There isn’t
a Floridian who doesn’t have a Hurricane Irma story. Here, for what it’s
worth, and it’s not worth much, is mine.
Three weeks
ago today, at 1:45 in the morning, my wife, our two dachshunds and I pulled out
of our driveway and headed north. I can’t say what was going through the dogs’
minds – not much probably – but my wife and I were convinced we would never
see our home again.
We had planned
to ride out Hurricane Irma in the house, which sits at an elevation of 12 feet
above sea level, a mile or so from Estero Bay. All week we had been busy moving
the outside furniture inside; cranking roll down storm shutters over some
windows; installing massive aluminum panels, some 12 feet high, over the
windows that didn’t have roll downs; running from store to store trying to find
the batteries we knew we’d need when the electricity went off; buying bottled
water, canned goods, fresh fruit, cookies and crackers for the the days we would be without refrigeration; waiting in lines at gas stations to top off
both cars’ tanks; going to the bank for cash because credit and debit cards
wouldn’t be usable once the electricity was down, and running to Home Depot for
hardware and tools to install the storm shutters.
We stopped
our preparations every few hours to check the website most Floridians have
bookmarked, the National Hurricane Center, to see the latest forecast that is
updated four times a day when a storm is brewing in the Atlantic. Early in the
week the NHC showed Irma was likely to hit Florida’s southwest Gulf coast,
where we live, head on. Then it showed the eyewall shifting slightly to the
east, coming up the center of the Florida peninsula. Then it moved to the east
coast. Then they projected it would move up the coast off shore, hovering
somewhere between the mainland and the Bahamas. On Thursday, as things became
clearer, the forecast shifted back to the Southwest Gulf coast, and there it
stayed.
The 11
o’clock local weather forecast Friday night scared us shitless: Irma, it was almost
certain, was going to hit us sometime Sunday afternoon head-on as a category 5
with 150 plus mph winds. The storm surge – water rushing from the gulf to the
bay and across the low-lying lands bordering the bay –on top of the predicted
eight to 12 inches of rain Irma was sure to bring, was going to be even more
destructive than the winds. The governor was on TV, telling us that if we
planned to evacuate, this was our last chance.
We looked
at each other and said, “We’re outta here.” We threw clothes into suitcases, and
tossed blankets, towels, cases of water and boxes of food (human and dog) into
the back of the SUV. The last thing I did before we left was to install aluminum
panels over the side door to the garage. I only had four screws left to hold
three panels but it didn’t matter. The house was a goner anyway.
We love our
house. It’s full of stuff we’ve collected over the last 40 years, some of it irreplaceable.
Funny but when you learn you’re in the path of what forecasters are saying
will be the most catastrophic hurricane to hit Florida in a decade, you don’t
care about all that stuff as you pull out of the driveway. You just want to get
away with what’s important, the people and creatures you love.
My wife’s
mother lives in a recently built Assisted Living Center a few miles south of
us. It’s a fortress, built to withstand even a cat 5 storm. We had been assured
a plan was in place to take care of its residents, including generators, food
and staff. She, at least, was in good hands. We weren’t so sure about us.
Within 10
minutes, we were on Interstate 75, headed toward Tallahassee in Florida’s
panhandle, 420 miles to the northwest, where my nephew had graciously invited us
to stay. Earlier that evening I had emailed him that we were still planning to
ride it out. That was before we watched the 11 p.m. forecast. I decided I’d
text him when we were about an hour from his house which I figured would be
sometime around noon if we were lucky enough not to encounter stop and go
traffic and/or run out of gas because the stations, the news said, were out of
it.
To our
surprise, traffic was moving just fine and didn’t even become heavy for 100
miles or so until we reached Sarasota. We had heard horror stories from friends
who had already fled north. It took one couple 24 hours to drive the 800 miles to
Jackson, Mississippi, the nearest hotel room they could find. Other friends
spent two days getting to Nashville. Still others tried to get out of Dodge and
returned hours later with tales about bumper to bumper traffic and no gas.
Within
three hours we had traveled 150 miles and were just outside Tampa where we
stopped for gas – no waiting – and, having been awake since 6 a.m. the previous
morning, drove through the drive-through window of a McDonald’s for coffee. The
vehicle in line ahead of us was a 1980s mini-van. Its rear window was missing.
The only thing in the cargo area was a miniature aluminum Christmas tree.
