Storm Preparations

Well bugger. Its official, all leave is cancelled and we get locked down Sunday at work. The good news for me is I am ordered in at midnight Sunday (overtime!) which gives me time to get the house sorted. In the spirit of this emergency I have postponed my planned essays around town and the Keys and will be writing storm related essays as long as the Internet is up, about what I'm doing and what is happening. I apologize to those that come here for rest and relaxation and a few nice pictures but the storm is sort of uppermost in my mind even though it can't seem to make up its mind about how strong it should be nor which direction it should take. And for those of you dreaming or planning a life in the Keys, this is just the Serpent in Paradise that one has to deal with every summer...

And yes I have cut down my coconuts, not because I could get sued, as ownership is hard to prove but because they become cannonballs in 100 mile-per-hour winds. Coconuts are non native trees and are prolific so it takes work to keep them trimmed and I harvest hundreds of coconuts from the dozen mature trees I inherited around my home. My house is a stilt home and we use the downstairs for storage, as a workshop as an outdoor laundry and we hang our clothes to dry down here too. Stilt homes are handy not only for flood avoidance purposes but because all wiring and plumbing is easily visible overhead if anything breaks. Plus you get tons of shade to keep cars and motorcycles out of the sun which is the real ruin down here, not necessarily fresh clean rain that washes everything off.

Next to the Bonneville (which I will cover and strap to one of the house's supporting columns tomorrow) I have the black filtration tanks for my rainwater collection system which uses pumps to filter and push the water up into the house from our 12,000 gallon water tank. The main tank actually forms the deck alongside the house:The barbeque grill (which will get strapped down to the deck) sits on the cement chamber that would store 12,000 gallons did it not suffer from periodic leaks...be that as it may we haven't run out of rainwater in the past 18 months and we only use the piped aqueduct water to run our washing machine mostly. My home was built in 1987 among the first in the subdivision before electricity and water were supplied to the street.

I have a sturdy wooden shed and all my outdoor crap has to get stored in there which is a monumental jigsaw puzzle and it may explain why we take so long to figure out what to buy for outdoor furniture.Furniture should fold or collapse, be comfortable lightweight and stack able. These are not the normal criteria but when we buy stuff we try to picture ourselves in this very position: storm coming!

I have a small (2400watt) gasoline generator by Yamaha. It can power the fridge (800 watts) lights fans and TV/DVD player (we don't have satellite or cable reception) and of course Sirius Satellite Radio- all the essentials except a/c. We decided to go with small and portable in our generator for simplicity and ease of maintenance and it is also very quiet; you can talk while standing right next to it. I might have gone for the Honda 1000 but I like the Yamaha dealers at Garrison Bight much more than Victor the Honda dealer on Simonton Street...

I have a skiff at our dock,a 14 foot Dusky which is self bailing (very important for those sudden summer squalls that drop four inches of water while you are at work!) and it rode out all the storms of 2005 at the dock...but I decided I need to get it together to put it on the trailer and stop pushing my luck:

And then I take an hour and secure my hurricane shutters to the windows of which I have 10 of various sizes around the home. I am lucky in that I enjoy wide side decks all round and that makes the job very simple compared to some people who have to climb ladders holding onto these sheets of corrugated aluminum:They slide into the upper frame on the window and are screwed in using butterfly nuts at the bottom, overlapping as you go:This type are laborious and awkward to use especially if you don't have decks to walk on, but I think they are the most secure and my insurance company agrees. Modern sliding shutters are very easy to use and are very good also while plywood sheets are a pain in the ass t nail up, labor intensive and awakward to store.

My house looks like a turtle when the shutters are in place and they make the interior dark and bunker like and a little creepy. Plus any slight breeze rattles them and they sound like the four horsemen of the apocalypse closing in. That was hard to take when I spent four lonely days waiting for Wilma to hit in 2005...my wife was safe Up North while I chewed my fingernails while sitting on the deck watching a cloudless sky, day after day.

So, I've got to get busy putting stuff away this hot Saturday afternoon and somehow, no matter how careful and obsessive we are about not being pack rats the crap accumulates!

The nasty part about Hurricanes (as opposed to California Earthquakes with which I am very familiar) is that you know its coming and you have a good idea when. The details may be fuzzy but there is that empty space in the put of your stomach hoping everything will still be here when you get back from being locked down at the Police Station...Meanwhile skies are blue and its a great day to be in the Keys:That's looking south towards Cuba whence cometh Fay. I hope its"only" a Category One, or pehaps a modest near miss.