Mean Puppies, Inc.: After the Storm

Wednesday, September 13, 2017

After the Storm

So Hurricane Irma...good riddance.

For the last 10 days I have eaten and breathed Hurricane Irma.

On Friday I woke up at 5am - there is a new hurricane advisory at 5am (during a storm 5, 8, 11, 2, repeat) - and checked the status and the "cone" had shifted west so that the eye of the storm was expected to go right up the middle of the state. Our evacuation plan all week was to go to Ft. Myers. We discussed it after the 8am advisory and decided that it would still be the best plan since the western side of a hurricane is less intense - it's called the "clean side".

We wrapped up our preparations by noon and headed west. We stopped for lunch in Immokalee (a town that in the end, was hit very directly by Irma) and the 2pm was out, it had the cone directly at Ft. Myers. We drove on to our friend's home, they were actually surprised to learn that they were suddenly targeted and did not have shutters. We stayed for the 5pm advisory and evacuated back to Miami!

Through a friend (who had evacuated to Orlando - which also was hit), we made contact with a local family who had room to take us in. Our house is in the zone A which was under storm surge warning for the 9-12 ft range. The family we stayed with was in zone D. The emergency planners asked zones A, B, and parts of C to evacuate. In the end, we did get storm surge, but no where close to 9ft. We saw some waterline debris when we took a walk yesterday. Anyway, the bottom line is our house is not at sea level, but built up from the road and a 9 ft storm surge might have not gotten in at all.

So we spent the night at home, and decided that our roof would probably stay on and we did not need to take every important paper in the house or all of the baby books...and a few other things, including Irene's shoes, which was an oversight, but ended up ok afterall.

About noon Saturday we re-evacuated to zone D. By then we were getting some pretty good gusts and several fronds were cracked in our palm trees. We got to the house before the tropical storm winds started and settled in to hunker down. The kids were immediately delighted to be there because the family had SIX dogs! All completely different sizes, shapes, and colors. They also had converted their pool into a koi pond.

The storm lasted until the middle of the night Sunday, the worst of it being from mid morning Sunday to mid afternoon. We lost power at 11am and I don't think they have it restored yet. The power outages are really the story of this hurricane. I haven't seen any damaged houses (Miami Dade county has a super strict building code), just a LOT of fallen trees. Our power lines are buried and we had power restored on Monday, but there are still huge numbers of people without power.

I am going to get groceries tomorrow and I will let that signal the return of normalcy (I hope). From Monday September 4 until today we have had a hurricane. Before the storm the flurry of preparation and after the storm wondering where to get milk because none of the stores were open.

In short, Irma was by far the worse hurricane I've experienced and really it wasn't that bad for us. We got a low cat 1, but it lasted much longer than most hurricanes. It was full of silver linings. We got to stay with a wonderful couple from our church. The girls got to love on lots of cute doggies. Caleb got to swim with a pool full of fish. I got to clean out my fridge, pantry, and closet all in one frantic afternoon. Our house was not damaged and my passion-vine is fine! It did blow all the leaves off the milkweed though.