Matt's Hurricane Ivan Page

Instead of weakening, the storm strengthened into a Category FIVE hurricane! Storms don't classed higher than that and so now I was beginning to worry.

Ivan slammed into Jamaica and reports came in about evacuations, flooding, and carnage of all sorts.

The reports on the hurricane's potential track did not look very promising either. Every five hours, the Hurricane Center experts adjusted their predictions further and further westward along the Florida coastline until it looked like first Tallahassee, then Pensacola, then Mobile was going to bear the brunt of the storm's landfall. Schools in Escambia County as well as Pensacola Junior College and the University of West Florida were closed as of Tuesday, September 14th "until further notice." All of my symphony performances were postponed or canceled By this time, Ivan was well into the Gulf and many people had already left town. I was torn between going to visit relatives and staying to help out friends. In the end, I chose to stay.

I made my apartment as hurricane-proof as possible, which meant taping up windows, taking pictures off the walls and storing valuable electronics in safe places. After that it was a matter of packing clothes, my instrument, and music for an extended stay with my friends who live in a strong brick house. Before moving in with them, though, I decided to take some pictures of Pensacola Beach.

 

"Just how bad could a hurrincane be?" I thought to myself around 3pm on Wednesday, September 15th. At this point, Ivan was making what some could call "final approach". Winds were picking up, the sky was overcast, and sometimes rain came down. I was staying in a sturdy ranch house on high ground with friends who had been through four such storms. The confidence everyone else radiated was enough to keep me relaxed.

I stepped outside to watch the sky. The clouds were whipping by overhead as though I was watching a time-lapse film from a nature show. The wind was gentle, but persistent. Looking around the back yard, though, the tall pine trees were rocking back and forth like dancers swaying to the music of an orchestra.

I wandered back inside, began reading a book and then, at about 5:30, I had dinner with my friends Mike and Amy and their 2-year-old daughter Sarah. After dinner, we settled down in front of the television and enjoyed a final few hours with electricity. The only other hurricane I experienced was Mitch, which hit Tallahassee in 1998 as a Category 2 storm that rapidly fizzled out.

At 10:15 PM, the power went out. The lights flickered quite a bit as though man-made machinery was locked in a desperate battle with the forces of nature. Unfortunately, nature won the fight and candles, hurricane lanterns, and flashlights were lit on the first hour of what was going to be the longest night of my life.

I remember having performance anxiety before concerts. Even before my recital the week before, I found myself lying awake in bed and wondering if I was going to play well or mess up really severely. At times like that, however, I took a small amount of comfort from the fact that, no matter how I played, I'd still be alive and on my feet as I left the concert hall. When a fierce Category 4 hurricane makes a landfall about twenty miles from where you're trying to sleep, one stops thinking about trivial things such as messing up a performance on a stage and the opinion of a conductor or of colleagues and students. Instead, the mind tends to turn to pondering things like the existence of God and the meanings of fate, karma, and death.

Huddled in the master bedroom with my friends, I wasn't paralyzed with fear, which was good because it was a long night and I had to make trips to the bathroom. In the time between about midnight and 3am, I couldn't have slept unless someone knocked me out... or a tree fell on me... (and the thought of that possibility didn't have the effect of a lullaby either!) In fact, I suddenly began to remember that the house was practically surrounded by trees! Big ones! In truth, the house wasn't surrounded by trees... but in a hurricane, one's imagination can easily transform an iron bunker shaded by a single scrawny Birch into a pup tent nestled in a clearing of Sequoias and Redwoods! Still and all, my awareness of the foliage around the house was greatly intensified.

How my friend Mike managed to sleep through the sound of gusts that bordered on banshee shrieks and runaway trains is beyond me. How Sarah managed to sleep through it was even more amazing! Amy, trying to sleep on the bed beside her husband and I, huddled on the floor next to her side of the bed, however, were not having a particularly good night. Eventually, it would have taken Arnold Schwarzenegger, armed with a heavy crowbar to pry our hands apart. The intense din of the gusts was permeated with whispers of "You okay?" and "Yeah, I'm fine. You okay?" When the worst of it had subsided and the sound of Mike's snores were all that remained, we managed to let go of each others' hands, rub circulation back into our fingers, and settle down to sleep... until another gust whipped past the window and something heavy thudded against the roof!! I snapped awake curled into a fetal position, and re-confirmed the fact that, regardless of my rather amorphous and non-traditional spiritual beliefs, I could never, ever be an atheist...

The sharp raps I heard on the bedroom window sometime long after I'd surrendered to gray haze startled me. The voice accompanying the knocks belonged to Bob, Amy's mother's husband.

"Looks like you're gonna need a new roof. We're gonna need one too. A tree smashed through our screened-in porch."

I blinked a few times, heard Mike grumble something like "okay", heard Amy give a more intelligible answer, and then my world faded back to black.

