Hurricane Frances Archives

August 27, 2015

Hurricane Erika – Stay or Go?

I wasn’t much concerned about Hurricane Danny. Every model predicted unfavorable conditions that would inhibit development. Hurricane Erika had a bad feel about it, though. She was following Danny like a girl hoping be noticed at prom time.

I particularly didn’t like Wednesday’s 11 A.M. track that showed the center of the cone knocking on our back door. The only problem was that different models said it would dissipate before it got to us, would swerve north to spin fish in the middle of the Atlantic or would come out of the Bahamas as a piddling Cat 1 storm, with the potential of cranking up to a Cat 2.

Before you dismiss my “piddling” Cat 1 hurricane, imagine yourself in the back of a pickup truck going 75 miles per hour. Now imagine yourself trying to hold up a 4×8 sheet of plywood while being blasted by a firehose.

Wife Lila and Kid Matt have been trying to talk me out of coming home. They both subscribed to the No Big Deal models, and Matt said he’d put up the storm panels if I wasn’t there.

This looks a little better

The model spaghetti is beginning to favor a northward turn before it gets to the coast of Florida. The state will probably get some much-needed rain, but be spared high winds. If the 11 A.M. Thursday advisory keeps the turn, looks like Cape is going to have to put up with me a little longer.

I’ve seen a few storms

We had four hurricanes pass over us in the 2004-2005 season. Here’s an account of Frances.

Here are some good disaster preparedness tips that are useful even if you aren’t in a hurricane area. I chased 13 hurricanes and had more than half that many chase me. Experience is a good teacher.

September 5, 2013September 5, 2013

Hurricane Frances 2004

I hadn’t forgotten Hurricane Frances, but I HAD forgotten that it was nine years ago that I was hunkered down at the office waiting for it to blow through.

This was a slow mover that was only a Category 2 storm with 105 mph winds, but it just sat on top of us and pounded away for hours.

Winn Dixie roof peeled off

I felt secure at work because the windows were designed for 120-mph winds and I designed the telecommunication area to be even stronger. The architect insisted on having laminated glass windows on the exterior of part of the area for esthetic purposes, but behind the glass, he put a gap, a sheet of drywall, a metal lath, another sheet of drywall and another air gap. He made a mockup and challenged my staff to try to penetrate it by throwing concrete blocks against it. We couldn’t, so I withdrew my request for block walls.

The building went to generator power when the winds hit about 45 miles per hour because the power lines were slapping together causing transformers to blow and surges and sags to come down the line. The big diesel was sucking down fuel so fast and the storm was moving so slowly that we were concerned that we were going to run the tank dry. (It was a 10,000-gallon tank, but it hadn’t been topped off.)

The Winn Dixie supermarket next to us didn’t come out so well. We stood in the 4th floor lobby outside my office and watched the wind get beneath the roof covering and peel it off. The repair they did after the storm must not have been done too well, because we got to see the same thing happen during Hurricane Wilma in 2005.

Neighborhood lost power

Wife Lila was in Orlando with Son Matt and family and I encouraged her to stay there. We had no power at the house (and wouldn’t for several days), and I was perfectly comfortable sleeping in air-conditioned comfort on air mattress on my office floor. If she came back, I’d have had to fire up the generator I bought after Hurricane Hugo ten years earlier.

The two-mile-drive to check out our house as soon as the winds died down was the longest two miles I think I’ve ever gone. (Until 2005 when we got hit by two more storms). I both wanted to hurry up and yet I wanted to keep from seeing if we still had a house as long as possible.

Trees and limbs down

As it turned out, we had a lot of trees and limbs down, but our house, built in the mid-1930s had stood up to the storm quite well. The apartment building across the street didn’t have our luck: a fairly large tree went through the roof.

Clean-up was NOT fun

Our side of the street had our power restored in a few days. The neighbors on the other side were fed by a different line and were dark for a week or 10 days. We “haves” on the south side stretched heavy-duty extension cords across the street to the “have-nots” so they could at least keep refrigerators and a few lights running.

