I live in Fort Lauderdale, FL, and I survived hurricanes Frances in 2004, Katrina and Wilma in 2005, and now they are talking about Dean who is beating up on Mexico while the sun shines gloriously and the ocean is as even as a lake here in Fort Lauderdale.
It’s difficult to decide how to prepare and behave when the forecast predicts a hurricane. To panic and evacuate as we did during our first summer in Florida, or stay and weather the storm hoping it would bypass us?
In Florida, we survived Frances and Katrina, then relaxed and forgot. So when the TV asks everyone to prepare for Wilma, we did it with a know-it-all smile on our lips. There was no way on earth we were going to panic and leave our apartment.
Little did we know that two days later we would be sitting in the living room of our apartment, listening to the wind blowing at hundred-fifty miles. The sound was horrendous. I never saw or heard wolves in my life but to my feverish mind the wind sounded like the howling of a pack of wolves. There was no electricity and no telephone. The hurricane shutters tightly closed left us in the dark except for a candle lit in the bathroom and another in the kitchen.
In the middle of the day, more precisely at 11:20 am I felt the building shaking. We live on the eighteenth floor and the ground moved under us. I grabbed my husband’s hand and said, “Do you think the building can collapse?” He said he was more worried about the glass door to the balcony shattering. Together we stuck towels against the panels to stop the shaking of the glass and the seeping of the water.
After ten hours, the noise subsided and the storm abated. We climbed down the eighteen floors and reconnected with our neighbors. We were among the lucky ones who didn’t suffer broken windows or major damage. One of our neighbors reported the wall between her bedroom and the next door neighbor’s living room had collapsed.
The next day the neighborhood was unrecognizable with devastation everywhere, cars smashed on top of each other, broken electric lines lying across the street, uprooted trees, windows, chairs and tables messing the beach sand.
But the hurricane brought people together, those without damages helping those severely affected. We gathered on the terrace of the building, barbequed and ate together for five days while waiting for the electricity to be restored.
Two years have passed by since hurricane Wilma, but some us in Fort Lauderdale are still waiting for repair to be done or insurances to cover the cost. Now while we watch hurricane Dean spread its ravages in Mexico, we wonder what is in our forecast for the next two months.
So what does a hurricane mean to you?
