As early as September 8th, 2004, when Hurricane Ivan was as far away as the island of Grenada, I told my wife that I had a “real bad feeling” about the storm. It had already killed forty people on Grenada and nearby Trinidad & Tobago. Image may be NSFW.
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It was already a Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale, which is unusual for a storm still in the lower latitudes. Like Hurricane Frederic twenty-five years earlier, it formed off the Cape Verde islands. Unlike Frederic, Ivan’s path from the Atlantic into the Caribbean was more westerly, taking it through a corridor devoid of large islands like Hispanola. By the Friday previous to the storm, I was already making preparations. I spent that Saturday and Sunday dragging the 3/4″ plywood we’d bought for Hurricane Georges back to the house from storage and cutting panels to fit the windows.
Just a year earlier, Darla had left her job at the newspaper where we met and her new company was a little more proactive than mine. They have a skeleton crew of volunteers who fly or are bussed to locations like Atlanta or St. Louis to keep her company running until the storm has passed and things have returned to normal in Mobile. She had volunteered for the “Disaster Recovery Team” because it looks good on your record. We’d been several years without a hurricane, so it seemed like a safe bet that she wouldn’t have to leave. In the first nine years of our marriage, we hadn’t spent a night apart. Sunday afternoon we got a call we’d been dreading since the predictions for Hurricane Ivan had been targeted for Mobile. We were a little more than seven months from our tenth anniversary when she flew out for St. Louis on Monday, September 13th.
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After Darla left that Monday, I spent the first half of the week finishing the hurricane “shutters” when I wasn’t at work. Darla’s brother stopped by on his way back from “battening down the hatches” at his rental house in Navarre, Florida and helped me hang the last four panels. Other than that, I mostly spent time picking up anything in the yard that the wind could pick up and turn into a deadly missile. I gathered lawn furniture and chained it to a tree. I moved our cars to the front yard and parked them away from trees. Nights I cleaned house: vacuuming, mopping, sweeping, cleaning animal crates and cages and doing lots and lots of laundry and dishes. Wednesday morning, my dad came over early before I left for work and helped me put the last four hanger bolts in the wall. The outside of the house was as prepared as it would get. I called my boss and told him I was going to stop by the Baldwin County office of the newspaper and help them move computers and clean up the office for the storm. It was a selfish move on my part, because I just wanted to stay close to home. The weather was beautiful; the “calm before the storm” which has become a cliché for anyone who doesn’t live on the coast. We knew it wouldn’t last long. When I got to the Baldwin office, I started unplugging any equipment that would move and taking it to the back of the office, away from the windows. We covered the computers with large plastic bags and taped everything shut with packing tape. Around 10:00 that morning, when everything was secure, we got a call from the home office telling us to head home early. The manager of the Baldwin office turned a blind eye when I left with a roll of plastic bags and several rolls of packing tape. I had computer equipment of my own to cover.
When I got home, I started working on cleaning the house and moving our valuables to the safest locations in the house. I put our photographs in plastic containers and moved them to the kitchen counter. Along with these, the computer, printers, scanner, hard drives, televisions, DVD players, etc. were placed in neat stacks and covered in plastic. I gathered my hurricane supplies and moved them all into the small half bath which has come to be known as my “hurricane bunker.” It’s a 6′ x 6′ room occupied by nothing but a cabinet and countertop. There’s just enough room on the floor for one person to curl up and sleep on a quilt or blanket. It has no windows and no exterior walls, making it the most structurally sound room in the house. By the time I was finished, the tiny room was outfitted with all the snacks I’d need to stay put throughout the storm, flashlights, a radio, my GameBoy, and a quilt to sleep on. (I always moved out of our bedroom during storms because of the large pine trees which used to literally hang over that end of the house.) I caged all the cats and made sure they and the dogs and ferrets had plenty to eat and drink. I’m obsessive about cleaning during times of stress, and hurricanes provide enough stress to get me in maximum cleaning mode. I watched the national weather coverage over my shoulder as I finished up the last of the dishes. I was still frantically cleaning when the satellite service went out, as it will even in a thunderstorm. I switched to the local channels. We had “brownouts” several times that evening. Later, at 10:00 PM the power finally went out. The sound of the wind blowing from the northeast kept me up. I was wide awake when the hurricane made landfall at 2:00 in the morning on the 16th. I decided to take a chance and look out one of the north windows to see if any of the large trees had fallen.Image may be NSFW.
