Got Those Hurricane Blues

By the time you read this, we will either have suffered a cataclysmic hurricane of nearly unprecedented intensity, lucked out, or landed someplace between. As we went to press, it was still not possible to know. Whichever way it goes down, this was one hell of a week, one that none of us are likely to forget anytime soon.

To be honest, I’ve never been that worried about dealing with a hurricane in Bradenton–before this week, anyway. Our area has been historically safe, or at least lucky, and I’ve kind of had this latent belief that you’re only likely to suffer a major one once in your life–or at least the first half of it.

I had my first run in with a major hurricane only three years after moving to Florida from Connecticut in late 2001. My ex-wife and I built our first home in North Port in late 2003. We did this only because the real estate bubble had priced us out of the Sarasota market, where we'd been living in an apartment that, like many apartment complexes of the day, had made the decision to convert into condos.

As if living in North Port wasn't awful enough on its own, we had moved in just months before the epic 2004 Atlantic hurricane season. After closing on the house in December of '03, our son was born the following St. Paddy’s Day. We were still getting settled when Hurricane Alex hit the East Coast that summer, followed only a week later by Tropical Storm Bonnie.

Failing to suffer anything more than heavy rain, we weren't that nervous when Charley, which had formed as a tropical wave off Africa in early August, began making its way across the Atlantic. Even when it became clear that it would make landfall as a powerful hurricane on the gulf coast, nearly every model showed the Tampa region as bearing the bulk of the storm's fury.

However, a quick an improbable last-second right turn late in the afternoon of August 13–Friday the 13th no less–sent Charley right toward us. I’d only decided to put the hurricane shutters up that morning as a cautionary measure, and we’d done little else to prepare, aside from getting some bottled water and non-perishables at the store the day before.

Then, literally the moment before we lost power and the television screen blackened, the weatherman announced a major shift in the storm’s trajectory with a graphic that seemed to draw a straight line through our front-yard as the projected path of the eye of the storm. It was like a scene from a cheesy disaster flick.

Suddenly, the idea of our roof getting blown off and our not-quite-five-month-old infant being pulled into the sky Wizard of Oz style, while clay-tiles shot off as deadly projectiles, became a justified fear. The best plan I could come up with was to strap him to my ex-wife in one of those front-load baby carriers, put turtle shell motorcycle helmets on each of their heads, then stuff them inside of our most interior closet and–as an added and admittedly ridiculous precaution–make an arch of our mattress over top of them in case the roof collapsed, while I climbed into the nearby garden tub.

Hurricane Charley made landfall in Charlotte Harbor on the north end of Captiva Island as a category 4 storm with 150-mph winds. It was the strongest hurricane to strike the United States since Andrew decimated south Florida just 12 years earlier. Our house was in the far southeast corner of Sarasota County, just a stone's throw from Port Charlotte and in no time at all, Charley was ripping right through the neighborhood. For about 45 minutes, a noise like a train whistle howled, and a peek out the window showed the corner stop sign had been flattened, while wind gusts uprooted trees and unsecured garbage cans and recyclable bins were carried along like plastic bags blowing in the wind.

We were fortunate enough to be just to the left of the eye of the storm as it moved north–the safest spot–and suffered minimal damage. Our electric grid had recently been upgraded, and while most of the surrounding area was out of power for weeks, we were back on in just 12 hours. Only blocks away, however, houses had been decimated. Punta Gorda, just a 10 minute drive, had the bad fortune of being situated in the fiercest pocket just right of the hurricane's eye. It had been turned into a pile of rubble with thousands of roofs in Lee and Charlotte counties ripped right off their houses and mobile homes shredded like aluminum cans during a Ginsu knife demonstration. When the waters receded, even the unscathed homes, which had no AC because of the power outages, were quickly eaten up by black mold. For miles, blue tarps and FEMA trailers dotted the landscape.

Charley was a different kind of hurricane. Fast-moving, narrow and intense, it zipped right across the state, back to the Atlantic and made a second landfall up the Eastern Seaboard with muted intensity. As we’ve learned from hurricanes like Katrina and Harvey, slow moving storms that hover over land, dumping rainfall measured by the foot are a special kind of awful. Just two weeks ago, the tail end of Harvey dumped so much rain on our community that it was hard to imagine we were separated from the hurricane landfall itself by the entire Gulf of Mexico.

As Irma approached this week, taking its time and with the sort of unpredictability that leaves tens of millions with little to do but stock up on essentials and let the stress eat away at them from the inside out, there was an ominous feeling in the air. Heavy, intermittent rain and flash flooding seemed to signal that no matter the path–the projections of which they seemed to be adjusting by the hour–none of us would be completely spared. The best we could hope for it seemed was to still have an intact home when it was all over, a precious fortune that was reinforced by all of those recent news clippings from Houston.