For those friends elsewhere asking or wondering about how & what we’re doing:
Our house is in the highest "evacuation zone" that is not being asked to leave so we will follow the "run from the water and hide from the wind" plan that we've had in place for the past 30+ years and hunker down at home with our son & daughter-in-law. And 2 dogs. When Irma came through in 2017 we spent the night in our windowless 50 square foot interior "safe room" where the biggest issue was the little dog peeing on one of the mattresses overnight.
A lot of people that live closer to the water and are in the lower topography are facing mandatory evacuations due to the threat of the storm surge. We should not face that issue. We've taken all the precautions we can and while we don't have hurricane windows or a generator, we have lots of ice and a swimming pool. Power outage is the only sure thing we know we will face. How long is the question! For Irma it was about 30 hours.
The past 7 years, our backup power plan had been our motorhomes. They had generators, water, refrigeration and most importantly, AIR CONDITIONING. Since we sold our RV in March, we do not have that option this time. As a matter of fact, for Irma, after about 24 hours of no power or A/C, I went & retreived our motorhome from it's safe enclosed storage facility and drove it back to the house to live in until the power was restored. Literally, just as I was backing it into the driveway, the power came back on!
Other than power & no A/C, our biggest threat is wind and rain. Hopefully the former will just create alot of debris to clean up and our property tends not to back up with water flow. However, once the power goes out, we won't be able to lower the pool water, so that creates an issue. We have one low entry into the house from the pool but we've used those sandbags you may have seen me pickup Sunday.
This area will get hit. This is the real deal.
Thank you for asking. We'll try to update as the week goes on or until the power goes out......