The van had a hand-lettered cardboard license plate and the driver’s door was stuck
open at a 45-degree angle, like the flaps on a plane that’s coming in for a
landing. The inside panel of the door was missing. There was some altercation –
we couldn’t hear it – between its occupants and the server before they drove
away. “Crackheads,” the server told us, shaking her head. “They probably headed
south,” I joked. She laughed. “Good luck,” she said, handing us our coffee. Everyone
in Florida was punch drunk at that point.
We stopped
several hours later in Lake City, Florida for more coffee. Dunkin’ Donuts was
packed. Strangers were asking each other, “Where are you from and where are you
going?” A guy in line ahead of me from Miami said he had no idea where he was
headed. “I just want to get the hell out of this goddam state.”
Traffic was
heavy but moving. Just north of Lake City we saw parked by the side of the road
dozens of trucks bearing the logos of out-of-state utility companies from as
far away as New Jersey that were awaiting word to proceed to southern Florida
once the hurricane had passed.
By 9 a.m.,
to our amazement, we were in Tallahassee.
My nephew
and his wife installed us in her parents’ beautiful home overlooking a golf
course, telling us we’d be more comfortable there. Her parents were at their
summer home in the Rockies. I went to the supermarket and bought some food and
three bottles of wine. It was packed with panicked shoppers, who had picked
some shelves clean because Irma was now predicted to hit Tallahassee, which
sits 20 miles inland, on Monday. The scene was a repeat of the frenzy we had
witnessed in our local Publix a few days before. We finally fell asleep around
1 p.m.
My
niece-in-law’s parents had turned off Comcast for the summer (a decision my
regular readers know I agree with) so there was no Internet or TV. Desperate
for news, we found a Hooters for dinner that had outside TVs and allowed dogs
on the patio. The weather forecast hadn’t changed from the night before.
Southwest Florida was officially ground zero. The group at the table next to
ours was from our town. They, too, had fled the night before.
Sunday morning
I checked the messages on our home phone. There were two robocalls – mandatory
evacuation orders from the local government, telling us that if we didn’t leave
that very minute and go to one of the many shelters set up in local schools and
arenas, that we were on our own if we needed help.
We watched
live-streaming Ft. Myers TV all day Sunday on my cell phone as the hurricane
approached and hit. It struck the Keys in the morning and mid-afternoon made
landfall at Marco Island, about 30 miles south of our home, as a category 3. The
weatherman said it was going to continue thundering up U.S. 41. We live a mile
west of U.S. 41. Swell. He rattled off the names of the neighborhoods,
including ours, that looked to be directly in Irma’s path and could expect
massive flooding. Irma hit our town around 5 p.m.
Around 7 p.m,
after the eyewall, to our horror, had passed directly over our house, it was
downgraded to a category two as Irma unexpectedly swerved ever-so-slightly to
the northeast, sparing Ft. Myers and Cape Coral from the worst of her wrath.
The weatherman said he had good news: The expected storm surge was minimal
because Irma had hit at low tide.
We turned
in early, physically and mentally exhausted.
The next
day was windy with some light rain and the hurricane, we learned, had blown
through Tallahassee overnight as a tropical storm. My nephew and his wife, who
were without power in their home, stopped by with their daughters. We were
playing a game when my cell phone rang. It was our neighbor, George. He and his wife had attempted to flee up I-75 on Wednesday but had returned after
realizing there was no gas to be had. They had ridden out the storm in the
stairwell of another friend’s mid-rise condo. He couldn’t talk long because he
was trying to preserve cell phone battery, but reported that our house looked
to be OK. Some trees were down and several screen panels on our pool cage were
torn but that, as far as he could tell, was the extent of the damage. He said
the rest of the neighborhood got off with about the same amount of damage as we
did, but that streets were impassable due to downed trees and, needless to say,
there was no power. We could barely believe our luck.
We had been
planning, for months, to spend that week in the Outer Banks of North Carolina,
where our son and his wife had rented a house. “Let’s go,” I told my wife. “There’s
no reason to go home since there’s no power.”
“We ought
to wait and leave tomorrow,” she said. “No,” I told her, “if we leave now and
overnight somewhere in Georgia, we can get there tomorrow night and have four
full days to spend with the kids.”
