- May 1, 2024
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Four days before Hurricane Irma I got in my car to drive inland to Ocala.
There was a lot of traffic, and gas shortages were prevalent not just in Port Orange, but essentially everywhere in the state. I made it home, and I figured it would be less dangerous to travel more inland and not be on the coast where storm surge occurs.
Turns out, Irma had other ideas.
Hurricane Irma, which hit Central Florida as a Category 1 hurricane, made its way to Florida and ravaged the Florida Keys before heading slightly west, directly toward Orange and Marion counties.
I was hunkered down in my Aunt Sandy's house. Her house has a concrete foundation and we boarded the windows a couple of days before. When the storm occurred, I was on my laptop patrolling social media to check up on what was happening, and couldn't help but get anxious about the whole thing.
I wasn't necessarily scared, but my family was. The panic was real. I was seeing photos of people's houses being flooded, crushed or worse. My mom feared for our family home, and it was totally warranted.
At around 3 a.m. my cousin Shaun went outside on the porch to feel the winds. At that point, the eyewall of Hurricane Irma was practically on top of Marion County, the place where I went to take refuge. Figures.
"Guys! There is a tree on top of the neighbor's house!" Shaun said.
I went outside and all I saw was a huge brown hole. It was obviously dark, so I couldn't see the entire scope of the damage, but it certainly didn't look good. In the morning I went outside to see and I was physically and emotionally stunned. A massive oak tree was uprooted from the ground due to the intense 80-90 mph sustained winds that swept through the neighborhood and supplanted directly in the center of the house.
The owners of the house weren't in town. They left to evacuate the storm, and that's what a family will have to go home to. My aunt made the phone call to let the family know, and they sounded positive, but when they see it, it'll be shocking. And when I looked at that tree inside of that home on Hemlock Radial Drive I felt the pain of the people who were about to return to it.
Irma was scary, and it will take quite an effort from all of Florida's communities to restore normalcy.
If the wind was blowing the other way, that tree would have been in the house I was in, and that's a thought that's hard to handle.
I might not have power, but at least I still have a home.
