not a surprise that her town has been hit by hurricane after hurricane over the years.
But not everybody got the worst of every hurricane, apparently just Martinez.
The first time she lost a home was in 1965, thanks to Hurricane Betsy.
Hurricane Juan took out another of her homes in 1985, and so did Hurricane George in 1998.
Then, Katrina in 2005; Martinez was one of hundreds of thousands of people whose homes were damaged or destroyed in that Category 5 hurricane.
Four hurricanes, four homes lost in the course of about 40 years.
Then, a few years after all those clouds, it looked like a silver lining: a reality show called Hideous Houses came to Braithwaite to fix the place up.
Over a week, they put $20,000 into Chez Martinez.
They completely redid the kitchen, put together a sewing room, added a widescreen TV.
But months later, Hurricane Isaac hit the region.
New Orleans managed pretty well, thanks to a $14 billion upgrade of its levees and flood control systems.
But Braithwaite got hit hard.
Martinez had tried to evacuate but her truck broke down, so she spent the storm in the attic.
As the floodwaters rose, they tried to hammer their way through the roof… until the hammer broke!?!
They had to punch and kick their way out; a boat eventually rescued the family, including their three dogs and five cats.
After losing a fifth house to a fifth hurricane, Melanie Martinez tried to answer why she stayed in a part of Louisiana where storms kept taking away just about everything she had in the world.
“It’s home, home, home,” she said. “But we want to move somewhere that’s hilly, you know? To a house on a hill.”
In the very late 1600s, Henry Winstanley oversaw the building of a 120 foot tall lighthouse near Plymouth, England.
It was a major achievement in engineering, and Winstanley liked to say how he hoped to be inside the structure during the worst weather to see just how strong it was.
In 1703, he spent the night in his lighthouse… which is when an enormous storm blew through, destroying the entire building and its creator.
Lost Five Homes in Five Hurricanes (HowStuffWorks)
Lighthouse: The beginning of the modern era (Britannica)
Be this podcast’s shelter from the storm as a backer on Patreon
Image via NASA/Wikicommons
