Sandy Versus Irma

I was feeling pretty sorry for myself as I walked Rusty in the green and pleasant land that is Palm Beach County.  I contrasted what I saw and compared it to where I live 200 miles away in a burnt out desert. He saw  bright green iguanas lounging in perfect safety on a  bunch of ficus roots across the canal. He had taken a decent walk so now was his time to hunker and observe. So he did: 

Then I met Bob Vecchione from Long Island. He came by and asked me how I was doing. For some reason I blurted my tale of car buying under storm duress and he had  his own way of cheering me up. He had survived Hurricane Sandy on Long Island. Now retired in Florida he was hit with two waves of seawater from both sides during that massive hurricane and his car barely survived yet he still drives it today, with a pinch of nostalgia I suspect.

His perspective on the random irrationality of powerful storms was interesting to me as he confirmed my own suspicions about hurricane preparation. I think we do it more to please ourselves and reassure ourselves that we have done what's possible. Certainly some actions will help but all too often people who take no precautions at all often end up with less damage than those of us who obsess over every detail of our storm response plan.

He told me about his neighbors who did nothing and came through unscathed and he talked about the slow and aggravating period of recovery. He empathized, it actually felt good talking to a stranger.

Rusty enjoyed running through the grass but while we talked he sat and stared at his nemesis across the water. Bob told me the ficus tree had been huge and shady and was cut down just a month before. He muttered it had seemed a shame at the time but now with all those reports of trees knocked over by high winds...

Rusty and I wandered back to breakfast at the hotel cutting across dew covered fields and avoiding spandex cyclists who ran hither and yon in upscale Boca Raton.

At the breakfast table we overheard a guest engage in a conversation, a monologue perhaps, with an employee. At one point the hail-fellow-well-met traveling businessman sympathized with the hotel employee saying how much damage he had seen and how much easier Tampa had it from Irma. My wife and I burst into spontaneous laughter. Indeed I'm sure the city of Boca Raton was in a huge uproar over the tipping of some ornamental plants in their pots...

Leafless winter in the Keys...and my electric blue Fusion to replace my bland tan Fusion that drowned. It's not a worthy thought I know but still I had to wonder how many cars drowned in Boca Raton?

Hurricane Sandy And Keys Energy

Seven lineman and several trucks took off for New York ten days ago from sunny Key West. It's been cool and windy down here, overnight lows managing to get just below sixty degrees one night, but that's as nothing compared to what these tropical workers found in the Empire State.

I had heard the trucks were heading north but the newspaper reported their services weren't required. What the paper failed to report was that they were redirected even though they lack proper winter clothing! Poor buggers! You can see in these pictures, from the Keys Energy website how their clothing is trying to reflect conditions as they traveled north, shirt sleeves at home and jackets blending in with brown Fall leaves on the road and woolly watch caps in the snow...

It took two days to drive up to New York with three bucket trucks, a utility truck and a pole trailer. In fact Delaware, unscathed, turned down the help but on November First the Long Island Power utility stepped up and asked for the Keys' help, workers who have more experience than most dealing with hurricane damage. But not like this.

It may seem odd but I know half a dozen of my young colleagues in Key West, Conchs born on or around the island, who have never seen snow, thus it was the cause of some great merriment to see their friends and neighbors trying to do their job in conditions that aren't just trying but downright peculiar if you have lived your life in the only frost-free town on the continent.

I heard stories that the utility workers also faced the stereotypical bad humor of people who like to live in New York who chose to berate our utility men for their "delayed" response. And it did them no good to protest they had trudged all the way from distant warm Key West to help. And all joking aside, help they did, and are helping, seen here in a place that goes by the unhappy name of Hicksville, New York.

It's a funny story to read about our people working in forty degree weather and worse, repairing lines with snow on the ground, but the post hurricane conditions in New York and New Jersey are a source of a lot of comment in Key West where surviving a storm is matter of course. Not in blizzard conditions of course.

Perhaps it is because we half expect hurricanes any summer, perhaps because we live so obviously close to the source of stormy discomfort, the ocean, that we live our lives half prepared for disaster. I would be embarrassed to run out of fuel food and water within three days of a hurricane strike. Granted I have a good job and thus disposable income thanks to my lack of offspring, but I make sure to have supplies on hand year round. It's a way of life. It was shocking to see the widespread helplessness in the face of an act of natural ferocity whose arrival was accurately predicted for days ahead of the actual event. I am proud of the help that our tiny community sent Up North and admire their tenacity in conditions I never particularly wish to see again, never mind work in. Good for them.

