I was able to avoid heavy traffic again which was nice by taking secondary roads. As for damage around my house, minor.
- 5 screen panels ripped out of the screen enclosure. It's two stories, exposed to the wind, so I knew that was likely.
- 1 small palm tree leaning over.
- 3 sections of my ligustrum trees fell.
- 1 top of a giant bird of paradise fell down
- Couple of bamboo down.
- Various plumeria bent and/or broken, but I have hundreds.
- And I forgot to take in the lid that pops up over the air conditioner, so that got bent and one of the joints to it is partially broke.
So we made out really well. Very, very lucky.
Never lost power. Although a tree next to my neighborhood fell on some lines and is still hanging over the road. If it's power lines, and that's what supplies us, we might. But someone said before we left that we get power from multiple directions, so I don't know.
On the way back from the panhandle there were lots of trees down, but there were crews all over the place working, on power and cutting trees. And it was clear that in a lot of places, the roads were covered with parts of trees, but they had already cleared them away. Only ran into one road closed, but that worked out as we decided to then take the Suncoast Parkway back which had no traffic, and no tolls right now. Where there was gas, there were lines. The closer to got to Tampa, the bigger the lines. We got gas after visiting my sister in Dothan, AL this morning and had enough to get back since we avoided traffic jams. I can see why some gas stations had to have several police officers directing traffic. There were a few places where there were no police directing things and it really blocked the road. Out of about 15 minutes we were probably in traffic, lines to getting gas were most of the reason for the backups. There wasn't much gas around. Most areas seemed to have power on the way back, but on a few occasions there were traffic lights that were out and people had to treat it as a four way stop.
In a week we could probably have the boards off our glass doors and windows, screen repaired and yard cleaned up. We're in no rush on taking most of the boards down and fixing the screen enclosure. Tonight we got most of the inside of the house back to normal from everything we set up higher or moved into safer parts of the house. |