Hurricane Irma…a disaster story!

On September 6, we started paying attention to the news about a hurricane that was coming our way as a category 5 and it appeared that it was obsessed with visiting Miami. We knew it was a beast on the Atlantic Ocean that ate a couple of islands on its way, but we were hoping that as always change its course and decided to get lost at sea.

Not this time! Irma was like a soldier on a mission and now it was not Miami, she was decided to visit the whole state, like a tourist on her first visit to the Sunshine State.

There is a couple of things we learned about us Floridians before and after the hurricane. First, we have the problem that our state is isolated and connected to the rest of the nation only by one side, the North. as the peninsula that we are we are surrounded by water, so the only way to escape is going up, meaning that if you decide to leave, you can expect a 14 hours drive just to get to Orlando, that sucks. Since we imagine that coming back to check our property was going to be the same drive we decided to stay.

Then, the ones that stayed like us found that everybody needs gas and they will buy more than they need, creating a gas crisis in a few hours. The same happened to the water, while everybody fought each other for a box of water, we decided to buy 2 liter soda bottles and drink them all in less than two days, so we could fill them with water and froze them, that way we could have cold water after the hurricane.

My wife went crazy freezing ziplock bags full of water, which result to be a great idea afyer the power went off.

After installing the shutters, and decided we were ready to face the giant, Governor Rick Scott started saying on TV that were were going to be flooded with 15 feet of water and we were going to die. That’s when I started to get really worried about the hurricane. It was incredible to me that they were trying to evacuate over 600,000 residents and only had 2 shelters that accepted pets. We were not leaving our dogs behind so the only solution was to stay and survive the apocalypses.

Wind started to blow on Sunday morning and the eye of Irma was still near to Cuba, that’s when we thought that it was going to be a “bad one”, as prepared as we were, power went off around 1:00 PM and we realize how dependent we are form our modern day commodities. With no Air Conditioning on the house, TV or Internet, we decided to record videos and take pictures of Irma.

We were blessed that FPL reconnected our power the next day, because still today there are more than 5 million homes without power across the state.

We need to come together as a nation when disasters like this happens, together we are stronger, I saw my neighbors come out and together we cleaned our streets. We watched together at night and took care of everyone around. My kids were amazed of how everyone was helping outside.

I hope nothing like this happen again in the next 500 years, but we all know that’s not real, so until the next one comes we are going to become stronger, rebuild our state and face any problems with our eyes set on the victory.