Back to Irma

A big pile of Irma

When we got back to Miami, we were surprised at how much debris was still by the sides of the road.  Actually we've been home 2 weeks and there are still huge piles of debris - especially in Palmetto Bay.  Every time we go out we meet a truck hauling a load of broken branches.

Otherwise, things seem to have gotten back to normal.  I'm even making progress at putting things back in their normal locations.  This hurricane experience gave me two take away lessons:

1.  The thought that your home and possessions will be destroyed makes it very easy to see what material possessions are important and which ones are just clutter.  I read a Japanese decluttering book (The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo) a few months ago and she suggested that if you want to declutter, hold an object and ask yourself if it gives you joy.  Somehow that didn't work for me, but imagining storm surge washing things out to sea worked really well!

2.  Sometimes no one knows what's the right thing to do.  In rehashing Irma with friends and neighbors I've found that everyone had the same conversations Rob and I had - stay or go? go where?  go when?  In the end I think we made a good choice, but friends who left and stayed away for several days after the storm seemed happy with their choices too.  Thankfully, I don't know anyone whose home was seriously damaged.

So technically it's still hurricane season, but it is waning and we are expecting a cold front!  The dry season is just around the corner!

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.

Last preparations!

Lots of water that we ended up not needing, but it was comforting to know it was there!

Early Irma

One of the favored pooches.

Koi-pool - the water was pumped in continuously from a personal well.  The man who lived there said it was safe to swim in and Caleb jumped right in!

Lights out!

The kids discovered Sorry.

Tree down in our neighborhood.

Helping clean up at our evacuation house.

Evacuees to be

This has been unlike anything I've experienced before.  There have been lots of time people have boarded up, but we've never been ordered to evacuate until today.  Many of our neighbors are leaving today or left yesterday.  We are planning to leave tomorrow morning.  Some people are just going farther inland, 3 of my friends who lived through Hurricane Andrew went more than 500 miles away.

Rob said that putting up shutters is like putting up Christmas lights - the more the better.  I said that if that is the case, he won the prize for our street:

As silly as it sounds I'm already sad about how the plants and trees will fare.  Old Cutler Road has large areas of beautiful tree canopies.  My passion vine is getting really full and lush.  A friend gave me a bleeding heart vine in a large concrete planter, I'm planning to move it in doors.  We'll see how it does.  

It is one part moving, one part packing for a trip, one part decluttering.  As we've gathered things up, I've found there is a lot of stuff that isn't valuable enough to take with us.  I've thrown a lot of things away saying, 'why did I even keep that?'

Something normal...

Rob and I got gas Monday and have used the cars as sparingly as possible all week.  Yesterday I took the big kids to a nature class and passed a gas station - easily 20 cars in line.  I got some groceries on Tuesday - not hurricane stuff, just food.  It was starting to get crowded, but yesterday Rob needed a new drill bit and was in a line with 25 people ahead of him.  So we have tried to lay low all week.  Today the weather is lovely, but hot and humid.  We had done a lot of work the last 2 days to prepare, but none of us would mind if it was all a false alarm.

Irma Prep

 We are looking at a possible hit from Hurricane Irma later this week/early next week.  Today we put up hurricane shutters - and that is significant because we have never put them up before.  Rob has always judged (and fortunately correctly) that our risk of being hit was not great enough to justify the work of putting them up.  This time, he did not feel that way.  Putting them up was a huge undertaking, but there are now railings on the windows which will make it easier if we put them up again.

Yes a window in the bath, serious design flaw in my opinion.

Irene helped thread washers onto Tapcon screws.

Caleb's official job:  panel fetcher

The last panel goes up.

We've been watching this storm for days as it has slowly moved west.  The local hysteria began to kick in yesterday.  I went to gas up the car and had to wait to get a pump, but only 1 car was ahead of me.  A lady I know waited 90 minutes today.  No one knows if it will impact east Florida more or west Florida.  So to leave begs the question, where to?  To add to the confusion the Hurricane Center and the South Florida Water Management websites seem to have different ideas where it is mostly likely to go.  The US Global Model is opposite the European Global Model.  And it will probably be 3-4 days before it gets here.  So as exasperating as it seems to everyone concerned, we all have to wait and see.