Goodnight Irene
Surely everyone has heard all about hurricane Irene and all the damage it has caused up and down the eastern coast. What a bummer! We took a moderate risk vacationing in the Florida Keys in August – pretty much peak hurricane season down there. It is especially risky because storms can fly in from the Gulf of Mexico or from the Dominican Republic. Having been evacuated from the tiny island of Key Colony Beach twice in my life, I was really dreading the evacuation notices once we found out about the hurricane. I think we found out that it was coming tracking our way on Aug 21-22nd and that they suspected it to either come directly into the keys and up the panhandle of Florida or track eastward and miss the Keys all together. Problem was, they do a 48-hour lead evacuation notice and they were predicting it hitting Thursday (Aug 25) which would have basically ended our vacation.
We scheduled a fishing trip and I went snorkeling and swimming a few more times just in case – but, much to my surprise when coming home from fishing NOAA had announced that the storm would be tracking east up the Atlantic coast and would avoid the Keys and Florida all together. Yay! But then we realized – we were supposed to fly out of Key West on Saturday and the storm would be in Philadelphia that evening. So, unfortunately, we had to cut vacation short by one day which was fine in the end because it could have been cut short by almost five days if it had tracked west.
The bad news was that we were here for hurricane Irene. It was really nerve racking even though I’ve been in hurricanes before. The constant tornado warnings were driving us nuts and it was a little freaky to hear that tornados had been spotted and/or touched down only a couple miles away and were headed right for our town. I haven’t looked that up to find out if a tornado actually had touched down but nonetheless it caused us some headaches. My sister and I watched some movies in the basement until about 2AM and went to bed.
Around 4-5AM I heard the craziest wind and thought for sure a tornado had formed. This huge piece of flashing that was on our roof had finally let go and I heard it make that sheet metal clanging noise as it banged onto the patio. I got out of bed for a moment just in case I had to go wake everyone up and run to the basement, but the huge gust of wind died down after about 20 seconds. When I woke up I went down to the intersection near our house that has a bridge crossing the creek. This creek always floods even in minor storms so everyone in the area knew it would be a mess.
As we had suspected the creek had risen probably 15-20 ft with the water nearly cresting over the old single-lane bridge. Usually in bad storms the water might come within 5-7 ft of the bridge, but never this high. The actual intersection had about 18-24″ of standing water and I didn’t try to drive through it to see the adjacent road (which also floods bad) but imagine it had 2 – 3 ft of standing water. The bed and breakfast on the corner was completely slammed with water. Even though the exterior walls of the bed and breakfast were about 100-150 ft from the actual creek, the water still rushed by hitting the stone building. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the building is ruined. It’s weathered other hurricanes (Floyd was the most recent) but I think this storm brought way more rain. Anyway – there were about 30 – 40 people at the bridge/intersection all doing exactly what I was doing – taking pictures of the craziness.
Pretty wild – I drove the opposite way to see if I could come around to the other side of that intersection pictures above but the road was flooded and closed on the north end as well. This was at about 9 – 10AM and was before the flood surged! I didn’t go back down to check because honestly it was probably even higher. I am hoping that I wake up tomorrow and the road is opened. If not I might be taking some crazy long way into work – if I can even get there. We’ll see. I will bring my camera just in case. The tornado was supposedly in the town my work is located at so maybe I can figure out what went on there as well!