Tag Archives: storm

Hurricane Irma, Personal Journal

Hurricane Irma: Who Needs Lights Anyway?

We just lost power.

We had a pretty good run as I followed many of my close neighbors over the last three hours, announcing their power loss.

Just when we thought we could be clear, and just while the whole family was enjoying reruns of “Frasier” on Netflix, buoooooom.

I think that’s the noise it made. Nothing. An eerie quiet. So we are breaking out the cards and the backgammon board.

I guess we will be going to sleep soon but the latest information tells us the most destructive (potentially) winds will arrive around 2 a.m. So we will be sleeping with one eye open, ready to gather the family and dive into our safe room (the master bedroom closet).

We laid down foam padding that I had stored and is coming in handy now if we have to spend any time on the floor of our closet.

Rain has been coming down steadily since early afternoon,  at times with loud winds and rain going horizontally. Trees have been stubbornly holding on to their branches so far.

That could change soon.

We still have wine. We are good.

Next update sometime early morning.
Gotta conserve power on the laptop and the phone’s hotspot.
Hurricane Irma, Personal Journal

Hurricane Irma: Of Battened Hatches and a Little Elbow Grease

The latest on the stormfront from Silvio LaFrossia as he awaits an unwelcome gust named Irma:

Completely battened down. Plywood on all windows.

A quick aside to those questioning the reasoning on plywood barricading homes when images from post-hurricane areas typically show total devastation of property. what can a thin sheet of plywood?

The plywood is not placed to keep the full fury of Mother Nature out. If she wants in, she will get in.

What the plywood is there for is to deflect Mother Nature’s minions in the shape of flying debris. These evil minions fly through the air, sometimes in less than full destructive hurricane wind speeds, finding uncovered windows, breaking in and thus allowing much of Mother Nature’s other henchmen, wind and rain, to enter the house and thoroughly destroy it from within.

Less than $300 worth of wood and some elbow grease can prevent a hurricane’s near-miss and outlier squall winds from totally ruining your home.

A final check of supplies found a bit of a dip in some essentials, bread, simple over the counter meds and wine. One quick trip to the local CVS fixed that.

I witnessed a local construction company’s unique way of securing its containers from becoming flying debris.

The latest track, emphatically relayed by the all day, all weather, news show had the center of the storm shifting out west a bit more than all the computer models and experts expected. These storms can be so fickle.

So the path out moves Orlando away from receiving the eye and strongest winds as it traveled up the peninsula. Now the storm will hug the west coast and threaten the coast from Fort Meyers all the way up to Tampa with its fiercest winds.