Hurricane Survival
A First hand Account from the Florida Keys during Hurricane Georges
Right now, a tropical storm could well be brewing somewhere off the coast of Africa. As it moves west, it gathers speed and power, until it forms the rotational look we are all familiar with from TV reports. From there, weather satellites and special hurricane hunting airplanes help us monitor its progress as it progresses towards the Caribbean or the continental United States.
For anyone living near the shore, or even in low-lying areas inland, hurricanes bring a terrible combination of rain, waves, floods an, most devastating of all, wind up to 174 miles per hour. On the shore, storm surges -- the combination of tide and weather-induced waves -- can rip boats from their moorings and smash houses to bits. Inland, the winds can drive a loose object through the wall of your house or rip its roof off. Further inland, when the winds of a hurricane have been dissipated by the land mass, 12 inches of rain in 8 or ten hours can cause tremendous flooding. Uprooted trees can knock down power lines and it may take weeks to restore power.
When faced with a hurricane, you have two options -- hunker down or bug out. This is your call, of course, but if you have made the mistake of living in a hurricane zone, then we encourage you not to compound it by sticking around to see it first-hand. If you are in the evacuation zone, then bug out. If not, then prepare for some temporary outages and stay put.
We've got plenty of information on bugging out, including planning your route and pre-positioning supplies. Also, the earlier you leave the better you will be and less-likely to get caught in the massive traffic that can clog coastal highways when a hurricane evacuation order is given.
How Bad Can it Be?
The worst isn't over when a hurricane moves on and the sun comes out. The aftermath can be psychologically more damaging than the actual storm. Here's a true story sent to us by a correspondent who is close friends with a Florida Key's man who lived through Hurricane Georges in late 1998. Mr. and Mrs. "Jones" (not their real name) live on Cudjoe Key. Their home is about 19 miles east of Key West, just a few blocks off US 1, the only highway connecting the Keys to the mainland, and a mere two blocks from the ocean. (You can see Hurricane Georges' track online, if you want.)
Cudjoe Cay Background
Cudjoe Key is primarily a residential community. There is no town government per se, no formal government except the county (which governs all the Keys). It is a typical middle class almost "suburban" development. The original layout of the community was designed by developers on as much of a grid system as possible. What you and I would consider "alleys" in a normal town are "canals," really dug out channels that back up to the houses and extending to the ocean or Gulf. Boating is quite common and one of the main attractions in the area. However, the channels have to be dug out beyond the land into the ocean or Gulf for larger boats because the bottom is so shallow, for several thousand yards out in most places.
The Geology
The keys are primarily coral reefs. Not rock. Not clay. These form in the shallow Ocean (south) or Gulf (north). Plants eventually attach themselves (especially those that are salt tolerant), form root systems, gather debris in their branches, form land, allow more coral to develop, and over the eons, you have an island. There is no soil except that which formed from the debris of fallen leaves and branches, and that is a very thin layer. There is only "marl," a material made of old coral, which is the base of everything, every building, tree, and plant. If you want to plant a non-native tree or shrub (non-native varieties are usually forbidden by the State and County governments), you have to dig a hole with a pick or back-hoe, import soil from at least as far away as Miami, in order to plant something. If you want a building foundation, you have to dig a hole with a backhoe. For what will be obvious reasons, there are no basements in Cudjoe Key.
The elevation of the Jones' house site of this development is four feet above sea level, typical for the area.
Plant Life
There is simply none left. Stripped, shredded, blown and washed off. What had been a glorious tropical paradise with large constantly blooming trees, shrubs, orchids, fruits, and vines, has been literally blown away or washed away. A few tree stumps stick up out of the ground. That's all. The thin soil cover has been eroded off. There is no longer any "duff," and what replaced it is about six inches of salt-laden silt washed up from the ocean bottom by Georges' seven-foot surge waves. The storm hit right at high tide.
Neighborhood yards and streets after Georges were covered with downed power poles, trees, and streets were filled with sand and silt, branches, washing machines, refrigerators, lumber, boats, and other litter. Somebody's hot tub and refrigerator sit under the Jones's house. The canals are filled with the same things, with the addition of several cars in the canal (or channel) within view of the Jones's back yard. Pavement in some areas was removed, drainage ditches filled in, and mailboxes shredded off.
