Tropical Storm Erika

Tropical Storm Erika is, I think, a trickster.

It came in on the heels of Tropical Storm Danny, which dissipated in the Caribbean last week. For the past several days, I’ve watched the National Hurricane Center – the government’s agency – and Accuweather, a private weather outfit – track the storm. The predictions have vacillated from the storm tracking away from Florida to coming right into Palm Beach County, where we live.

A tropical storm is not a hurricane. Although TS often have an eye, an area of circulation like a hurricane, they are less organized and the winds are below 74 m.p.h. But they do pack a lot of rain. Erika, for instance, dumped 12 inches of rain in 12 hours on the island of Dominica, resulting in flash floods, mudslides, and four fatalities.

In 2012, TS Isaac stalled over our area for hours and dumped so much rain that our neighborhood flooded to the point where our mailbox became an island. I was coming home from the gym during the torrential downpour, my car stalled out, and I eventually had to have the engine replaced. We couldn’t get out of our neighborhood for two days.

Today I started going through our hurricane supplies – which haven’t seen the light of day in 10 years, since Hurricane Wilma in 2005. I found useless flashlights, useless battery-operated lanterns, corroded batteries, portable fans that no longer worked. So I made my hurricane run. I stopped by our local Walgreens drug store first – no flashlights, a paltry selection of batteries. But their coolers were on sale, so I bought one.

I moved on to the grocery store, where vast palettes of bottled water took up the front of the store, where canned goods had been pretty much cleaned out, and flashlights were gone. I stocked up on food supplies I thought we might need – including pet food for two dogs and two cats. But tomorrow I’ll make another run for stuff I overlooked. At another drug store, I bought a ten-pound bag of ice. Meanwhile, Rob was at another place, filling several containers with gas for the generator that has sat in our garage since 2005 and for a propane tank so we can use the grill.

In many ways, the bare shelves and the lack of goods reminds me of what used to happen in Venezuela when I was a kid and a revolution was in the works. Schools closed, grocery store shelves laid bare, gas stations lined with cars waiting for a pump so tanks could be topped off.

After the hurricane season of 2005 – when we were hit three times and lost power for a total of about two weeks – all gas stations in South Florida were supposed to have backup generators. I discovered tonight, thanks to a map on a local website, that only a handful in our area have those generators. So, tomorrow, we top off our car gas tanks as well.

The most recent forecast for the storm is that if it survives passage through an unfavorable area in the Caribbean without being torn apart, it will hit our county as a cat 1 hurricane. I remember that in October 2005, when I heard the Wilma was just a cat 1, I didn’t worry too much about it.Big mistake.

At one point in its existence, Wilma had become a cat 5 hurricane, with winds of 185 m.p.h, and a barometric pressure of just 882 millibars. And that pressure is the telling factor. When it stalled out over our area, the skylights in our roof were vibrating so violently I was sure they were going to pop out. Rob and I took turns gripping the handle of our front door, which shook so violently we thought it would explode outward from the pressure, which wasn’t anywhere near 882 mb at that point. Fortunately, Wilma was moving fast.

The aftermath of a hurricane is usually worse than the hurricane itself, unless you’re dealing with a Katrina, which occurred a decade ago today, as I’m writing this. Katrina brought the city of New Orleans to its knees, 1,800 people died, and the government negligence exposed the Bush administration for the incompetent idiots they were. In the absence of electricity, the heat and humidity and the bugs are the worst of it. But this time, we have a generator that we can power up as soon as the storm has passed. It means we can plug in the fridge. It means we won’t lose frozen foods.  It means we can take turns standing in front of the fridge with the door open so we can cool off.

So if you leave comments that don’t appear on the blog, it means we don’t have electricity or Internet. It means we are going quietly crazy here in South Florida and are contemplating a move to the mountains!

Oh, Erika. You trickster. Surprise us! Get shredded to bits before you reach the south Atlantic waters where you could strengthen. Just move on out to sea. You aren’t welcome here.