….Ten years ago, we were all dealing with the wrath of Hurricane Frances. 2004 proved to be the worst season for Florida in the history of the state. Virtually every square inch of Florida was affected in some shape or form.
At the time, I was working at the Stuart K Mart. Since I was carefully monitoring the progress and models of Frances, everybody was waiting for to see when I was going to leave the area. They knew that at that point it was time to take action. Since I was in charge of horticulture, it was my responsibility to be sure all the plants and anything that could blow away was moved inside from the outside garden area. It was a very long and painstaking process to get everything secured.
Once getting the store ready, it was time to head home and make the hard decision to stay or to leave. At the time, Frances was ripping up the Bahamas as a cat 3 storm. Knowing that intensity forecasts are not very accurate, I felt it was time to leave the area. The last thing I wanted was to see a category 4 or 5 hurricane heading to our doorstep. We made the hard decision to evacuate to Naples. Knowing what the current track was and what the model suite trends were, this was the closest and best place to evacuate to. The last thing I wanted was to be heading north (as many folks did) and be chased by the storm. Since most people evacuated to the north, traffic going south and west was not bad at all. Traffic going North along the TPK was extremely heavy with lines at the gas stations extremely long.
We finally arrived at Naples where we made reservations at an apartment complex that was actually for Ford employees when they were in Florida on vacation. We tried to make our stay more like a vacation then an evacuation. We visited the zoo and ate at Joe’s Crabshack. During the height of the storm on the Treasure Coast, I remember being in a Radio Shack store watching the slow progress of the hurricane. The area was lucky as the system lost a lot of punch as it made its way ashore.
Since I took all my computer equipment with me, Ross (my son) and I set up our systems and we were able to maintain updates to our websites through the use of a dial up connection.
Although it got windy, the effects were no where near what the Treasure Coast was experiencing. We stayed at that location for almost a week. We came back when we knew all the roads were clear and travel would be safe. Fortunately besides lost shingles, the structure of our house was fine. Our yard, however, looked like a war zone and a tree took down all our wires and pulled the meter right off the house. We were very fortunate especially after we saw some of the damage that was evident all around us.
With power out to a major part of the state, we were able to function with the use of our generator. Having a generator is a definite must when a hurricane strikes. It took a good part of 2 weeks to get our power back on.
We finally got our power back and now we were watching another system in the Atlantic that initially looked like it was going to pass by us. Boy were we wrong. The subtropical ridge to the north closed in and formed a “block” that would not allow hurricane Jeanne to pass through. Jeanne then made a complete loop and was headed to Florida in almost the same exact spot that Frances hit just 2 weeks ago. It was like a nightmare. All the preparations would have to be done again. We again made the hard decision to evacuate and we made reservations at the same l; location in Naples. During that second storm, we already had a damaged roof so we did not know how the house was going to hold up to yet another blow.
As we rode around Naples we were making plans on where we might live or work if the Treasure Coast was destroyed. Again, the area got lucky as the system lost some punch as it made its way onshore near Seawalls Point in almost the exact same spot as Jeanne did just a couple of weeks ago. The chances of that happening twice in any season are very rare.
The storm came and went and after about 4 days we again returned home to a structurally sound house. The damage was not as bad since all the trees were already stripped of leaves and branches from Frances. We again had to make use of our generator in order to keep the refrigerator, lights and computers running. This time, my DSL line kept working right through the storm and never missed a beat.
The season was so busy that we actually ran out of names and they started to have to use the Greek Alphabet for naming the storms. Experts were all saying that was the beginning of a 10 to 20 year cycle.
2005 was also a busy year where we got slammed with a back door storm called Wilma. That storm is a whole different story.
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Stormtracker Joe Zelenak. Tracking storms since 1999.http://www.hometownweather.net .