My dad's elderly brother lives in Florida - 136 miles NNE of Key West in "zone B" - people in "zone A" have been evacuated ...
Hopefully he has an attic ...
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I'm in Zone A (down the street from Harlem Heights, in the map of the area.
frogwoman for your reference - the cows we walked to are 2 blocks away [roughly] from the Heights). There are no attics or basements in Floridian residential buildings. We're built on sand and shells.
How long does it take for the eye to pass?
about an hour apparently ... that seems like a MASSIVE amount of time. Mind you it is a big storm.
Took an hour on the dot to pass and then it started up again in the other direction. We lost power minutes after the eye passed.
To whoever questioned about Naples: Collier County was bad. Marco Island and Naples got the brunt of the storm for the county. Lee County (me) got bad as well, but the main city that got the brunt was Lehigh and North Fort Myers from what I heard.
It's been a rough couple of days. We were getting phone calls and text alerts from the Emergency Management line all afternoon and then into the night on Friday. It wasn't until 9 Friday night went we got a call saying if you haven't gotten out by now, get to a shelter. My cousin's neighbour owns a house across town, and since he is a snowbird, the place is empty. My cousin has a key and the neighbour said "use my house; I'm out of the flood zone". My mum and I got things moved around our house as much as we could Friday night, backed a "go bag" and were picked up Saturday morning by my cousin. You can't bring anything extraneous when you do this... only important papers (insurance information, passports, IDs), money, jewelry (for those who wear it), and "at least 3 days worth of clothes and food". My neighbours decided to wait it out in the unit upstairs from me. They ended up seeking shelter at the hospital down the street Saturday night because one of the blokes took to a panic attack.
Once we got to Joe's on Saturday, everyone settled in and waited for the storm to arrive. The only problem? Joe may not be in a flood zone area, but his house is wide open. No shutters were up...the windows were barren of any type of boarding. He said the glass was hurricane / shatter proof, so we prayed he was right (he's in his 80s). There was nothing we could do - no one we knew in that community to put the shutters up. It takes 3 hours to do, and we didn't have that luxury. So we had to suck it up. We had power that night and it started raining.
Sunday was when the storm started coming. It moved at a snail's pace, and we were following the progression on the news. I had packed my Roku "just in case" we could have access to Internet and wanted to watch Netflix. What the hell, right? The wifi was spotty as hell because Joe doesn't have internet in his house (I was catching a free hotspot signal from one of his neighbours). Nor does he have cable TV. It's a good thing I had my Roku because we were using the ABCNews / CBSNews / NBCNews and local Fox affiliate apps to follow it all. It started getting real windy and rainy and bad around 12:30pm, so we knew something was coming; it'd be only a matter of time. By 2pm, the eye was in Marco Island and making its way towards us. We got white out conditions round 6pm, and by 6:30 it was dead calm. An hour later to the money, storm picked up again and reversed its tracks, going in the opposite direction. We lost power round 7:30, after having power go out intermittently from 4pm onward. Power was restored after midnight as we found out Joe's on the same electrical grid as a fire department.
We didn't get any flooding in Joe's, but we did watch the water rise in the street Sunday night. It didn't recede until 7am Monday - a full 13 hours after we first noticed it. Monday was calm, but a lot of vegetation damage. The lanai cage had screen damage, but that was the extent of harm Joe's house occurred. Fallen trees down his street caused back up, but it was cleared by the afternoon. We were able to take a ride back to my community and it looked like a war zone. No structural damage to any of the houses, but debris and down trees were everywhere. It no longer looks like a Hollywood movie set,
frogwoman! Major intersections and parts of the city had no power and still have no power. It was hard trying to drive across town because of the lack of power.
A neighbour called us yesterday morning saying they finally got power restored. So we packed the car up and drove back to my house. My cousin was going back to Joe's because her community still didn't have power, and as I write this, it is still in the dark. She may be across town for a few more days.
We were all so lucky to not be in the major devastation part of the area / state, but the hotels I work in weren't so lucky. One of the Naples hotels had part of their roof collapse and I know Marco Island is looking ugly. My hotel is still without power and based on what it looks like during regular rain storms, I reckon it's going to be a few weeks before it opens back up. So no work this week and most of next week thus far for me.
I plan on copying this onto my blog within the next couple days and adding photos and videos. I'm in the process of getting everything squared up and put together.
Thanks for positive thinking... it could have been a lot worse for the area I'm in as well as other parts of the state. I wish the ones who got it worse than me have an easy time trying to make sense and odds of things. It's hard and it's not fun, but "you can rebuild houses. You can't rebuild your life" (although the death toll is getting up there in places).