Within an
hour we were back on the road again, heading north into Georgia. Thomasville,
about an hour north of Tallahassee, had no power. Nor did any other town we
passed through for the next 200 miles. While Florida got most of the media attention,
Irma did some massive damage to southern and central Georgia, too. We saw an
armada – literally hundreds – of utility trucks and tree service trucks headed
south.
I should
have checked the forecast, because we drove right into the remnants of Irma.
The further north we drove, the harder the rain and the heavier the winds we
encountered. At Macon, I took what the GPS showed to be a backroads shortcut
over to Interstate 20 so we would avoid the Atlanta metro area. For two hours
we twisted and turned through darkened countryside, dodging fallen trees,
downed road signs and rain as heavy as any I have ever driven though. My wife
was furious. “I told you we should wait a day.” I readily admitted she was
right. It was out-and-out scary, the worst ride of our lives.
When we
finally made it to I-20, I stopped at a Holiday Inn whose lobby was packed with
people trying to sleep on the floor. No room in the Inn. The clerk said there
were likely no rooms anywhere in central Georgia that night. But at the next
exit I found a fleabag motel – no electricity – where a clerk was engaged in
conversation with a couple through a bulletproof screen. The couple – the wife
carrying a baby who looked to be the age of our youngest grandson -- had a pit
bull terrier that was running up and down the sidewalk off leash. They stepped
aside as I approached the window. “Do you have a room?” I asked the clerk, an
Indian woman, shouting to be heard over the wind and driving rain. “Yes. It’s
$125.” “I”ll take it,” I said.
At that moment
the young man told the clerk, “We only have $40. Can’t you give us a room for
that?”
“No,” she
snapped.
Knowing I had
been blessed beyond belief, I told her I’d pay for their room, that nobody
should have to be out in that weather.
“How can I
ever repay you?” the young man asked.
“Some day
you can do the same for someone else,” I answered. His room was $125, too. I later
found out the hotel’s regular room rate is $60.
When I went
back to the car and opened the door, the couple’s pit bull leapt into the
driver’s seat and jumped up against my wife, who was holding our two dachshunds
in her lap. She somehow resisted the urge to scream out in terror. I didn’t
want to reach in and pull the dog off, lest I provoke him to attack her.
“Get your
fucking dog off my wife!” I shouted at the young man, who reached in and pulled
the dog off.
Our room
was on the second floor. There was no power. It was hard to carry the bags up
the open stairs with no light to guide us, through wind gusts so strong the rain appeared to be falling horizontally. The parking lot was full of cars with Florida plates. Fellow
Irma refugees.
“This
stinks,” my wife said when we got into our pitch-black room.
We couldn’t
take showers – no hot water and no power. It came back on sometime during the
night but went off again a few hours later and stayed off.
The next
morning we found out why the room stank. My wife had stepped in a pile of dog poop
some other guest’s dog had left in front of our door. There was no way she
could have seen it.
A woman in the parking lot said she had fled Florida
with her 90-year-old father who had to breathe through a machine. “There’s no
power and I’m almost out of oxygen tanks. I don’t know what I’m going to do.” I
wished her well and we continued on our way. There was no electricity so we
couldn’t find a place selling coffee until we reached Augusta, near the South
Carolina line. We arrived at the Outer Banks around 7 that night.
When we logged
on to the Internet, we found emails from friends and family concerned about our
safety and, for the first time in days, had access to web sites that enabled us
to see a fuller picture of what Irma left in her wake than we had been able to
learn from radio news broadcasts. It wasn’t pretty.
Over the
next four days we tried, we really did, to act normally around our children and
grandchildren but we were exhausted and on edge and I know they could sense it.
We left
Sunday morning and made it 700 miles to Jacksonville, Florida where, in the
parking lot of our hotel, dazed-looking people draped with Red Cross blankets were
smoking cigarettes. A man told my wife his house had caught fire during Irma
and burned to the ground. Just as we were turning in, I got a text from a
neighbor that the power at our house had just come back on. Sweet.
The next
day, as we continued south through Daytona, Orlando and Ft. Myers, we saw lots of damage. No missing roofs but
lots of uprooted trees, flattened billboards and downed power lines.
Our own
development was a mess – trees down everywhere, some pool cages missing, almost
every yard covered with broken branches, leaves and other debris that had blown
in from who knows where. I took the storm shutters off the garage door and we
went inside, half expecting to find rain had leaked through the roof or water
had somehow seeped through the storm shutters covering the windows. But everything
was good.
