I finally feel like a real Floridian. In 6 years in South Florida we never got a direct hit from a hurricane, or anything even close. The closest was probably Isaac at 150ish miles away or Tropical Storm Fay which was about 50-60 miles away but just a lot of rain and a weak TS. We moved to Clermont because it's the lowest risk area in the state so we thought it would be years before we saw a hurricane. Turns out we would only go 3 months until we got one.
Ian started east of Hispaniola. They were watching the storm about a week before it hit us when it was a wave. Ian became a depression on September 23rd Southwest of Jamaica and became a tropical storm on the 24th. They thought it was going to develop faster and become Hermine, but another storm out in the middle of the Atlantic got that name so we didn't get the Harry Potter storm. Even before the storm was developed they were saying there was going to be rapid intensification and it would become a beast. For a couple days they were forecasting a Cat 3 around Tampa but they kept moving the cone west and putting landfall in the Panhandle. We were originally in the dead center of the cone of death which means statistically we were at a very low chances (under 10%) of getting a direct hit. Then they changed the forecast to a Cat4 and started moving the cone East. About a day before the storm they had the eye of the storm forecasted right over Lake Lousia, about 4 miles south of here. It continued to shift East which was putting the path South of us.
I got two days paid off from work and moved all my plants in the garage. A Cat1 brushing by us wasn't a huge concern for me. My only concerns were that we couldn't get the cars in the garage and I don't own the house and don't have shutters or impact windows. When we own a house it won't be an issue. I moved the majority of my plants into the garage and cleaned up as best I could. I had one neighbor that waited until things were getting a little crazy the night before the storm to clean up because he thought it was going to miss us. Another neighbor took his trampoline legs off and dropped the thing onto the ground and left the safety net. He left his swing set and decided to evacuate at 9 PM when the rain was coming down.
Tuesday night our hurricane party began. We tried to go out for dinner at Texas Roadhouse but had to go to Outback instead because of Dean's allergies and the peanut dust warning. Outback is trash, I'll never eat there again. The steak was awful.
Wednesday right before the storm made landfall in Fort Myers we took the kids for lunch and ice cream at Culvers. I checked the Weather Channel app and at that time winds at Sanibel were 112 mph. When driving out I noticed a lot of my neighbors are kinda dumb, parking their cars sideways in front of their garages. I don't think half of them even know why they are doing it, they're just lemmings following each other. I read it's to protect the garage door from the wind. However the garage doors here are reinforced with big beams and a Cat 1 isn't going to do anything to them. I also question how 2 cars parked parallel to a garage covers anymore of the garage than two cars parked normal in front of it. Just a waste of time in my opinion.
We started getting the first hard squalls around 3:30 that afternoon. By this time they were saying it was going to go about 60 miles south of us in the middle of the night. Around dinner time the guava tree looked like it wasn't going to survive. I think I stayed up til around 10 that night and then decided I needed to try and get some sleep. The sleep would never come. The wind kicked up really hard shortly after I went to bed and it was howling on the house all night. We don't have gutters on the roof so the rain would come down and then blow into the window and it sounded like the house was getting power washed blasted. I have no idea what these windows are rated for so all night I'm wondering if the next gust is going to take out our windows. They said we would have sustained winds of 60-70 mph and gust from 90-100 and that'a probably right about what we got.
I woke up at 03:30 when the storm was probably at its closest point. It was 62 miles away and the pressure was the lowest my weather center had measured all night. I tried to walk out to the front yard but debris came flying at me and I ran to the corner of the porch. The wind kept going strong until sometime around 09:00 at which point it was no big deal anymore. Somehow the rainfall totals in my area were only half of what they got in Orlando, just under 7 inches, even though we had rain for 40 hours straight.
I went out to assess the damage which was nothing major. Roofs missing shingles, a lot of fences down, and my neighbor wasn't going to be happy. The Dunkin Donuts had a piece of sheet metal wrapped around two of the letters. I have no idea where that came from but it didn't look like it came from the building. There aren't a lot of street trees on my block so it wasn't too bad but just a couple blocks away the streets were covered in twigs and branches. It took a few weeks for them to cleanup all the debris. Close by in Winter Garden they had flooded roads for a few days and the lower ground (parks and anything near water) are still flooded. Our cousin lost internet for a couple days. We never lost power or internet through the whole storm.
We are on top of a sandhill so we didn't get any flooding. However, just a couple miles away, over a month later there is still standing water. The water at the preserve hasn't gone down at all.
Culvers on Weds Sept 28th.
The forecast a week few days out. Ian ended up making landfall at Sanibel as a Cat 4.
The eye was about 120 miles away at this point. Afternoon of Wednesday September 28th. This is when it started raining oak leaves. I grew up in SoCal with Santa Ana winds to dead leaves blowing isn't anything new. But the live green oak leaves getting ripped from trees and raining down from high above, that was something I've never seen.
Adri was in her room doing face time with her cousin so I decided to walk in front of her window and pretend I was getting blown away.
The kids playing in the rain.
Morning after the storm.
I bought this blackberry through the mail just a couple weeks before the storm. I didn't want to put this one in the garage so I covered it with a mason jar. It worked.
After the storm.
That weekend we tried to take the kids out. The Preserve was closed because a big oak cracked in half by the road. Lake Lousia State Park was closed and both gates had their motors torn from the foundation. It looked to me like someone rammed the gates because there's no way the wind could have done that. We tried to go to another park that was closed. We ended up just walking around the waterfront downtown. There were some yards in that area where they could have filled a dumpster with all the Virginia Moss.
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