Three days ago Tropical Storm Katrina approached the south Florida coastline, intensifying to a category 1 hurricane as it made landfall at the Miami-Dade/Broward County line (an area between Miami & Fort Lauderdale). Hurricane forecasters predicted it would come in north of Fort Lauderdale and travel northwest across the state.
We were told it would be a major rain-event. Rain?? Barely a Cat 1 storm? Should we put up the hurricane shutters? Nah!! No time for that. Most people in south Florida made the same decision.
They said the winds would be worst in the middle of the night, to early morning hours. Most employers kept their employees at work all day. But the storm came ashore much earlier than expected (dinnertime on Thursday night), we lost power immediately at 5:30pm. Reporters were amazed at how many people were still out driving on the expressways. Well, what the hell!! No one expected the winds to pickup so soon. Someone has dropped the ball here.
This was our first time riding out a storm with no hurricane shutters. With shutters on all the windows you have no idea what is happening outside other than hearing the wind and rain. Your imagination tries to fill-in the missing images. I don't know what's worse . . . imagining the power of the winds, or actually seeing the power of the wind gusts on the trees . . . it was quite scary. These were probably just 50-60 mph gusts. Having no radar images on TV to monitor the progress of the storm, we relied on listening to the radio. The storm was coming right at us . . . yikes!! But where is all the rain they talked about? The storm started to take a southwesterly track down into the Miami-Dade county area. Well, well, won't they all be surprised? No one in Miami is prepared for this. It ended up dumping up to 20 inches of rain in some areas and flooded many city streets in Miami.
Usually the worst quadrant of a hurricane is the northeast quadrant of the storm. Oddly enough, the heaviest areas of rain came to its southeast quadrant. This spared our area from any significant rain.
But power was lost to 1.3 million homes. After a day without power, and no A/C, its was hot and humid . . . people started griping about when electricity would be restored. This was no big deal for us. We are campers and setup the propane stove on our screened-in front porch and cooked our meals.
We lost a couple of large limbs from the 30 ft tall Crepe Myrtle tree in our front yard. They fell onto the driveway just barely missing my husband's truck. Friday was very cloudy and breezy and we spent the morning, clearing the yard debris that was everywhere. My neighbor from across the street pulled up with his pickup truck, and started to chop up the tree limbs for me with his machete. He called it his "cuban chain saw". Dang, that thing was sharp! He loaded up debris from some other neighbors and took it all away to the dump for us. That was really cool! We have some of the nicest neighbors on our street.
My friend "Mimi" put her fingers to her head that day and said she was predicting to have power back on that night by 10pm. All the neighbors gathered in the carport at Mimi's that night talking it up and joking around. We joked about her prediction and griped some about where the hell the FPL crews were. At 9pm, the flashing lights of the FPL (FL Power & Light) drove down our street. We all jumped up and cheered and applauded their arrival. They waved as they went down the street assessing where the source of the problem was. At 10:20pm our lights cames back on . . . YEAH!!!! Everyone jumped up and run back to their homes to put their A/C's back on. Mimi said we looked like a bunch of cockroaches that scurried out of sight when the lights came on.
What a minor inconvenience this hurricane was for us. I watch sadly at what destruction it will now bring to the Louisiana area.
