Hurricane Matthew Update

It's been about nine weeks since the hurricane brushed by here. Below are a few pictures of some of the damaged homes where nothing has been repaired yet. That is the point of this posting! Nothing gets repaired quickly after a major storm. A lot of people have damage, many far worse than we have and the best the limited number of carpenters and roofers can do is put you on the list. Thank goodness for those "Blue Tarps"! It can take 6-9 months after a storm for everything to be repaired. As of last week, the city and FEMA finished picking up all the tree debris city-wide. So now the city needs to repair the sidewalks that were busted up when the trees next to them uprooted. Also where-ever the branch piles were they killed the grass below so everyone will have 20-30 yards of sod to put down to repair the damage. I'm going to wait till spring before doing anything.

Could have been a lot worse for my neighborhood!

Hurricane Matthew One Month Later

Yesterday and today, the debris collection truck (one truck) was in the neighborhood hauling off all the storm’s tree damage. I took this photo with my cell phone so it’s not the greatest because you can’t see what the trucks signs say. These are FEMA contracted trucks. Lord knows what the cost is, maybe some day we’ll find out. But we’re all happy that it’s being hauled off. Now it’s time to re-seed or re-sod the grass areas that were killed under the branch piles.

I do have one oak tree in the back yard that will need to come down because of the extensive storm damage. Maybe next year I’ll have it taken down. It’s a 24 inch diameter oak and the going rate for removal is $2,500.00 for the one tree. Who knows, maybe if another storm comes through Mother Nature will take it down!

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.