Life with Frances
This is going to be pretty quick, mostly because I'm supposed to be somewhere else in about 30 minutes, but I wanted to put something on the 'ole blog to make it official.
On Sunday, September 5th, 2004, at 12:30PM, Hurricane Frances knocked the power out of the house. Power was restored today, September 10th, around 2PM.
As far as hurricanes go, Frances caused very little wind damage.
Where Frances was devastating was that it kept raining on Gainesville
for 36 hours. We received somewhere between 20 and 24 inches of rain
between Sunday and Tuesday morning.
The water weakened the soil, and so, so many trees fell. Giant Laurel
Oaks, giants up to 100' tall, fell as if they were a bunch of tin
soldiers pushed over by an angry toddler.
We lost half of a pine tree. The top, snapped off like a toothpick,
hurtled towards the earth in front of our very eyes.
It missed Sandy's car by less than a foot.
After Frances left our tiny village, the restoration began. Life
started to renew itself, people started to move about, activity
started to flourish. Although 70,000 people were out of power, or had
their homes destroyed by felled giants, or found that their living
room had been returned to a primordial swamp, we persevered.
Neighbors helped neighbors. Paula brought us a bag of ice, so that we
may try to salvage the food in our freezer. The gesture was nice, but
it was for naught. We had to toss all of the food as it had gone
rancid and sour.
Ruth and Craig were the first ones to offer us a bed at night. They
knew the sweltering heat must have been intolerable, and we took them
up on their offer this past Wednesday.
On Thursday, Philip and Susan offered up their daughters bed so that
we may sleep in comfort. They moved Kate in with their son Thomas for
the evening. We shared with them a fine microbrew, Dogfish Head
Shelter Pale Ale. We figured it was a fitting beer given the
circumstances of our lodging.
Here's a copy of a letter I wrote to several dear friends around the
world. Those of you who did not receive it, I apologize, but I didn't
have access to my complete address book.
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 09:55:47 -0400 (EDT)
From: Ken Sallot
To: Ken Sallot
Subject: Living in Florida update
Hi there,
This is just a generic update on how things are going in Gainesville.
We're going on Day 5 without power at Casa Sallots. The latest word I
heard is that we'll get power by Monday, which would be about 8 days.
Life wasn't so bad until the skies cleared and warmed up the city --
it was 98F yesterday, and life without A/C or ceiling fans was pretty
miserable. Camping gear (thank you Coleman) allowed us to cook
indoors on Sunday and Monday, by Tuesday we were able to go to
restaurants.
We've also been coming up with ways to keep ourselves entertained and
busy; Sunday and Monday night we entertained ourselves by watching
DVD's on my powerbook, Tuesday we went to a friends place to watch a
movie, and last night we decided to spend the night over at another
friends.
Several sections of Gainesville are going to require a complete
rebuild of the electrical infrastructure. There were so many trees
that fell that it is impossible to just patch the electrical lines in
these areas. One fairly expensive neighborhood has been plagued with
sewage backing up into the houses because the lift stations have been
down; at least we don't have to contend with that.
The University re-opened for business yesterday, even though several
buildings on campus were flooded and shut down. My opinion was that
it was reckless to re-open when the major traffic intersections
feeding into the campus were without stop lights (power). At the very
least, it should have been University Police directing traffic rather
than City of Gainesville police.
Aside from that, it looks like Florida is about to get hit by another
hurricane. I find it amazing that in the nearly 30 years I've lived
here, I've never been through a hurricane. I can count the major
hurricanes that I remember hitting Florida on one hand (David, Andrew,
Opal), and now in a span of four weeks Florida will have been
devastated by 3 hurricanes. 6 of 8 computer models project a hit by
Ivan for Florida, 3 of which project landfall near the
Ft. Myers/Naples area; I suspect the crews are still reeling from
Charlie cleanup, it's just going to be ugly.
Here's a link with projections from the 8 different models:
http://www.sfwmd.gov/org/omd/ops/weather/plots/storm_09.gif
As a computer nerd, I'm impressed with the relative accuracy that the
models are displaying these days. Even just five years ago, the
hurricane models seemed to be no more accurate than throwing a dart at
a map, but the projections for Charlie and Frances were reasonably
accurate up to five days before, this has impressed me.
Well, that's about it. Our home phone is out, so if you need to reach
either of us, you can try me at work or on our cell phones:
Ken work - xxx-xxx-xxxx x xxx
Ken cell - xxx-xxx-xxxx
Sandy cell - xxx-xxx-xxxx
Take care,
Ken & Sandy
So, life continues once again. Take care my friends.
Posted at: 20:55 on 10/09/2004
[ /diary ]
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