What a story, Malcolm! I was thinking about you as Irma approached. You responded to a crisis about as perfectly as one could. Hurricane preparedness pamphlets should include the lessons you shared.
Two months ago we answered the call of a friend in Connecticut who asked for help fixing up her house to put on the market. What was supposed to be 2-3 weeks turned into 2 months. I was without my passwords for SMC and all my emails but one so I was "dark" for the time we were there. We arrived home late Monday night.
We were able to find a live broadcast out of Ft. Myers through YouTube while in CT. Every report looked increasingly worse. Just 24 hours before Irma was predicted to roll right over us, storm surge predictions were 6-9 feet, worst case scenario. We prepared ourselves to be homeless.
Inexplicably, Irma veered a bit to the east as it approached us. The eye passed about 10-15 miles to the east of us. Winds here were estimated to be around 100 MPH as the storm approached but dropped to around 65 by the time we were even with the eye. That's the report we got from our 85 year old neighbor who rode it out. He's an ex-Air Force pilot, so who am I to question?
Unbelievably, our house was undamaged. We didn't even lose a screen panel. I'm still baffled as to how this happened. Next door they lost their entire screen cage that blew up and over their house and landed across the street between the houses. On the other side of us they had water intrusion they contributed to the wind forcing rain water through the cinder block and into the house. Never heard of anything like that before.
The worst damage to the city was losing 15 miles of seawall. The canals drained and with no water to hold the ground back, many failed. Every house on our side of our block had seawall failure, except ours. The only thing I can contribute as to why our seawall didn't fail is because we regularly maintain it according to city recommendations. Maybe we were just lucky. Some houses are in danger of slab erosion, if we get many more heavy rains.
On our drive back into town we must have seen over a thousand line trucks leaving the state. Some came from as far as Quebec. Driving down I-95 and I-75, we didn't see much tree damage. We thought we'd see trees stripped of leaves but we didn't see any of that. I watched videos of Irma passing through our city and compared them to videos of when Hurricane Charley passed through in 2004. Not even comparable.
My heart goes out to those who took the brunt of these storms. While I hoped we wouldn't lose our home I also was acutely aware wishing it away meant someone else would suffer. We'll be going out for a while helping those who didn't fare as well as we did. And, in time, life will return to normal...
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness..." - Mark Twain