This last bit of advice stayed with me throughout the long hours ahead, and as my family and I hurled through the night II found myself wondering if perhaps I had made a fatal mistake.
I watched as the storms stayed to the south of Marianna, Florida, the town where my family had lived for some two years, and dreaded the time when the radar would show the feeder bands a bit farther to the East of where the initial outbreak had taken place. I knew if the bands widened any at all, some of the storms were sure to head in our direction. There was no way we could miss all of them.
I couldn’t believe it when the reports of deaths from the storms were first read, and there was no way I could tear myself away from the screen. How could this be happening? The hurricane was still miles out in the Gulf, and yet the beast was already ravaging much of the lower panhandle of Florida’s Gulf coast. Many towns in the northern Gulf were being hammered hard, and it was unbelievable that this storm was going to get worse.
In horror I sat before the television, enthralled as the news showed footage of a tornado that touched down in Panama City, and realized that I recognized the location that was being shown on the screen.
We had moved to Marianna from Ada, Oklahoma in May of 2002 when I accepted a position as Team Manager for Sykes, Enterprises, the company I had worked for since 1999. Sykes is a call center, handling technical and billing inbound calls from several different clients, and I had enjoyed working there as much as I have ever enjoyed working anywhere. We found a rental home, actually a modular home that had a large room added to it, on highway 71 North, a little less than 2 miles from Sykes, and about 5 miles from Marianna proper. Even though we weren’t fond of the idea of living in a mobile home, we rented it because of its location. We could walk to work if we had to, and we were close enough to town for all of our needs. We were also only about 25 miles from Dothan, Alabama, and we came to really like visiting and shopping there.
Go to the Time-Series of Hurricane Ivan Images for a look at Ivan from space.Sykes is known for their large, new brick buildings, and in Oklahoma many times I had thought over the prospect of riding out a tornado inside the Sykes center. We were trained to say a disaster call script to any customers we had on the phones, and then as a Team Manager I was to help move our agents into a centralized location, either to one of the training rooms or to an inside bathroom, where everyone would supposedly be safe.
Unfortunately, we had gotten notice a few months ago that the account I worked on was being outsourced to the Philippines, and my last day of work was on August 6, 2004. I was to hit my 5 year anniversary with Sykes just a little over a month later.
On the last day, I turned in my badge, locked my office, and left, and I now realize that perhaps not having access to the building any longer may have saved my life, and the lives of my wife, my daughter and our beloved 4 year old grand-daughter, who also lived with us.
Ironically, after Tropical Storm Bonnie, Hurricane Charley and Hurricane Francis had beaten much of Florida into the ground, FEMA opened an account at the Marianna Sykes location and many of the agents were called back to work, taking phone calls and aiding all of the previous storm victims with their problems. My daughter was one of the people who went back, and, along with my wife, was working there, even as the latest disaster was moving relentlessly toward our small town.
Both my wife and daughter had been at work in the center since early in the morning, and I was trying to stay in contact with them on the Internet. My wife asked the same questions over and over…
Where are the storms heading, are we going to be safe, what do you want to do?
We had packed up a lot of our personal belonging a week or so ago when we thought Hurricane Francis might head in our direction, so it was simple enough for me to load most of the things that are important to us in the van, just in case we had to leave in a hurry.
I had all of our family pictures, one of our computers and all of my computer programs, my Grandfathers old violin, my wife’s glass shoe collection and her treasured Scrabble board loaded and ready to move by 5 o’clock that afternoon, when she was scheduled to get off from work.
My daughter was not supposed to get off work until 7:00 that evening, so I figured my wife and I would have time to finish loading our clothes, all of our medicine along with some food and water, just in case we decided to leave. I wasn’t sure just yet if we were going to have to evacuate or not, but I wanted to be ready if the word came to get out in a hurry.
By 6:00 o’clock we had pretty much completed loading the van when our daughter called and said they were being allowed to leave an hour early because of the storms, so I went to pick her up, and as we drove back to our home we began to discuss what we needed to do.
By 7:00 o’clock rain was falling and the wind had picked up,
