Hurricane II: The Revenge

Okay, this is a bit late! But if you follow the news, you will know a big hurricane recently came our way in Tampa, Florida. Hurricane Ian was actually our second; months after we first moved here, we experienced Hurricane Irma.

We evacuated for Irma, staying with our friends Jared and Angela in Columbia, South Carolina, but in the end, it had been kind of unnecessary. We live fairly far inland, in a suburb of Tampa. The advice they give is "run from the water, hide from the wind." That is to say, if you don't live in a flood zone, your best bet is to stay at your home, and just be ready for wind, moving to a safe interior room if you get hit by hurricane-force gusts.

Evacuating for Irma not only turned out be totally unnecessary, but kind of risky. When we came back, there was no way to get off the interstate once we got on it for much of Georgia:

The drive home was much less smooth: for the last forty miles of I-95 S in Georgia, every exit was barricaded by the state highway patrol, sometimes supplemented by the armed forces! As far as I could tell, there was no advance warning of this. Thankfully we'd gassed up in Augusta despite having over half a tank, or we might have been in some trouble. We later found out that the entire county was basically without power, so they just kept all the returning refugees on the interstates.

If I hadn't had the forethought to gas up in Augusta, we could have been stranded on the side of I-95! By the time we got back, it was clear our power had been out, but it was not actually out anymore, and our home was fine.

So we decided to not evacuate this time. Or rather, really, Hayley and I never even talk about evacuating at all; we just set to doing what we needed to do. We don't have storm shutters or anything, so mostly that came down to clearing the yard of the kind of stuff that could be hazardous debris, stockpiling canned goods in case we lost power, filling the tub with water for flushing the toilets, preparing a cooler, and so on.

pre-Ian gummy making

Ian was incoming over the weekend and due to arrive around the evening of the Tuesday the 27th; pretty quickly, the public schools called off Monday through Thursday because some of them get used as shelters. I actually woke up on the Saturday before horrendously sick. Incredibly achy and tired, so I could do little other than lie on the couch or in bed as Hayley did a lot of the prep. I was still pretty bad Sunday, but I was due to have student conferences on Monday, so I powered through a bunch of papers Sunday evening, only for UT to call the whole week of school off at 7:30pm Sunday. UT usually doesn't make calls that quickly in my experience, but it was certainly handy. Most of our students are from out of state, and so many of them were flying back home, so there was no way to hold class on Monday. UT's dorms are in mandatory evacuation zones A and B, both of which the county called, so students couldn't remain on campus once evacuations started.

I did feel a bit better by Monday, and began to pitch in, but it was clear by that point that the hurricane wouldn't really arrive until Wednesday. And as everyone now knows, by Wednesday morning, it was clear that the hurricane's track was turning steadily east, meaning it would make landfall nowhere near Tampa, and thus any wind impact on us would be pretty minimal.

So our Wednesday was pretty chill. I made a meal I had planned as a dinner for lunch, in case we lost power—but this turned out to be unneeded, as we never did, though there were a number of flickers off and on across the course of the late afternoon and evening. We had a family movie viewing (The LEGO Movie, which I had never seen) in the afternoon, which isn't something we've done very much, so again that was nice. The Internet went out in the evening, but other than that there was some strong-ish wind and consistent but rarely heavy rain.

When we woke up Thursday, the power was still on and the Internet still out. Our main impact was that a number of the screens on our pool enclosure tore, and the pool had a bunch of leaves in it. I, like an idiot, had forgotten to turn off the pool pump's automatic timer, so the leaves jammed up the pump and it lost prime, but I was able to fix it. And that was it! We had a pretty lazy couple of days of slowly putting back everything we had locked up. Lots of our neighbors had lots of branches in their yards, but we don't really have any trees, so that wasn't much of an issue for us. Of course we were lucky—south of us you had trees falling on houses and massive flooding. One of my students commutes from Anna Maria Island, and wasn't able to make it to class for a week.

We watched some friends' kid (our older son's best buddy from pre-K) on Saturday, since they had a fence come down in the storm and needed to make repairs.

We didn't get Internet back until Tuesday the 4th, almost a week since it went out! It's kind of understandable, but it was very frustrating because the damage to our area was so minimal, and calling Spectrum support was useless, as they wouldn't even give us estimates. In 2022, I basically can't do any course prep even without being online, so on Saturday, I had to go to a Panera in order to edit my syllabus and prep my Blackboard site and organize lesson plans and e-mail my students about what to do. Meanwhile, back at home, Hayley and I were burning through data on our phones!