Fix-a-Flat is your friend

I’m glad a had a stock of Fix-a-Flat. The streets were full of debris, nails, screws and other stuff just waiting for you to run over them.

As soon as I could, I gave my 3,000-watt generator to Matt and upgraded to a 7,500-watt one with electric start. The best thing I did was buy a kit to adapt it to run on natural gas, propane or gasoline. I also rewired the electrical panel so we could drop off the commercial grid and run the house off the generator if we were careful with our load balancing. It paid off during the next two storms.

I chased 13 hurricanes as a photographer. Let me tell you, covering somebody else’s hurricane is a lot more fun than having one chase you.

March 3, 2013

How to Cut Down a Tree

Like most males of a certain age, I have an aversion to reading directions. HAD I picked up the Manual of Manual Labor before I started cutting firewood, I probably would have seen Rule One: Avoid it.

See, I mentioned before that I can usually pull out my Medicare Card when I’m with Brother Mark or Sons Matt and Adam to get out of work, but I suspect that when your mother is 91 and counting, her card is senior to mine.

Master of the chain saw

So, to back up: we had a windstorm blow through Cape that took down some big branches off a maple tree on the west side of the house. I bought an electric chain saw (I get along with gas saws just about as well as I coexist with plumbing) and made short work of cutting it up into lengths we could put in the fireplace. [This was me doing damage to the trees and limbs we had blow down in our yard in West Palm Beach during Hurricane Frances in 2004. I look much the same today. Trees tremble around me.]

“Just in case”

When the ice storm was predicted, we decided (Mother decided, waving her Medicare Card), that we should bring in extra firewood and kindling “just in case.”

This year’s wood must have been dryer than usual because there was very little left on the pile after filling the garden cart and two storage bins in the basement. We decided (Mother decided, waving her Medicare Card) to harvest whatever dead wood there was in the yard “just in case.”

I had been eying a dead snag on the east side of the yard for some time. It looked big enough to provide a lot of wood, but small enough that I could handle it with my 16″saw.

Boy Scouts used “squaw wood”

In my Boy Scout days, we didn’t get to cut down many trees at camp. Like NO trees at camp. We were told to gather “squaw wood,” defined in the Scout Handbook as “the kind Indian women used to collect by simply breaking it off.” You probably won’t find that phrase used in today’s Handbook. Anyway, after I took off to college, Dad came up with a great money-making scheme for my brothers’ Order of the Arrow Chapter: he had woods that needed to be cleared for roads; he had trucks; he had chainsaws and he had parents of boys 14 to 18-years-old who didn’t see anything wrong with putting that combination together to cut firewood.

So far as I know, Dad always came home with the same number of boys he started with; the boys got to do a “man’s work” with dangerous tools, and people needing firewood got a great deal. Of course, that’s in the days when chainsaws were considered tools, not killing machines wielded by hockey-mask-wearing crazy guys in slasher movies.

I’m an experienced tree trimmer

Despite my lack of Boy Scout experience, I HAVE managed to down a tree or two. Here’s an account of one of those adventures.

OK, I’ll confess, that’s my tree, but that’s not me IN my tree. I could have done that if I had wanted to, though.

I accounted for old fence wire

I sized up the tree, decided I wanted it to fall to the southwest into the back yard where I could cut it up with a minimum of hauling. The trees on two sides of our yard had been used as fence posts going back probably 70 years or more. The ones on the east side were pretty much rusted away by the time we moved in 57 years ago. Still, I knew I’d have to watch out for nails and fence wire. I started my notch cut about four feet above the ground, above the visible wire.

All went well for about 23 seconds, then the saw bucked a few times and I watched sparks fly out of my cut. Not ALL of the wire was visible. I changed my angle, cut about 17 seconds, with the same result. The notch wasn’t as big as I would like, but it’ll do, I thought.

