…I was sitting in the living room of my house until the front windows blew in - for some reason, the front windows didn’t have hurricane shutters. Since my bedroom had hurricane shutters over all three windows we figured that would be the safest place. And it was, until rain started blowing in through the gaps in the ceiling - the wind had taken the roofing materials off. The wind was blowing so hard, water was forcing itself into the cracks in the poured-concrete walls and SHOOTING across the room. The noise was indescribable; the most common phrase, “Like sitting underneath a freight train” works to a point, but imagine that punctuated by the screetch of sheet metal being torn off of all the carports in the area and blowing down the streets. Then add in the howling of the wind through the remaining power lines, and a pair of dogs going insane.
We moved to my roommates bedroom after that, which turned out to be the safest place - her window had a hurricane shutter on the windward side. The leeward side of her room had a huge, four-foot fan set into the wall (it was an odd house - the fridge was in the dining room. But it was a 1950s, poured concrete, steel-trussed bomb shelter of a home. Safe, in other words. It stood.) which gave us a perfect view of…well, not a lot. It was pitch dark - all the powder had gone out, of course. I vaguely made out the huge tree in the back yard when it tipped over.
And when it ended, and we walked out side, the first thing I noticed was the bank building, four stories high. Mostly because I had never seen it before from the front yard - the trees always blocked it out. The next thing I noticed were the sea shells. The previous residents had set some on an outside windowsill and they were still there. Later, after the Navy finally got its ass in gear and told us to where we should evacuate, a co-worker brought in pictures which showed how the pressure had separated the glass of her sliding glass door from its frame and sucked the curtain between them. The only way to remove the curtain from the door would have been to break the glass.
I don’t recommend that anyone spend time in a hurricane. Especially a category four.
When Hurricane Hugo ripped through Charleston 12 years ago, my family hauled boogie to Georgia. Granted, we only made it as far as Vidalia, and we still got terrible storms out of that. It took us approximately 6 hours to do the 100 mile drive from Savannah to Charleston to get home.
If something like this ever heads this way again, I’m moving to another country. I live right at the bottom left part of the ‘eye’ of the storm, where that big green blob is.
I think Chique is talking about Hurricane Andrew - it hit South Florida 10 years ago.
I was pretty sure Andrew was a category 5 hurricane, but I could be mistaken. It was supposed to hit us dead on but turned just a tad south almost last minute. We were completely unprepared for how horrible the storm was and I can only imagine what it must have been like for those people unfortunate enought to live in Homestead that got hit by the eye. I’d never seen so much destruction. One of the things I remember most was how beautiful the weather was while my family and neighbors were boarding up windows. I kept thinking to myself, but the sky is so blue, and the weather is so calm. We were very lucky, I can hardly believe it’s been 10 years.
Monty2, this site claims that Andrew, after further review, was in fact a class 5 with sustained wind speeds of 165 mph.
Other than that, I can add nothing to this thread as I have been safely ensconced in the Midwest for most of my life. Just watch out for the damn tornadoes though.
Monty2, I was indeed speaking of Andrew - the link at the bottom of my post goes to NOAA. And yeah, you were lucky. IIRC, Kendall Drive is 88th SW, yes? I had a cousin living at 67th SW and all she had was a downed tree. I lived a couple of blocks south of 288th SW - if you drive out the front gate of the AFB and hang a left a few blocks short of US 1, that’s where I used to live.
Hell, I was very lucky.
I lived in an old house, built to hurricane specs - not one of those cookie-cutter, all-glass stick-builts they were tossing up left and right in those years. I rented, I didn’t own. For all its piss-poor pre-disaster planning, the Navy did a heckuva job after giving us a place to stay and compensating us for our lost belongings. Not so much for the people I knew in the community who had to boil their coffee over wood scavanged from what was left of their banyan trees.
Right now I’m watching Dateline and just about in tears. I have never, before or since, been so scared in my entire life.