It’s Thursday, September 26th, and I’m sitting on our sectional watching day-long reports on Hurricane Helene as she nears landfall in northwest Florida.
Weather alerts during hurricane season are numerous. In some ways, the reaction of the people living here reminds me of how people reacted to snowstorm predictions in Minnesota. Grocery stores, hardware stores, and even gas stations become very, very busy – the fact is, we waited in line for about twenty minutes at our neighborhood gas station for a pump so I could fill our car’s gas tank.
Some news stations on television did nothing else all day but report current conditions as they tracked Helene.
Understandably, any threat of a hurricane is taken very seriously here. They can be fierce and cover many miles with devastating winds and many inches of rain. Those on the coast are always at risk of storm surge, which, with this system, creates up to 12-foot-high walls of water coming to shore. Hurricane systems also present a risk of tornados that come in multiple waves as the storm moves north.
Helene is the first hurricane that came relatively close to our home. We are situated very near the line of the hurricane warning issued by the weather forecasters. Just to our east is where tropical storm warnings exist. Heavy rain is expected later in the evening and could measure as much as six to eight inches locally and as much as a foot in the Florida panhandle. Winds here are nearly 50 miles per hour at our home and over 120 miles per hour north and west of here.
Hurricanes are storms Florida has to deal with every summer/fall, and I found it interesting that The Villages (where we live) is a staging area for power company equipment. There are over 4,000 power company trucks of varying sizes parked not too far away from our home, with the manpower needed to respond to power outages.
Strong winds prove to be Mother Nature’s way of pruning trees here. There will be a lot of branches and palm fronds on the ground by Friday morning. Workers will be out early in the morning, driving around and picking up the mess created by Helene, and everything should be cleared by noon.
Sadly enough, there are two new systems to the south of Florida, and they present another risk of seeing the same results later next week. Issac and John are forming and still figuring out what direction they will head.
One thing for sure, the news stations here will keep us informed.
Have A Good Week!
