Friday, August 25, 2017

Hurricane Experience - Wilma

When I was a kid in Florida, I remember trees down and people taking boats down the "roads" in hurricane Ingrid. Did not feel afraid. Many other hurricanes, no problem.

We lived on barrier island in Boca Raton. Hurricanes have a problem getting to us because of the Bahamas. Evacuated twice, both times we just went to brother-in-law's house and it was fine, just loss of power. Hurricane Wilma 2005 - different story.

For Wilma, we were not evacuated. It ended up terrifying.

Wilma was deemed not a risk. After evacuating twice in the past couple years, we were pretty happy.

Here's what happened. We were in our billiards room playing pool and noticed my car getting pounded by debris. It was parked out front. I ran out to pull it into garage, and a 70 pound palm frond narrowly missed me going 80 MPH. Ran back inside, screw the Infiniti.

We went to sleep. Middle of the night, wind was howling, transformers were popping, trees were falling, hitting the house.

In the family room, the sliding glass doors were arcing due to wind. We watched our screened porch over the pool fall - and parts of it were swinging violently toward the sliding glass doors.

Walked from window to window, watching fences fall, trees fall. Didn't see the neighbor's roof land in our backyard - saw that in the morning.

My ears popped. It was life-threatening bad. We went to the most reinforced bathroom to wait it out.

It was bad. Remembered seeing Andrew tragedy, which we missed by being in Boca Raton.

So, we got through it. Took in a professional chef who had his roof destroyed. Best move ever - he was master of grill. We didn't have power for 2 weeks. No internet for 6 weeks. No food in grocery stores for 2 weeks.

We ate MRE's. They aren't bad. Best source of food was the neighbors' freezers though. With a chef and propane, we fed the neighborhood & family for many days with the goodies from their freezers.

You can't be prepared for the smells, we took people into the house who didn't bathe for - literally weeks. No fans, no A/C - oh and the dogs, they smell too.

Anyway, on the bright side, we made it through, and made some good friends.


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