Nails must have been cheap

I made the top angle cut, pretending not to notice the sparks, then switched to the back of the tree to make the hinge cut. MORE sparks. If the fence wire I could SEE was 70 years old, then there must have been another fence hanging off that tree 90 years ago, because it was at least 1-1/2 inches under the surface.

I had other stuff to cut, so I didn’t want to kill the saw blade. “I’ll drive wedges into the hinge cut,” I thought. Shouldn’t take much to get the tree to decide gravity should take over. Three big wedges and a 6-pound sledge earned me a slight cracking sound. From the way the tree hadn’t changed position, I surmised the cracking sound was coming from my back.

Earlier in the procedure, I worked a rope up the tree as high as I could, figuring that I could “encourage” the tree to fall in that direction if I got it rocking. Unfortunately, the tree was leaning against a dead branch from another tree about 30 feet in the air. It had been there long enough that it had cut a deep groove in the branch. It wouldn’t rock.

Saw blade slick as dental floss

Finally, I decided that I had had enough. I didn’t care if I made the saw blade as slick as a piece of dental floss: I was tired of swinging that sledge. Ignoring the fireworks show going on, I cut all the way through the hinge to the notch. I could see light through it. The tree was ignoring the law of gravity.

Where are the pictures of all this? Well, Mother was standing by keeping a close eye on the proceedings. She had a whip in one hand to encourage me to keep working, and a cell phone in the other so she could dial 9-1-1. Her camera was in her pocket. She hadn’t planned to pull it out unless there was blood, at which point she would take a picture and faint dead away. When she woke up, THEN she would dial 9-1-1.

Use a longer rope

I pulled on the rope. With a loud crack, the tree starting falling in my direction. Hint: if your tree is 30 feet tall, use at least a 40-foot rope, not a 25-foot one. “I never knew you could run so fast,” Mother observed, having dropped the whip and picked up the camera.

Amazing what you can do with the right encouragement.

Well, the story isn’t over. While taking down the tree, I noticed a dead one that had fallen just down the slope. Since I already had the saw and the electric cord down there, I elected to cut it up, too. That involved cutting a piece of wood, throwing up the slope as far as I could, then picking up it and throwing it the rest of the way to the yard. Keep track of those steps. It’ll become important later.

Was farmer keeping out bats?

Now it was time to cut up the primary tree. I started at the top, slender, end. It cut about as well as you would expect a piece of dental floss to cut. It didn’t cut so much as worry the wood to death.

Then, about four feet from the butt end, which would have been about eight feet above the ground, I hit fence wire again. I don’t know what the farmer was trying to keep in or keep out, but it had to have been bats or giraffes. Mother had gone to get her hair done, so I took this opportunity to throw the four-foot snag waaaay down the hill where I hoped she wouldn’t notice it.

THIS is the cart

Our back yard has two levels. I pulled the garden cart down to pick up the wood from down the hill. That’s the wood that I had already picked up at least twice. I put it into the cart, then pulled the cart up a 40% grade to the main yard, where I put in the big stuff from the primary tree. Some other large branches had fallen on the east side of the yard, so I cut them up, loaded the cart and headed toward the basement. The only problem was that I couldn’t steer the cart: a nut on the bolt that attached the steering handle to the cart had evidently worked loose. The only solution was to unload the cart so I could replace the bolt and nut.

I’ve touched it five-plus times

That meant that I had to touch those pieces a fourth time. After I got the cart fixed, it dawned on me that it wouldn’t make much sense to haul an empty cart inside, so I loaded it back up. We’re now up to a minimum of five touches per piece of wood. Much of the wood went into bins on the left and right side of the fireplace. That brings us to six or seven touches.

I’m tempted to NAME the firewood

Throwing it into the fireplace will be the eighth time (minimum) I’ve moved it. The final step will be carrying out the ashes. I’ve seen each piece of wood so many times I’m tempted to name it.