Privacy has been reduced to zero. Where houses were once screened by lush tropical plants and trees, they now sit out on a desert-like barren. At best, it looks like a newly-constructed development. No vegetation, no shade, no places for birds. Birds ARE returning, and they are thoroughly confused. Mosquitoes are breeding in the many brackish ponds remaining.
Homes & Structures
Because of Florida's strict building codes and recent experiences with numerous hurricanes, most houses survived, including the Jones'. Still, some built in the halcyon days before codes did not.
The Jones residence is a beautiful three bedroom Caribbean-style one-story white stucco home built out of reinforced concrete. It has a low-slope roof and a large "deck" (also concrete) extending out from the main body of the house on two sides) which is roofed over. It is tile-covered reinforced concrete, and adds a charming and roomy extension to the "living space" of the home. The entire main body of the house is built up on reinforced concrete piers which are architecturally designed into the whole decor of the home. The underside is used for extended living space and for parking of cars, boats, or just patio entertaining. The house is quite typical of the residential architecture of the area.
The main body of the house is open to the decks on two sides, and glassed entirely with sliding doors. The underneath is open, except for a section which serves as a garage. It is blocked in, with a sliding garage door, a side entry, and one window. The decks are tiled the same as the interior, and the arches are screened to fend off the common and prevalent mosquitoes that are always present, no matter what the season. The house is architecturally beautiful with curving arches between pillars and an overhanging roof.
The details of the house were carefully designed for hurricanes. The main living quarters sit up on concrete reinforced piers. The roof shingles were made especially for high winds. They worked except for a few insignificant blow-offs. There is a good roof-top solar hot-water heater, and on most days, no electric supplemental heating is required. (Good thing-electricity is not expected for several more weeks.) Windows can be quickly covered with sliding steel shutters to ward off flying objects. (Daily temperatures average a high of 90 and a low of 80 in the Keys.) A trap door leads from the hallway in the house to the roof in case maintenance is required. Joe Jones built a communication antenna tower on the side of his house to catch the Coast Guard, weather, and even FM reception, and to communicate by cell phone with his wife when he is out on his boat. It also houses weather-recording devices.
The tower and weather vane survived, and Joe was able to observe the wind speeds during the entire storm. (Georges winds were sustained at between 115 and 135 between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., and mostly in the upper ranges between 12 to 2 p.m. The sliding steel shutters protected the glass. They worked, and worked very well.
The air-condition unit also is mounted above ground-it "hangs" above ground on the back side of the house eight feet up. It is thought to have survived the onslaught because it is mounted above the high-water surge that Georges brought. But since power is still unavailable to much of the Keys, the Jones will have to await the return of the electric grid to see if it still works. With the 90 degree heat, they fervently hope so.
The sanitation system at Cudjoe Key is unique. There are no sewer lines (digging in marl would be difficult, anyway. Also, where would you pump the sewage? To Miami, 100 miles to the east? Not likely.) Codes allowed builders to drill a deep sanitary well into the marl and pump sewage into it, where presumably it is "absorbed" into the marl, and the bacteria does its job much like a regular septic tank, except that at about 4-5 feet down, you meet the brackish water table.
The only known storm-caused failures in the Jones' house were two: they forgot to remove the five ceiling fans that served the deck areas. In the high winds, they were shredded, yanked off their mountings, and blown to the bottom of the ocean, ripping out those lovely archway nylon deck screens on the outside of the deck in the process and dinging the stucco. The second failure was forgetting that sliding doors are not airtight at the bottom. They spent literally all day mopping up the water and, yes, even leaves, that blew past the steel covers over the doors. They gathered all the towels they had, rolled back the furniture, and rugs, and exhausted themselves trying to keep the water off critical areas by mopping and wringing out towels. They succeeded, but only just.
It is not known yet if the septic system will fail since the entire island was covered in a minimum of two-feet rainwater and/or seven feet of storm surge from the ocean. So far, so good.
Oddly, the telephone works randomly, possibly because much of its system is radio-generated. Time will tell if the wiring and junction boxes, which are now salt laden, will continue to work, especially after a rainstorm. Reliability will remain doubtful for several weeks or months.