In all, we
had seven trees down, seven pool screens that needed replacing and our pool
cage suffered structural damage. It was apparently lifted up and detached from our
house and how it is still standing I’m not quite sure, but there’s no way we’re
going to be able to find anyone to fix it until well into the next year.
Friends report pool cage repairmen’s voice mailboxes are full so they can’t
even leave messages.
It’ll cost
us a few thousand out of pocket since our insurance policy doesn't cover anything until we have shelled out $22,000. High deductibles
are the only possible way insurers can afford to offer coverage in a state that
juts out into storm-prone Atlantic waters.
Since then I’ve
taken down shutters, moved furniture back outside, cleaned the swimming pool which was full of debris and mud, and cleaned the fridge (gross –
I forget to empty it when we left in the middle of the night and the power was
off for a full week). Jose, our perpetually cheerful yard man, is slowly but surely carrying away debris each time he visits but says it will take a while because all of his other regulars have as much if not more of it than we do and his truck only has so much room.
I work at the local Food Bank one day a week and have
been volunteering for extra shifts, handing out food and other supplies at
local temporary pantries. It breaks my heart. The neighborhoods that were
hardest hit – the ones that suffered the most flooding, the ones the power
companies restore electricity to last – are the poorest ones, the ones populated
primarily by immigrants who do most of the heavy lifting around here, folks who
live in trailer parks and shacks way out toward the Everglades. Entire families
are without food and running water and many wage earners whose jobs depend on agriculture
– orange pickers for instance – and tourism have lost their incomes. Many of
them work in our own community and have been hard at work removing downed trees
and serving up fancy meals at the country club to people whose homes have only
been cosmetically damaged and lightly at that. Residents of our community have
teamed up to raise funds to help them out.
Tourists
are avoiding southwest Florida, assuming we are devastated. We’re not.
Everything tourism-related is pretty much up and running. The malls are teeming
with people buying stuff they don’t need at post-hurricane sale prices.
Restaurants are packed with homeowners who’ve returned from their northern
homes to see that their properties are OK. Here in our development the streets
are lined with tree stumps, branches and other debris awaiting pick-up by city
workers. A man at the monthly meeting of the board that governs our community
complained city workers aren’t moving fast enough for him and proposed that we
try and find private companies to clear the debris, as if any of them aren’t
working. When you step outside, you hear chain saws and see FEMA trucks whose
workers are cutting overhead branches dangling above roadways. I find it odd
that FEMA trucks are in our gated community. Seems to me they’re needed more in
Houston and Puerto Rico.
We’ve heard
some amazing (and funny) stories. We had dinner the other night with a couple our
age who had intended to ride out the storm in their home but, once they were
ordered to evacuate, wound up spending two nights in a high school shelter. It
took them hours to check in because authorities first had to identify that they
(and the four thousand or so other shelter guests) weren’t registered sex
offenders. Had it been discovered they were, they would have been assigned
their own room with their fellow offenders where they could have presumably
molested each other. The day after the storm, knowing they had no electricity
at home, they headed toward Tampa in search of a hotel. Their worried son, who
had access to the Internet at his Georgia office, texted them the names of the
two or three hotels he was able to find that had available rooms. One of them
was a clothing-optional hotel. They came home.
Some well
meaning people have said the reason we escaped with minimal damage is that God was
looking out for us but I don’t buy that for a minute. If He was looking out for
us, why wasn’t He looking out for St. Maarten, Antigua, Barbuda, the Virgin
Islands, Puerto Rico and Cuba, whose residents have been decimated by Irma and
Hurricane Maria? Or for the 200,000 Houstonians whose homes were flooded by Harvey? Or
for the unfortunates lined up at the food pantries a few miles down the road
for cases of water, boxes of Keebler cookies, jars of peanut butter, packages
of cheap diapers and cans of tuna and pears imported from China? Yes, China.
The country where, when I was a kid, we were told people were starving, is now
sending food to poor Americans.
As my Aunt
Margaret used to say when confronted with a question for which there is no easy
answer, I don’t know. I just don’t know.
But I do
know and appreciate how, whatever God was or wasn’t doing, we got off lucky.
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Front yard of the house across the street, piled high with hurricane
debris awaiting removal. |
