So let’s see, where did we leave off? Oh yes, Charley!

Well, as you probably heard by now, there have been, oh, two more hurricanes since then! In the event that I might be a little busy with the aftermath of Hurricane Frances, I wrote the two last articles early. If you were scratching your head wondering why I was still talking about Charley when Frances and even Ivan was the main story, that would be why.

So I guess the next question is simply, so what happened?

Well, Frances was a very big storm, and moved very, very slow. To tell you the truth, it really scared the begeezus out of me, and a lot of us down here. I mean, we had seen the devastation from Charley in the area first hand, and they were clocking Frances before it hit well above 30 MPH higher, and at the same time it was larger.

Well, as far as my little neck of the woods is concerned, it did do more damage to us than Charley. Luckily, that only meant that we lost one pine tree next to our house. For most of Central Florida, it was the other way around as most didn’t get as much damage as they had had from Charley. While Charley was a compact and fast storm, Frances was a large and slow storm. A lot of people lost power, water, phone, cable, etc. just like the time before, but overall the damage wasn’t as bad.

We were spared from Ivan here, but our fellow brothers and sisters in the panhandle of Florida and the other Gulf Coast States were no so lucky. I am happy to report however that many businesses and agencies have been able to send supplies and personnel to those areas for assistance. This includes even Gatorland, who sent some of their staff to help capture Alligators in Louisiana who have been displaced by the storm.

I would comment on the other three storms we currently have brewing in the Atlantic, but for the small time being, ignorance is bliss. We all here in Central Florida have had ample time to get our Hurricane supplies down here, and half of our home’s windows are still covered with plywood. That’s not an invitation for more Hurricanes, mind you.

As I hinted at in the title, yes some people are moving out of the area because of these storms. I can’t say that I blame them, but this is literally home for me and I couldn’t do it (permanently).

Speaking of home, here’s a fun before and after. I was worried that a pine tree would break and come down on our home, so I decided to take a play out of the demolition professional’s playbook and put some tension on it in the opposite direction of the house. The idea there is same for when they implode a building with explosives: they attach cables on the exterior walls and columns pulling them to the inside, so when the explosions occur, the building wants to fall in on itself.

Well, being the amateur demolition professional (only in my own mind), I decided to try the same approach with this tree. I figured worst comes to worse; it breaks and falls, but away from the house. I was really worried about this one too, because it has a double trunk (twice the weight), is the closest to the house, and could fall in the vicinity of our main living area, where we just happened to be waiting out the storm.

What you don’t see in these pictures is that the morning of the day Frances hit, the 12” stakes I used pulled right out of the ground just from some moderate wind on the tree. There were two lines, and each had THREE stakes!

The lucky (or blessed) part of this was that the way the tree fell; it missed our house by a foot or less. The wind was blowing from the north-northeast, and the tree would have had to have fallen west to hit our main living area. All of this and no tie downs to help

Well, enough about these hurricanes. Until next week when we can (hopefully) get back to some more upbeat (non-hurricane) news, I’ll leave you with this glimpse of “proposed” tourism marketing campaign for the State of Florida:

Thanks for stopping on by, and I’ll see you next week!