Other residences did not survive so well. The house next door to the Jones was awash in sea water six inches deep even though the owner sandbagged around it. With its windows all wide open, the owner thinks that things will dry out, but mildew and other biota probably will forever remain a threat, since water was inside walls that can't readily be aerated. The house was built at ground level, predating the current Florida codes. Other buildings, even the Police Station, stores, etc., were placed at ground level. Some even had their walls cave in from pressure waves pounding them. They may be condemned.
People's ground level brick driveways, walkways and ornamental structures were either washed away, damaged, or covered with silt. Even with the obvious landscape losses, the Jones's metered watering system, including hoses and weeper valves, was pretty much left intact. Except, of course, it's now all covered with six inches of sand and silt. Fences were almost all removed or severely bent, even strong iron ones.
The Jones had filled their generous-sized garage with thousands of dollars of tools, a second refrigerator, a brush shredder, bicycles, a canoe, food, supplies, and many other items a normal family would collect. All were unceremoniously ruined during the seven-foot ocean surges. Joe's loss of power tools is particularly hard to take. He can't do many repairs now. The county code had excluded wiring in this lower level garage, but Joe had wired it himself in order to use his garage as a shop. When power returns, he will find out only then if his garage wiring needs to be replaced as a result his conduits and junction boxes. And assuming County authorities don't penalize him for doing it in the first place when they inspect.
The Jones' two cars survived the ordeal only because Joe had the wit to move them to the highest place on the island before the storm and biked back to his house. Many of their neighbors' autos were ruined. Seven feet of salt water did not do them much good.
Jones had towed his boat to the high ground where he parked his cars. It survived. Had he left it tied to his dock, or strung up above the dock, it would have been smashed to smithereens, as many were.
It could have been worse. The public water supply is still available, pumped through pipes originating all the way from the mainland, but it is not potable, due to the overrunning of the system at various points in the chain by the storm surges. There is uncertainty as to when that will be repaired. The water can be used to flush toilets and to wash (using Clorox), but otherwise it has to be boiled for drinking or food preparation and for washing cooking utensils.
Rebuilding
The worse thing facing Cudjoe Key is the return of services and repairs. The foremost need obviously is for the electricity grid to be restored. Estimates vary, but it may be a matter of weeks, as it was with the ice storms in New England. The Jones live 85 miles from the start of the huge power towers, and each street, village, and town along the way will have to be restored before the repair crews show up at their street. There are obviously other things needed, small things, like screening. The nearest hardware store is Key West, 19 miles to the West. It is uncertain how well it will be stocked and working, since cash registers and computers for monitoring inventory aren't working.
Getting unwanted sand and silt removed will be a major issue. There are tons and tons of it. Will the County authorize trucking it out? Will the streets be plowed? How will they remove it from their own yard? Everything is up in the air now. If it is removed, where will it be put? Florida, and especially Brevard County, has some of the toughest environmental laws in the country. It won't be easy to remove all that non-silt debris. Where will it be hauled to? By whom? Florida has faced this problem before, but not along an island chain linked by one mostly two-lane road.
Replanting trees and shrubs will be a major undertaking. The nearest nursery stocks now are near Miami, and they will be overburdened with requests. In addition, the environmental laws of the county often require arduous paperwork in order to plant some species. Will the County be able to process these in quick fashion? Given the huge numbers of requests that are likely to made on the local government, it doesn't seem likely.
Those channels, or "canals," as they locals call them, are now filled with silt, trash, trees, limbs, autos, hot tubs, stairs steps, trash cans, boats, and God knows what else. Worse, the channels out to open sea are bound to have been filled up with silt, also. The buoys marking the route were ripped out. The Coast Guard will have to restore thousands of miles of those, and the USGS Maps will have to be checked and rechecked, to see if anything changed on the sea bottom. It may be a process of years before all those things are updated.
Because there is no electricity to the Keys yet, the Jones, like their neighbors, have to open their windows and sit in the 90-degree swelter. There are no shade trees anymore. Since screens are absent now, anything that wants to come in does, including mosquitoes and birds. For recreation, the natives sit in their cars, turn on the AC and listen to CDs. Worse, without lighting, they can't read at night, and of course there is no TV. True, Joe has a small generator that gives them some lighting and runs small appliances. All the neighbors are running their own units, and the noise, with open windows, is unabating.
