Hurricane Matthew 2016 pictures and some issues

Hurricane Matthew 2016 pictures and some issues

Some of you know I live on the Intracoastal Waterway in Northeast Florida and had to deal with this hurricane. Here's a brief summary of the event.

At 4:00am today 10-8-16 the storm has moved out of our area and it’s now a soft breeze and cool here. We had one tree down including lots of snapped off branches some branches as big as 10 inches in diameter! But we were lucky with no house damage or flooding. A big part of the downed trees was the nor-easter we had immediately ahead of the hurricane. This 3 inches of rain saturated and softened the ground so when the hurricane winds and lots more rain came the roots had nothing but mush to hold on to. Lots of trees uprooted and limbs snapped off, the neighborhood is a mess.

The storm surge here in the Intracoastal Waterway was by my best guess from known trees/bushes/marsh grass heights growing in the waterway was showing me between 4-5 feet. It’s the first time I’ve seen the street a couple houses down from me was covered with water for half a block, curb to curb and over the tops of the curb. No one had water inside on their floors.

Electric power is still off since Friday noon and JEA said it will not be back on until Sunday afternoon, this is a first for my area. Normally the power is only off for at most half an hour. Glad I have a generator.

Communications: Cell phones are out for outgoing calls but incoming works but the voice is garbled. However texting works fine.

Also the internet connection is dead if you use only a router to connect through and if you don’t have a generator for 110v power to power the router, it’s dead.

Then there’s TV, without a generator it’s useless and you have to rely on a radio to keep up with the weather updates which is nowhere near as informative as the graphics of are on TV.

Evacuation: Once again was a traffic mess. I have a rule that with Category 3, 4 or 5 I evacuate. Because it was a cat 4, I made reservations at a Holiday Inn for Thursday and Friday night so I thought I was all set until Thursday night when Holiday Inn called and said because of evacuation orders they canceled my reservation! Well that was just great, that late or last moment all motels were filled leaving me to either drive in the traffic mess for 100 miles or stay put. So because of the storms path parallel to the coastline I risked staying. If it were a straight westward path onto the shore I would have driven out of town. Fortunately,

We made it through with no broken windows or other house damage. It helped a great deal that I’m always prepped for these events.

My house.

My backyard.

Other neighborhood pictures. No one got hurt although 90% of the people left and no one had water in their house.