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WADE STALLINGS says it's the engineer in him that wouldn't let him just sit idly by as a Class 2 hurricane swept into town last week.
That's why the Spotsylvania County man left his job as an electrical engineer at Dahlgren early on Wednesday to put in a full afternoon of storm-proofing on his family's house in Spotswood Estates.
First came the purchase of eight sheets of plywood, three rolls of plastic sheeting, 10 two-by-fours, several rolls of duct tape and enough food to last the family for days.
Next, he hurried home and applied duct tape to the cracks at the edge of his storm windows, hoping to keep any rain driven by the storm out of the house that's been the family's home for 12 years.
Then came the harder part, standing atop a ladder while he single-handedly juggled a drill, a driver and the sheets of plywood used to protect each and every one of the more than dozen or so windows and sliding-glass doors in the house.
He started the storm-proofing about 3, and the sun was starting to set as he dragged the ladder and his tools into the house with arms aching from the effort.
"In my job at Dahlgren, we do a lot of testing and support, which includes a great deal of planning," Stallings said during a break in his preparations Thursday. "The notion is always that you hope for the best, but plan for the worst."
He noted that while his own kids think boarding up the windows was a lot of trouble for nothing, that doesn't bother him.
"If this work turns out to be unnecessary, that's perfectly fine with me," he said. "But if it is the kind of storm that could break windows and cause all kinds of water damage, it will have been worth it."
As someone who'd done little but move a few small items off the back deck and fill up a few coolers in my own home, I found myself a little worried by Stallings' hard work.
Sure, I'd watched all week long as the weather forecasters and TV reporters had beaten the never-ending hurricane drum, giving it the same blanket coverage previously reserved for the war in Iraq or the sniper shootings.
It's true, we needed to be warned, we needed to be advised on how to get ready and we wanted to watch the storm's progress as it got closer.
But somewhere in that mix, I decided not to fixate.
Instead, I chose to do a few of the obvious things to get ready and then simply hope that the storm wouldn't be so bad.
Thursday morning, observing all the preparations that Stallings had taken on his own home, that choice began to look a little suspect.
It got worse when he began to outline what he saw as the biggest dangers to local homeowners outside of flood waters.
Yep, this man who makes a living with science and precision began discussing the likely effects of sustained winds of more than 40 or 50 mph.
Then, he noted how quickly the storm could pump torrents of water into a house if a tree poked a hole through a window, the roof or even the siding.
"The worst thing: It's likely that the power will go out, so you wouldn't have anything to get up the water once it got in," he said.
Seen against that potential of thousands of dollars in damage, Stallings' said his relatively small layout for plywood and supplies could be the best money he ever spent.
It doesn't bother Stallings that his younger son, 15-year-old Robert, has bet him a million dollars that this storm won't turn out to be much.
"If he's right, I'll be glad to miss it," said Stallings. "But if I'm right, there's a large woodpile out back that will be moved to another part of the yard."
As I drove away from the boarded-up house midday Thursday, the rain and wind had gotten noticeably worse.
At that moment, I realized that if Stallings misjudged the need for the "full monty" of weatherproofing, he's just out a few hundred bucks.
But if those of us betting on minimal house damage turned out to be wrong, we would soon be facing a mess we wouldn't soon forget.
To reach ROB HEDELT: 540/374-5415 rhedelt@freelancestar.com