Emergency services, such as police and life support, are gradually returning to the islands, although radio communication systems were damaged in many areas. However, authorities at this time are not admitting anyone down Highway 1 to the Keys from the mainland except residents. They stop you and look at your driver's license. No tourists, no relatives, no tradesmen, no services except emergency. Every day, though, a truck delivers ice blocks to the Jones' community, and they are able to keep their foods refrigerated this old fashioned way, but of course not frozen. Every day the county sprays insecticide from an aircraft because they are concerned about the mosquitoes. This spray drifts into the windows since no one knows when the spraying will arrive in time to close the whole house.
Radio communication with the police is possible in some communities, but without telephone lines and power, many people may suffer serious harm if emergency services are unreachable. You would possibly not survive a heart attack just now because it is a 3-hour ride to Miami, once you manage to reach the rescue squad and they reach you. Needless to say, hospitals (there are only 3 in the entire Keys) are limiting the services they provide.
Repairs will be another major problem to Key residents. As with the Jones, if your house survived, you undoubtedly will need to solve several other problems: removal of sand and debris from your swimming pool; restoration of pool and fountain plumbing and watering systems; restoration of sidewalks, driveways, and ground level patios; replacing torn-out fencing; repairing telephone, cable TV, and other communication systems; replacement of possibly hundreds of square feet of insect screens in each home; replacement of HVAC systems due to water damage; repair/replacement of sewage pump systems, and almost anything else you can think of that was damaged by wind or water, from roofs to boat docks. With such a large area devastated, all parallel to a 100-mile single-lane road from Panama City to Key West, transporting goods and services will be time-consuming and costly. Tradesmen will be swamped with requests. The insurance agents admit they don't know WHEN they will come to inspect the Jones' property, but it will be weeks. Thus, compensation may be months away. Will the loss of greenery be compensated for? Possibly, depending on the insured plan. But who will come and do the work?
Buying new tools, new ceiling fans, new screens, garden hoses, lawn chairs, soil, mulch, fencing, etc., will be weeks away, perhaps months. Many of those sorts of things have to be purchased from Miami due to shortages in the Keys, and there will be a run on those necessities at stores nearest the Keys. If it is small enough to be shipped by mail, catalog shopping will be possible. Mail service was restored seven days after the storm, remarkable considering the condition of roads, streets, and - oh yes - the loss of mail boxes.
Personal losses will be great. Those tools and appliances in the Jones' garage were not supposed to be there, according to codes. Whether the insurance industry will pay for them is to be determined, but doubt lingers in Joe's mind.
In Conclusion:
So, Paradise was blown away. And then scrubbed clean by waves. We should know not to take all our worldly possession into a place of high risk. Yet we all do it, and willingly. But some of us are not prepared for eventualities. We could, after all, be living on an earthquake fault, next to a volcanic vent, on a mud-slide prone hill, in a brush-fire zone, or even upon a flood plain. Or we could build on a sand beach, only to see the entire foundation washed out in a mere nor'easter. It has all happened before. But life teaches us others of us lessons of survival, and if we are smart, we listen to those who have survived. We may not like government, but government in the case of the Jones was one of their best friends because it had demanding building codes. Their house survived very well.
The Jones' survived; that's the first rule of existence: stay alive even after what Nature throws at you. They have housing, a roof over their heads, still. True, they are hot; they can't drink the water; they can't buy the things they used to be able to for a while; they can't talk to their friends by phone with any reasonable reliability; and they don't have a single screen or tree to hold off either of Nature's insect or sun. They will suffer the easy access to fresh food and supplies for awhile. But they do have hot water, a luxury for most survivors there, and they have the use of their autos and boats, something that many people lost. They won't need the tree shredder for a long time, and their house-to-house privacy is gone. They will have to listen to the drone of generators for perhaps weeks, including their own.
It'll be weeks or months before they will be able to plant a single thing. The rain will have to come in inches and inches to wash the salt out of the soil, provided it is usable.
