Around 11pm, I made the decision that it was no longer all that safe to remain in the living room, close to the large front windows. I took my daughter and went through the bedroom and into the master bathroom, because it was the most interior room I had and therefore the safest. I didn't want to be so sequestered, because I wanted to know what was going on with the storm, but I was worried by then at the alarming way that the house was creaking and the way that it sounded like the roof was just going to leave at any minute. I thought that the roof might be preparing for liftoff, and I didn’t want to be in the middle of the living room, in a rain of flying debris, if that happened.
Go to the Time-Series of Hurricane Ivan Images for a look at Ivan from space.I lay on a blanket on the floor between the bathtub and the sink counter, my sleeping daughter next to me, and listened to the closet door pop and creak every time the wind blew. I knew that the whole house was shifting with each gust, and I could actually feel the floor shifting slightly. The house was constructed with wood floors on concrete block pilings, with the brick exterior going all of the way to the ground. This type of construction is wonderful to access the pipes under the house, but there are vents in the brick facing, and the wind was getting into these vents and whistling under the house as well as around the eaves.
A tentative hand placed to the window in the bedroom indicated a lot of strong vibration, and I crept back to the bathroom floor. Having struggled with anxiety my whole life, I was waiting for a full-on panic attack, but one never came. My heart rate was up, and I was breathing quickly, but there was no panic; there wasn't even really that much fear; only the awe and wonder and respect that I was feeling for what Mother Nature had brought to my neighborhood.
Usually, I love to hear the thunder and rain when there is a storm, but I did not get to enjoy either of these with Ivan. With a hurricane, there is usually very little thunder and lightning. I knew that it must be pouring down rain, but the wind was so amazingly loud that I was unable to hear the rain hitting the roof. Eventually, against all odds and out of sheer exhaustion, I fell asleep with the wind shrieking and the floor trembling beneath me. When I woke up the next day, the roof was still on the house and the wind was still howling, but it had backed off enough to feel safe in the rest of the house.
It took Ivan, which was a category 3 hurricane when it made landfall just a few short miles from my house, over 12 hours to move through, and its aftermath was amazing. Full size telephone poles and vending machines lay in the roads, which were littered with debris, roofs were gone, trees (including 2 in my own back yard) were completely snapped in half. The wind had been so loud during the night that I had not even heard the trees fall. There were many houses and businesses that were completely gone. Less than a mile farther south, houses were washed off their foundations and flooded up to their roof lines, and the water had not yet gone back down to normal levels. I vividly remember one older lady leaning against the hood of a truck, shaking her head over and over while tears rolled down her cheeks. Everything that she owned was under water. I wanted to comfort her, but what do you say in a time like that?
The water missed my house by about 8 blocks. I was spared, and my parent's home had only sustained minor damage. I am still infinitely fascinated by weather, and I still love hurricanes, but I also respect them much more now, and I'm much more aware of the way that hurricanes can change people's lives in an instant.
