BATON ROUGE, LA – As hurricane season officially gets underway, a new study found that most Louisiana residents are no longer bothering to distinguish between emergency preparedness and football season preparation.
Researchers found that generators, ice chests, portable grills, folding tables, extension cords, battery-powered fans, tents and propane tanks purchased for hurricane season are overwhelmingly deployed first at LSU tailgates.
“Every year I tell my wife we’re buying this generator for emergencies,” said Baton Rouge resident Chad Landry while loading it into a trailer for a September home game. “And every year it somehow ends up powering three televisions and a crockpot outside Tiger Stadium before a single tropical storm forms.”
The report found that many residents consider LSU football season to be an important annual test of their emergency equipment.
“If your generator can survive a 14-hour tailgate in Louisiana heat, it’ll probably survive a hurricane,” explained one researcher.
State emergency officials acknowledged the findings and noted that while the original intent may be disaster preparedness, the equipment is at least being maintained.
“Honestly, we’d rather see people start their generators at a tailgate than discover they don’t work when a Category 3 is in the Gulf,” said one official.
Researchers concluded that Louisiana may be the only state where residents can justify buying a 55″ flatscreen and tagging it as “Hurricane Prep.”
