Hurricane Irma…Rain, Wind, No Direct Hit

Citrus Heights, Ca at Sister’s House

Although we won’t have word until tomorrow (Tuesday) at the earliest, the heart of Hurricane Irma missed our community of Tarpon Springs/Holiday Florida by around 20 miles.  And when it did get near us…it was barely a Category 1 Hurricane.  When we saw it hit the coast at Marco Island, I knew we had a good chance to miss the most powerful punch of the hurricane.  The arrow is the general path of the Hurricane as it passed through the Tampa area.  The “X” in the upper left is the area we live in.  The entire state seemed to get lots of rain and wind from the outer bands.  We will know in the morning if there is any flooding problems…for now, the area is under curfew, and morning’s light will produce a massive amounts of pictures.

I feel for those folks in and around Marco Island…and Naples who did take the full punch.  I also feel for folks in the Miami area in general, and of course, the Keys which took the hardest punch in Florida.  Of course, the Hurricane did massive damage outside of the United States too…it is the nature of the beast of living in this humid area.

Not that our area near the Tarpon Springs / Holiday area did not have problems.  Above is a Duke Energy Outage Map…and our Condo is in this general “outage” spot affecting nearly 1,000 homes.

We kept in touch with the situation by watching FOX 13 out of Tampa via the Internet.  On Saturday morning I did some research on which Television stations had a live stream…and FOX 13 seemed to be the best…maybe not the “technical best”, but because they have what we consider the best Meteorologist team headed up by Paul Dellegatto who oversees the work of four other Meteorologist. When it comes to Hurricanes…they are my team, that is for sure.  That said, they did have some technical problems.  At 9:00 pm Pacific Time Saturday (Midnight Tampa time) it went off the air for about 20 minutes…then it came back on with the rerun of the Saturday morning show.  Figured they had to make a mistake, and after 10-15 minutes of watching what I had watched earlier in the day…I called them.  Got transferred to the “Internet” person, and the nice lady immediately looked at it, acknowledged they had problems much of the day, promised she would fix it, and thanked me for calling.  She had “no clue” that they were broadcasting old stuff…and had been for 20+ minutes. 

At 1:00 am my time, 4 am Tampa time, it happened again…but this time when it came on they were showing what they broadcasted 2 hours prior to this.  I immediately called, and unfortunately the nice lady had left after a long, busy day. Her replacement was more skeptical when I talked to her…asked if I had started the “Miami feed” (did not know there was such a feed), and when I told her this was the second time I had called in the past 4 hours, she said, “Well, let me see for myself…”  And then about 30 seconds I hear the echo of what I am watching…and she gasps and says, “Oh, you are so right….”  Well, it was bed time, and we left the stream going…but by 6:45 when I got up to let the dogs out and feed them, the live stream was gone.

At noon our time, 3 pm Sunday Tampa time, it happened again…this time they started broadcasting what they broadcasted 45 minutes prior.  I immediately called, and this time was connected to a guy who tried to blow me off by saying, “Our engineers know about it and are working on it….”  I told him this was the third time I had called in less than 24 hours, and that the first two times I called no knew they were broadcasting old stuff.  I could not have counted to 10 after I hung up and the live stream went off the air.  Nearly 30 minutes later it came back up…and it has worked great ever since.

Another site I used was the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) site.  They seemed to have the best view of the eye of the storm so that I could track its direction.  They provide a 30 minute satellite view of the hurricane which takes about 10 seconds to play.  Every time it did a “wobble” to the north before they expected it to turn, I would say “YES!”, but with the full knowledge that if it turned too early, Miami and millions of people would be put in harms way.  What I truly hoped for was a turn into the Everglades…less population to harm…but no, it turned as forecasted…now it depended on which northern path it would follow. 

Goodbye Irma…how about headed west and putting out a few fires out here…..

PS:  Why is it that all the news media seem to think we like seeing them out in the wind, the rain, along a beach, standing in water, picking up sand and watching it blow into their face when they drop it????