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(One tree I called the “Hand of Doom” was a pine tree more than 50 years old. It had grown in an odd shape, and it hung over my house like a hand ready to crush my master bedroom.) I had pushed a mattress over the one window on the north side of the house that didn’t get covered in plywood. When I looked out, there was no light from the neighborhood or surrounding towns to light the sky; just blackness. When I pulled the mattress back to look out the window (not a smart move) the window bowed in its frame from the force of the wind. I dropped the mattress against the window and ran back into my shelter. I got a call from Darla’s cousin in Birmingham at the moment the eye started to pass over my house, one of many “moral support” calls I got that night. When we were sure that the eye was over me, I went outside. Unlike Erin, Ivan had a poorly defined eye so instead of seeing a clear sky, all I could see was black. There were no birds either. Just lots of deer flies, smaller aggressive biting flies related to horseflies, that chased me around trying to bite as I walked the dogs and checked on the house and yard.
Other than a few small trees and limbs down, I couldn’t see any damage. The yard was littered with pine straw and shredded leaves. I knew that the storm was moving slowly, so I had about two hours before the south side of the eye passed over me. I also knew that the hurricane winds would start again with the passing of the eye, only from the other direction. (Like a tornado, hurricanes spin as they move. If the eye passes over you, you’ll get wind blowing from opposite directions on either side of the eye.) The south side of the storm is almost never as destructive as the north side, so I felt like I’d survived the worst. I curled up in the bathroom floor and slept for a couple of hours until Darla called me around six to check on me.
I had never considered running from the storm, despite having evacuated with my family so many times as a child. Our house is on high ground, away from water and sheltered from most of the high winds. Evacuation shelters don’t take animals, so I would have had to leave my pets at home or arrange to drive as far as Birmingham to find a place to stay with family. Add to that my obsessive nesting instinct, and there was no way I was leaving my home short of an apocalyptic storm.
Other than a large number of small trees down, I had almost no damage due to Hurricane Ivan. The trees were no big loss. I was planning on cutting them down anyway because many of them were diseased. The storm just helped me get motivated. As for the house, I lost a single tab off of one asphalt roof shingle. I had parked my truck on the street before the storm, but the roads were closed and there was a curfew, so I missed work and was docked a day’s pay on Thursday. (At the Fish-Wrapper, there’s only one excuse for missing work – death – and it better be your own.) I spent the day resting from the night before. I was coming down off that adrenaline high and I crashed Thursday afternoon. All I could do was lie around and listen to the news reports of the damage Ivan had caused. I had bought a couple of solar showers, large black rubber bags that you fill up and place in the sun to heat the water. I put those out and started arranging things to make my post-storm life easier. It was too hot to sleep in a bed, so I moved to the sofa where I could get better ventilation. The solar showers worked perfectly. After a day in the sun, the water kept its warmth well enough to be used for a quick shower on the back porch. I tried to start my generator, but the carburetor was clogged up, and I’m no small-engine mechanic.
Image may be NSFW.
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Thursday night, the sky was bright with stars. The normal light pollution which keeps them hidden had all been knocked out with the power. I pulled the propane grill around to the back of the house and started cooking “Chicken Ivan” which consisted of three or four boneless chicken breasts smothered in whatever perishables happen to be left in the refrigerator; bell peppers, three kinds of cheese, onion, etc. I got a call from my dad Thursday night. He had his generator going and they invited me to bring the items from my freezer to their house. After a quick stop at our rental house (the trailer we lived in prior to buying our house) I drove to mom and dad’s, where he had air conditioning, water, ice and all the other modern conveniences. I took him my busted generator, and in a little while, he had it running.
Friday I was back at work. People were grumbling about the lack of power, trees on their houses, price gouging at the gas stations. Mostly though, everyone was just happy to be alive. There was plenty to do, and we were short staffed because so many families had left before the storm hit. Since Mobile County (and the city of Mobile) had been on the west side of the storm, there was a lot of talk about how Ivan had been a “near miss.” Mobile had gotten flooding, but none of the severe wind damage experienced in Baldwin County and across the state line in Florida. Almost half of the employees in my department live across the Bay in Baldwin, so we were quick to set them straight. They were spared the worst because the eye had gone right up our side of Mobile Bay.
Darla flew back in Saturday morning, and we got to work clearing trees out of our driveway. My best friend and his wife drove in from Pensacola. Their power was off and they were headed to Daphne to take a shower at his grandmother’s house. They helped us move at least forty small pine trees to the roadside for the county to haul away. Sunday afternoon, the power came on just a few hours after my generator quit again – perfect timing. After that, it was amazing how quickly things got back to “normal.”
I learned quite a few lessons from Hurricane Ivan. I had hoped to have a few years to make some changes around the house to make us better prepared for the next storm. I ended up having less than ten months between Ivan and the start of 2005’s busy season.