Milton
As I said at the end of my last post, I’ve headed down to Florida to see my folks. Hurricane Helene had just gone through. They were fine because their house is relatively high. Almost 10 feet above the water! But a lot of the neighbors got whacked pretty badly and all of the streets were lined with junk like this:
But another hurricane was heading this way! Milton was coming in from the west, and it was getting pretty big over the hot Gulf waters. It looked like it was going to go north of us, but I was still pretty worried about high winds setting all of that debris flying. So I spent a couple of days battening down the hatches.
But then, at the last moment, the storm “wobbled” to the south and we were being warned of 12 feet of storm surge. So we scrambled to find a place away from the water that would take all of us, including the cat. I found something in Orlando, which is about a 3 hour drive. I charged the car up to 100% and off we went.
The storm was fairly uneventful in Orlando, and the next morning I went out to charge up for the drive home. Unfortunately, I drove over some debris and ended up with this embedded in the tire:
The result was a slow leak, but it needed to be fixed before the 3 hour drive. I went around to all of the tire shops in town, but they were all closed for the storm. I called various service stations, but nothing. Even AAA refused to come out. So I patched it with some of that spray goo and pumped it up with a little compressor. Then I loaded up my parents and the cat and we headed back.
We arrived to find this:
The water had gotten right up to the doors, but hadn’t gotten in at all. But it had been streaming past the house. There was muck everywhere, and you could see erosion marks from a very strong current. And all of the debris from Helene had floated all over town.
So the whole neighborhood got out and started cleaning up. We piled all of the trash up again.
And attacked the muck with shovels and pressure washers.
We were a lot luckier than a lot of people we know. Milton was a pretty nasty storm and coming so soon after Helene was pretty discouraging.
