In Fall of 2024, still inside the Hurricane Season window, but at a time when everyone gets complacent and thinks it's over, we got a nice surprise.
In September we had Hurricane Helene right off the coast in the Gulf. It created a mess up in North Carolina but didn't do anything in my area except bring in some light rain and a breeze. A week later and they were talking about another hurricane over by Cancun. Normally hurricanes in that area wouldn't be a problem for us. They are far more likely to hit Naples or the Caribbean islands that time of year.
A week out and we all thought this thing wasn't going to be a problem. Regardless I decided to get my generator fixed. It has a hybrid motor that won't start with a dead battery so I had to get one overnight from Amazon. We went to Costco and fought the madness that Sunday. We had to follow someone to their car to get a cart and the line for checkout was to the back of the store. I didn't fight with all the morons trying to stock up on water. I have a lot of 6-gallon jugs for that.
On my birthday I didn't do any prep. I sat around enjoying my day and keeping on eye on things. The cone kept moving up and down so I really thought it would either go to Naples or the Panhandle. At one point on the 7th or 8th they had the cone ending four houses down the street from me. I was 4 houses outside of the cone of death. On the 7th most gas stations were already out of gas. People were crying on Facebook about how all these hoarders took all the gas and now they don't have enough to get home from work. It sounds like piss poor planning to me. I am wondering where they think everyone was "hoarding" the gas too. It's not like it's toilet paper.
I decided to go to Lowes last minute and get some plywood, a heavier extension cord for my fridge, plywood window clips, and other supplies. My cousin came over that evening and helped me board up the most exposed windows. Even though the storm was coming from the west the winds were forecasted to be the worst coming from the east so that is mostly the side I boarded up. I didn't board anything on the lanai, west facing, or covered by the patio. We did the second floor last, which was a big mistake. As we were doing Zach's window the first squall hit and it hit hard. We were up there in pouring rain with an electric drill fighting 40 mph wind gust with a sheet of plywood trying to catch the wind like a kite. At this point it's around 6:30PM.
On the 9th the storm was breaking records for rapid intensification. It went from a Cat1 to a Cat5 in 10 ten hours. We were going to take the kids to Cold Stone for some hurricane party ice cream, but they were closed. So we headed back towards home and stopped by Dairy Queen around 1:30 PM. We went home and around 6:30 PM the rain started.
The forecast said the eye would make landfall sometime around midnight to 2AM as a strong Cat4 or a Cat5 and the wind would get worse several hours later. It did come in faster than expected but they really weren't that far off. It weakened from a 5 to a weak 3 just before landfall and made landfall at 8:30PM near Siesta Key.
I think the kids stayed up until around midnight and I kept going to the front patio to get videos. The wind was ripping sustained well into the 70s with gust close to 100. They said it's the second highest winds recorded in this area, only behind those of Hurricane Charley. We were watching the news and they said that it was the most tornado warnings issued in Florida in a day. Tornados were ripping through West Palm, far from the path of the eye and the inner bands.
I left the TV on in my room when I tried to go to bed. I slept ten minutes here and there throughout the night. We used these clips to put the boards over the recessed windows without drilling but the one by my office we cut just a little too small. For the first hour or two we could hear it creak as it pushed it's way in tighter. I'm glad I boarded up, it did bring some sense of security, but the wind was still howling really loud and kept me up thinking what if something hits a window that isn't boarded.
The eye passed 29 miles south of us, around Lake Wales, around 1:30AM on the 10th. I went outside and the wind was really kicking and I thought that would be the end of it. After it passed us it wasn't so bad for the next couple hours. Then around 4AM I kept hearing one all of my UPS units kicking on a couple times a minute. My cousin lost power the night before, early. We never lost power during the storm but the transformers were all blowing up which was making my UPS kick on and off. I could hear the wind was even worse than when the eye passed and then I get a text from my cousin asking what the hell is going on.
I looked on Facebook and some dummies were claiming we were getting tornados because they saw green lights. These green lights were all the transformers blowing up. As forecasted, the storm went extratropical as it was coming out by Cocoa Beach and it flattened and the winds coming back around were even worse than the ones coming in. I though they were nuts when they forecasted the winds would pick back up at 4AM but they were right. It was now technically an extra-tropical Cat1 storm.
The winds had been coming from the east but now they were coming in nearly 100mph from the North. This lasted well over an hour and by 6:30 or 7:00 it was pretty calm. I went out to check out the damage and all of my bananas got shredded. We lost a 15-20 foot branch from our oak, lots of roof shingles, had grass blades plastered on the side of our cars, but no major structural damage. I was surprised that the screens on the lanai held up.
I went for a walk with the kids and then we all took a drive of the neighborhood. We have these water retention ponds that are normally bone dry. All of them were overflowing. We got around 13 inches of rain overnight. It was a really wet storm. A lot of the covers for the streetlights were either blown at an angle or blew off. We caught some kids walking down the street with one of them. On some streets they were all blowing facing west which is up to the point when the eye passed, and on other streets they were blown facing Northeast.
We drove through Clermont later that day and they cleanup really fast. By the preserve a massive oak that had to be over 200 years old was down. They already had the road cleared. Downtown was a real mess. The Lake had risen several feet and the docks were all trashed. One dock was on it's side going 40+ feet out of the water sideways. Lots of boats and jet skis were pushed together where people didn't secure them. The shoreline moved up 40-50 feet in some spots and one of the playgrounds was now in the lake. We ended up going to BWW for lunch before heading back.
This was as bad as it gets for Clermont and we survived with minimal damage. That is why we moved here and not the coast. It was quite an experience. Most of the parts of Clermont that did lose power had it restored that day. I think there were some spots around the coast that didn't have power for a week or two, but they were really on top of restoring it fast here.
Before the hurricane we had a lot of Elder Berry trees blocking our view of the lake. Milton destroyed them all and over the next couple weeks we kept getting a better view as they continued to fall over.
Only morons fight for cases of 16oz water bottles. I have six of these.
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About an hour before that first squall came in.  |
Hurricane Party #1.
Here are some screenshots from the weather apps. Some of them have the time showing in the top left.
Until this point I still thought it was going to stay further south of us. Then they start showing the wobble.
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