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Watching Hurricane Sandy

Last night I took this picture on the way home from a fund raising dinner on Stock Island. It was just after seven o'clock and the sky was a blue and pink and purple mess, just one more breezy, cool, yet essentially serene Florida Keys sunset.

It was seventy degrees and the north wind has been blowing cool dry air for days so I have taken to wearing my windproof vest in these Autumnal conditions. I know it sounds silly but when your blood is used to eighty or more degrees day and night, seventy degrees (known locally as 'zero degrees') feels cold on the skin. The air conditioner was off in the car for the first time since April. It wasn't the cold that forced me to take the car, rather it was because I had a frisky Cheyenne now unwilling to be left at home when she could be out walking. My Labrador loves these cool winter days and her summer hibernation in air conditioning is over for a few months. This next picture is of the south side of Big Coppitt which was protected from the breeze and the waters of the bay looked as smooth and glassy as a pond in the dying light of day.

And then as we sit here in peace and serenity in the fabulous Florida Keys enjoying a refreshing end of October, a break at last from the heat and humidity of summer, we hear that Hurricane Sandy is wrecking New Jersey and New York. And on top of that a massive winter storm is preparing to blanket parts of the northeast with snow. I mean, how weird is that? A hurricane and snow at the same time. The young Conchs I work with have never seen snow, except on the screen, and the idea of the two mixed up all together is fascinating and as unimaginable as meeting a Yeti on the street. Down here, in the land where a Category One hurricane is a matter of no great moment, the levels of panic seen Up North are every bit as startling as the notion of a snowy hurricane landing on your house. All I could think was that a snowdrift would put a serious damper on the hurricane parties traditionally held in the Keys.

But then when we look at Hurricane Sandy's impact on New Jersey and New York we know that self important reporters will call this a "killer" storm, not because brown people in tropical Haïti or the Bahamas died as it made its way north, but because Americans actually died when it rolled across our coast. These aren't people living in shanties or on low lying islands in some foreign land. These are our neighbors whose subways have flooded whose Amtrak trains have stopped running and whose planes are grounded. Electricity is cut off and by Key West standards unheated homes now without power face the prospect of becoming ice boxes. I mean, seriously, who wants to live through a hurricane that brings frigid temperatures in it's wake? In our islands a hurricane, even one that leaves behind devastation also leaves us sweating and buggy and uncomfortable but not hypothermic ferchrissakes!

 

Down here waterside dining is still a peaceful and enjoyable activity, the cool temperatures revealed by the long sleeves on the shirts in the photograph above. I find it remarkable when we are busy getting ready for a storm and the rest of the country barely seems to notice. After Wilma it was surreal dealing with the flooding that went almost unnoticed, overshadowed by the vaster more fearsome destruction caused just weeks earlier by Katrina, while the rest of the country went about its business as usual. And this summer I never noticed the appalling drought until I flew to Iowa and saw the entire state reduced to a brown crisp. It's only when it's in your home is the disaster real. And in this case I hardly know the affected areas at all. This is what I know:

I listened to NPR yesterday (91.5 from Miami) and it was astonishing how parochial, how community-radio-like the national network sounded. They were all excited and aroused by the storm in their own backyard. Similar winds and floods down here produce a yawn from the hardened newscasters in the nation's capital. Sods. Still I suppose there is a reason people still ask how we poor convicts manage hurricanes on our tiny lumps of rock cast into the middle of this big warm ocean like errant hurricane bait chumming for wind. It seems to me, considering the recent major quake in British Columbia, fires and drought across the US and now snow to blanket West Virginia while frigid winter is already shriveling testicles in Alaska, these funny little islands are doing quite well so far in the awful weather stakes. My wife goes back to California next week for a wedding and more than anything she will bitch about how cold and damp beautiful San Francisco is. Lucky her, she gets real Mexican food and superb Indian and Chinese cuisine while I'm stuck here with Cuban bread and palomilla steak if I want to go "ethnic". I just hope an earthquake or a mudslide or a forest fire don't get her while she's away from the safety of the Florida Keys where eighty five degrees is the forecast high all next week.

 

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