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.

Fay 2

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Smurf Village

A good few years ago when I was taking a call for service in New Town my supervisor leaned over, looked at the address on the computer monitor and said, "Ah, Smurf Village." And then pretended to ignore me. Denise knew well enough that my curiosity would kill me, and she knew I was always interested in her stories of growing up in the "good old days..."

"It was a new development," she said, relenting finally with a smile. "They built a whole bunch of duplexes, with overhanging roofs like mushrooms, and painted them bright blue." Everyone thought they looked like the homes of cartoon Smurfs, popular at the time, so in a town that lives and dies by nicknames, the title stuck:

Since those early days the new homeowners have repainted them of course, various shades of this and that:

Smurf Village lies north of Flagler Avenue between 16th Street and 14th Street (14th unhappily also goes by the name of Glynn Archer Drive to make it more confusing) and Duck Avenue. Smurf Village is bisected by a couple of smaller one way streets, Pearl and Harriet, New Town additions to the list of women's names gracing Key West streets: As well as the larger, and straighter, thoroughfare called Eagle Avenue:These are all streets with fairly abundant greenery which adds to the charm, and homeowners in Smurf Village enjoy duplexes with yards large enough to grow a bush or two:I haven't heard the term Smurf Village used in a while so perhaps it has faded from the lips of newer arrivals, perhaps the Smurfs are no longer the craze they once were and perhaps too, people who paid half a million or more for their duplex may not want to think of themselves as living in a cartoon character's toadstool. Even though they do boast those pronounced overhangs and easily identified silhouettes: Make no mistake these are duplexes:I know a couple of people who live in Smurf Village and I understand the interiors with two beds and two baths boast about 1200 square feet of space, a nice size for a Key West home. These days I'm told some of the less fancy homes -no central air, no swimming pool- are offered for less than $200,000, and the more upscale ones are offered around $300,000 so working folks could get a pretty decent home in this very pleasant neighborhood:And like everywhere else in Key West, when it comes to real estate, if you wait long enough it will come on the market:This sign looked pretty weathered so a cute Smurf home with pool may or may not still be looking for a happy new owner...