ALERT!

It was 5:30 when Kim & I were awakened by the sound of a strong wind driving heavy rain. Moments later all that was light went dark. The power was out. The storm that we had been warned about was upon us. And now a new sound. What is it? Where is it coming from? It’s an alarm and it’s coming from the phone. “Tornado warning! Take shelter immediately!”

This is Florida, not Kansas! Where would you suggest we go? It’s not like we have basements here! The water table ranges from one to six feet and this storm was promising to make the water table above ground, not below it! So, what do we do? We do what everyone does who didn’t grow up in the midwest. We look out the window! Just what did we think we’d see at 5:40 in the morning with the power out?

I decided the best course of action was to put some clothes on. If my home was going to blow away in the next few minutes, and I was going to be homeless, I needed to be dressed. Made sense at the time. Still makes sense, but what I did next does not. I crawled back into bed. Kim never got out of it! Oh don’t lecture me! I know what we should have done. We should have climbed into the bathtub. It’s the center most part of the apartment. The center most part of the building. That would have been the smart thing to do until the danger had passed. Somehow it didn’t cross my mind at the time. Being cozy in bed when we ended up in Oz did.

By 7:00 the storm had begun to settle, but the aftermath was just beginning. Let’s address the immediate problem. No power, which means no coffee! Things are serious! A breakfast of cold cereal and then we needed to begin thinking about how to handle the coffee situation. One of the neighbors had made a coffee run for him and his wife to the 7/11  a few miles away that had a generator, and a line out the door waiting for the same thing!  At some point we’ll need his justification for failing to take coffee orders from the rest of us! A serious breach of neighbor etiquette! A short walk around the neighborhood revealed a few bigger problems than coffee, though obviously a hot cup of joe would go a long way to being able to deal with the situation more clearly.

Palm fronds had been stripped from trees and were littering roadways and sidewalks. Two palm trees had been sliced through at ground level, as if they had been cut by a saw. One lay on the ground. The other was teetering on the brink of disaster waiting to happen, braced against another tree. One palm tree had its top half blown off. I have no idea where it ended up. Large oak trees had branches snapped and two had been completely uprooted. Pool furniture had been blown around and upturned. Debris was everywhere and that was just our neighborhood. A transformer had blown up and power lines were down all over the county. We live very near the the Naples airport, where wind gusts were measured at 83 mph. Planes had been blown around and Judge Judy’s jet ended up on its tail with its nose in the air. A jet! Naples was a mess and there is plenty of work to be done to clean up, but fortunately no one was hurt, not here anyways.

Now for lessons learned. When there is a tornado warning, move immediately to the bathroom! Don’t get dressed, close the blinds, and go back to sleep! When the weather service warns that a severe thunderstorm is coming, they mean “severe”! Time to gas up the car, if for no other reason than being able to go in search of coffee while you wait for Florida Power & Light to get everything up and running again. After all, there are priorities!