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

A couple hours later (I think it was...) I awoke to the sound of Amy calling me from across a great chasm... actually, she was standing about three feet away from my spot on the floor. It just took a moment for me to come back from the netherworld. Apparently something like breakfast was available, we were without power and running water. I was still too tired to comprehend the full impact of what was being explained. I got up, used the bathroom, flushed the toilet and then heard no sound of it refilling. Then, I began to understand. I ate something... don't ask me what at this point... probably crackers... and headed out to the garage where Mike and Amy had gathered with Sarah. Thinking that this would be worth recording, I grabbed my palm pilot, turned it on, and pointed the camera out the open garage door.

The first sight that greeted my eyes didn't look too bad... though the light pole that was lying behind Mike's car used to be standing tall and proud... if somewhat cracked. Now, it rested with its end not more than a foot away from Mike's tailgate. "The Powers Above were definitely smiling on Mike last night," I thought. Looking over toward my own car and seeing it unscathed, with the exception of being covered by leaves, I was quite relieved. I walked around the house from the garage and finally got to see what Ivan could do: A very large oak tree in the Raines family's front yard had been blown over. The fact that it had toppled over onto the mailbox was not the problem. That it took out a bunch of telephone and power cables, however, was a big deal! I snapped some more pictures and continued around the house, stepping on roof shingles that the mighty winds had strewn over the yard as if Ivan had been a child in a tantrum. Rounding the far side of the house, I saw that a very large pine tree... over forty feet tall with a trunk at least four feet thick, had toppled over, torn the electrical feed from the roof, and landed about fifteen feet from the rear wall. Fifteen feet might not have been hair-parting, but if that tree had twisted a few degrees...

The more frightening fact about this damage was that, apparently, a tornado had come behind the house... near to where we were all lying! This was why the trees were damaged that fashion. A second tornado fell the tree that damaged Bob and Janis' screened-in porch.

Continuing down the street, Mike and I passed by houses that, like his, were intact but whose yards had been rearranged by a demented landscaper. Abe, a former Navy bombardier and Mike's neighbor across the street, lost the wooden portions of his fence and had some extensive damage done to his trees. If I was ever curious to see what tree roots looked like from the bottom, I just had to pay Abe a visit! Other curious sights included a telephone pole whose upper extremety, weighted down by a transformer, was bent like a drinking straw. The only reason it wasn't downed was probably the tension of the wires to which it was connected.

After surveying the damage, the first thing we needed to do was get in touch with the rest of Mike and Amy's family. We knew that Amy's mom and her husband were okay, but that was all. Some we managed to contact by phone. Others, we had to drive to. Before we left, though, I called home and let my Mom know that I was all right. You can bet she appreciated that call!!

Perhaps it would've been better to wait until the roads were safer, but that's simply not how one thinks when worried about family. So, the four of us piled into Amy's car and we drove off in search of her and Mike's families. The roads were very treacherous and we dodged fallen trees, ran over dead power lines, and had to turn around several times because of severe road blockages. Eventually, we did manage to see who we needed to see. We even stopped by the Naval Lodge and found it still standing and intact... though two doors had been blown in. At least our meeting place would still be functional!

To go into more details regarding every facet of the cleanup would take much longer than I have the patience to write about. Let's just say that I participated in doing more yardwork than any suburban-raised Northerner would have thought could be done in a week's time! I didn't walk away from this incident completly unscathed either. While picking up the mass of fallen shingles outside Mike and Amy's house, I didn't realize that one of the shingles had landed among fire ants and before I knew it, I sustained six nasty bites on my left hand, which caused it to swell up considerably. Man, those things HURT!!! It took over four days for my hand to return to what I'd call "passable function" but I helped out as much as I could even when it was injured. What else was there to do? I couldn't possibly just sit around while others worked around me! No way! I did, however, go off on my own a few times to visit Pensacola Junior College and see how well it handled the nasty hand of Ivan. While there, I took some more pictures.

It took only a day and a half for the water to work again, but it took nine days for the electricity to come back on! It was in getting "reconnected" that we all got to see the scope of the help Florida was getting. The electricians who fixed our wires and poles were from "Hydro Quebec"!! That's right French Canadians came all the way down here to help in the disaster relief! We also saw power trucks from just about every other state east of the Mississippi! Amazing, if you think about it. We gave bottles of water and cups of ice to all of the workmen who fixed up the house. Yes, I even attempted to revive my high school French and exchanged a couple of sentences with the workmen... though I was definitely very very rusty at it.

Now, while all of this was happening at Mike and Amy's suburban house, my own apartment was without power and telephone lines for even longer. Though, the water was working at about the same time. I didn't get to come home until the night of September 24th! I know that even while I am sitting at home, basking in A/C and thinking about classes starting back up again at school, there's still a lot of work to be done cleaning the city up and turning it into the warm and pleasant cultural and historical center that it was. I also know that the next time a big hurricane passes by the Gulf Coast, I'll be gone faster than you can snap your fingers!! The Road Runner would wish he could move as fast I will when nature comes knocking on Pensacola's door once again!

Still and all, we made it through and, like any hurricane prone city, we have what it takes to survive. To celebrate, Mike bought all of us T-shirts that someone made to commemorate what has been dubbed Pensacola's Worst Named Storm Ever.