And good riddance! Cat 5 will DESTROY stuff.

heath

At least I was able to get some good footage of a very well defined eye of the hurricane directly over our area.

(very quick video shot).
http://www.magoomedia.com/media/eye.wmv

That's cool.

hwm

I finally got the internet this morning... Been climbing the walls! Power was only out for a week or so, cable never died (BrightHouse).

My wife is an RN, and got locked inside the hospital for a 3 day shift (With the healthy bonus, we got an EU1000 i Honda generator... quiet little bugger, and runs 7 hrs on .61 gallons of gas). I loaded two kids, two dogs, a cat, a bird, a lizard, and crickets into our PT Cruiser and ran to Georgia. Unfortunately, Georgia was closed, so I came back to Florida and stayed at my sister's in Daytona Bch. It was eerie being the only car on AIA...

We lost most of our fence, a lot of soffit, facia, and shingles, and the skylight in our kitchen. It's not really lost... I found parts of it in the backyard ;) Traffic lights were gone at a lot of intersections, but it wasn't too bad.

It wasn't so bad in Palm Beach County, Keith, but we've never had something THIS bad. Not even Hurricane Irene, with it's "out of the blue" turn into Florida that gave us a foot of water five years ago!

BTW, got your email, glad you're okay!

heath

ps-"Georgia was closed" cracked me up!

Glad everything is working out. I, too, like the part about GA being closed. Good to have you back.

"ps-"Georgia was closed" cracked me up!"

I wasn't overly amused at the time... All I wanted was a room, and a few hours of sleep. I went as far as Hilton Head S.C. without finding a single room. Except for a Heritage Inn in Dublin Ga, that wanted $75 for 6 hrs... I didn't want it that bad.

Keith,

It was how you said it. Hurricanes stink, but hey, we got through it. I feel bad for the third world countries...Mudslides killed over 700 people in Haiti by a TROPICAL storm, rough, but not a hurricane.

heath

Imagine how bad it was in the old days, before doppler radar and satellite imagery. The weirdest thing about hurricanes is that the day before you get it, it seems like the most beautiful day of the year. No evacuations = deadly outcome.

Galveston, Texas on September 8, 1900 - 6,000 people died. I've read in some places that it was 8,000. And it was only a Category FOUR.

I helped do a documentary/special in 2002 for the Hurricane of 1928 that nailed Palm Beach County. Lake Okeechobee overflowed and went over the dikes, and killed thousands in Belle Glade. They buried them in West Palm Beach in a mass, unmarked grave. In 2002, they were honored with a special marker over the area.

heath

And now, out of the blue for me (I don't watch much news after working in it for 7 years), Jeanne made a u-turn and is heading for, well, either the Space Coast or Daytona, but it sure makes a beeline for south Florida...

ARGH!

heath

ps-Ivan loved the Gulf of Mexico so much, it made a u-turn at Jersey and headed back down.

Chicago has been having one of the best summers in decades. The weather here has literally been like San Diego for weeks. I cannot remember a longer spell of clear-sky days, and the forecast for the coming week remains largely clear and sunny, with the fall temps beginning to dip into the low-to-mid 70's from the current low 80's. I'm almost tired of clear, sunny days; it's getting downright monotonous!

We really do feel badly for Floridians. You've had a truly miserable hurricane season...and it looks like it's not over yet. I saw a veritable conga line of tropical storms on the Carribean.

It's the peak of the season. Speaking of conga line, in Sept. 1995, there were 5 storms IN A ROW dancing out of Africa on a westward journey of "fun."

i swear, the storms keep making u-turns, like Jeanne and Ivan, and are likely gonna become snowbirds down here! I can see it now, Ivan driving his old Cadillac slow down in the fast lane down the highway with his right-blinker on and Jeanne causing problems over her grocery receipt that totalled $4.97...

heath

It will offer no current comfort, but the cover story of the current issue of Scientific American features a theoretical way in which hurricanes might be somewhat controlled in the future. It's basically a combination of the largely discarded cloud seeding technique and a space-based (of course) laser or solar reflector that can heat large sections of the ocean to attract hurricanes to higher energy (like dogs to meat).

Of course it's pretty far-fetched and will never happen in our lifetimes. Can you just imagine such a James Bond-movie-like gizmo in the sky at the beckon call of a White House politician itchin' to BBQ something in 'tween 'cane-baitin'? But it's an interesting think-piece.

These guys with a name like a laundry detergent decided to use some sort of absorption stuff to make hurricanes (and clouds) disappear. They took off in a plane, flew into a cloud that was visible on radar, and sprayed their absorption stuff into the cloud. Apparently, the cloud disappeared from radar.

Of course, I think that we'd drop some of that stuff into a hurricane, we'd probably screw something up (like in a schlocky horror film/cautionary tale) and the hurricane would become a never-before-seen category 35.

heath