Well it looks like my weekend is going to be a busy one putting my life away for an encounter with Tropical Storm Fay sometime Monday night or Tuesday morning. That's if we are lucky and Fay gets a move on and hits us quickly, before it has time to pick up strength. A Category One doesn't sound like much but 74 miles per hour sustained can do a number of outdoor furniture, coconuts and all the other loosely organized paraphernalia of outdoor life.
The police department is trying to figure out the timing of this one and we may all be ordered in to work Monday and get locked into the Police Station for the duration. Lots of overtime follows from that but it also means sleeping in a cot in a building filled with armed people bursting with adrenaline. I have had the hallucinatory experience in previous storms of coming out of the stall rubbing myself briskly with a my towel to find myself surrounded by men half my age bristling with helmets and guns, which some might find invigorating but just did not work for me.
.
City officials will doubtless order a mandatory evacuation if Fay continues to follow the predicted path. That means people who elect to stay (not visitors, hotels shut down and force them out) will find themselves without help when the shit hits the fan. people tend to be very brave when the hurricane is 24 hours away, but by the time the real winds start to blow people get anxious and start to call the police and we tell them that a mandatory evacuation has been declared which means in turn that the hospital is closed and emergency personnel lock down when sustained winds reach 35 miles per hour. By that time people start to get scared as the increasing force of the wind brings home to them how helpless we are in the face of a determined natural event.
.
In the police station I know things are going downhill when we lose the Internet. Before the storm the number of calls tapers off as people are busy. After the storm people call about everything imaginable, and we get extremely busy. And as we are still locked down we have no idea what happened to our own homes. After Wilma I drove home at six in the morning and picked up a stray dog in my car on North Roosevelt (I put the motorcycle away for storms) and dodged boats blown onto the Overseas Highway for miles outside Key West on my drive home. They lay across the road in the pre-dawn darkness like beached whales, some blown 15 miles from the Key West Harbor where they had been anchored. Hopefully this one won't replicate Wilma for us.
.
This rather unpleasant experience is our cross to bear, not unlike the California fires, the Midwest floods or tornadoes. At least after the storm we will be recovering in the Keys, eaten to death by mosquitoes perhaps but not getting hypothermia. Its important to look on the bright side in these situations.
.
And on that note I got Sparky back to his home safe and sound, thanks to the helpful people at the SPCA who kept a list of animals gone missing. His owner had had him since college and was frantic to get him back.
3 comments:
Conch:
My prayers and thoughts are with you guys at zero. I can recall being one of those guys armed with adrenaline and bristling with guns when my area was hit with back to back (to back) storms not too long ago. It sucked in proportions that "sucked" just can't adequately express (as you well know). Weeks with a few hours (if any) of sleep a day, feet soaked and wrinkled, kids grumpy and sticky as the byproduct of being electrically challenged and having to do without the comfort of climate control, eating rations provided by the gaurd (and being thankful for them!)... It definitely makes one appreciate the little things on a much different level.
Take good care of yourselves and hunker down the best that you can. And know that, should nature have a larger calamity in store for our beloved keys greater than what is to be expected, there are a battalions of us that will head south bristling again with adrenaline and gear to lend a hand just as you all did when we were brought to our knees and humbled in the way that only nature can...
Not to worry, so far it just looks inconvenient, but we will have to wait and see what everything looks like in 24 hours. This storm loks like it will test the oft-spouted theory that cuba's mountains wll break up a hurricane approaching from the south. Prayers? Sure- guns -nah thanks we'll be fine.
In less than a year, my wfe and I will be living on United Street and I can't fiqure any way of bringing our Tartan 33 sailboat. Are you just supposed to kiss it goodbye when the storms come? We're thinking, leave it on the Chesapeake and when we need a break from paradise, shift gears up the coast.
On another subject; flying coconuts.. Do people really get charged for the damage their trees coconuts cause in storms? I want to have these trees on our property but have been warned about liability issues.. How does anyone actually prove whose nuts did what..came out kinda funny.
Good luck with Fay. Your blog has been great reading for us. I can't thank you enough for your insights into Key West life.
Charlie Whitten
Post a Comment