After the Hurricane Irma  9-12-17 Tuesday..
Been like forever since I blogged but I know a lot of my followers know we're living in SW Florida so I thought 'd drop a note to say we are ok .

MY VIEW

BEFORE, DURING, and AFTER

with excitable voices HURRICANE IRMA

9/9/17 Saturday BEFORE : The insanity starts when the weather guessers say “ Here it comes “ . The hype and excitable voices start on TV and radio and won't stop for weeks. Mind numbing forecasts and endless guessing. I listened to the governor and all the officials assure us that it's gonna happen, BUT... the weather guessers couldn't really say for sure East or West so they added some colorfull adjectives to the reports. AND the madness continued with exciteable voices. We prepared..batteries, water, emergency passes to get back on our island, BUT if Irma goes East we stay , BUT it might go West....hmmmm. So we have to make a decision. OR..spend thousands getting outa Dodge. We decided to stay. As time went on we decided to go to a shelter.

Our governor says stay safe, evacuate, go to a shelter...Well, alrighty now !!

So we left home early in the morning and headed to a shelter called Island Coast High School. The internet posting is lacking a lot of info like zip codes and phone numbers and mapping. We arrived to a line of cars and creeped our way to a cop that said they were full, turn around , go away.. OK NOW, he said he didn't have any info on other shelters, hmm, but I remembered our Governor said just call 211 for help in such a case. ( By the way-- I wanted to see if there were any shelters with room so I called 211 for 4 hours and it immediately went to a message “ Due to a large number of calls, please call back later . )

Luckily I have a friend, Amy, that offered her place to us so we headed there, at least it's more inland and safer than a surge area . We were there in about ½ hr, nice, newer building. It had steel storm shutters installed.

DURING: At our friends house which I will forevermore refer to as “ Fort Ferguson “ . Northwest Fort Meyers Near I-75 & Hwy 78, 25 miles inland from our house, we caught the Western edge of Irma's eye, The condo was built about 10 years ago, steel shutters installed, kinda like a vault. Could not hear the storm inside, good solid building. South facing porch out the front door enabled us to go outside and watch Irma and her 100MPH gusts. Unbelievable energy. SCARY..strange noises outside. Saw some trees come down nearby. Made me glad it wasn't any worse. We managed to have power til near 830 PM at the end of the blow hard time. The lights did go off & on a few times. Once the winds slowed to a reasonable speed of 30MPH we all took a deep breath and Thanked God for his mercy. WE SURVIVED.

AFTER : We woke up next morning after a fitful sleep at about 7AM. Our first outside observations showed us no flooding or bad damage. Car was ok ! About 830 AM my friend, Carl, called me to report no damage to our place on Matlacha Island and no surge damage. ( 9 foot or higher surges were predicted, DID NOT HAPPEN ) He said there was Electric Power. One of the few powered sites in Lee County Florida. We headed home at 9AM but had to delay for 1 hour while some good neighbors cleared a downed tree at the subdivision entrance,

we got out about 10 AM.

We were home before 11 AM after Heather dodged and weaved thru debris and manuevering powerless intersections. No cops directing traffic yet ! We saw a lot of landscaping blown around and some trees down but only a couple homes with structural damage. THANK GOD !!

We came home to almost normal conditions. AMAZING !!