2020 Atlantic Hurricane Season Running Thread

Lancey, you might want to hold off on that Florida property decision for a week or two.

 

Not to mention my memories of time served in and around Wellington and Lake Worth where there were gators in the canals!

 

My house in the middle of the cone, my house

 

There are still alligators in Wellington canals. I tell myself it’s way too much work for one to go up the steep side of the one behind my house, climb my fence and then drag one of my dogs back over - despite the videos people love to send me of alligators scaling fences. One of my dogs has killed one bird, one snake and two possums that wandered into the yard this summer, though.

The Sunday morning dot is over my house.

I’ve had houses in Wellington since 2004. The only flooding was in 2012, when Isaac unexpectedly sat directly over us forever. The canals hadn’t been lowered or storm drains cleaned out. The roads around the house I was living in then flooded. House and immediate neighborhood were fine. I had recently closed on the house I am in now. No flooding there. The south part of town is just a bit lower in elevation and tons of roads, fields, and barns flooded there (that’s the equestrian preserve part of town), although I don’t remember hearing about house damage.

I don’t remember Craig ever mentioning flooding in Coral Springs. Part of the parking lot at his office in Ft. Lauderdale flooded every time there was a big storm, so most summer afternoons.

 

When I lived in Houston we'd run down to Galveston to do the beach and seafood. I used to drive down the beach and marvel at the $200k homes under construction about ten inches above high tide. Seriously, just the other side of the beachside dunes some developer would be throwing up luxe beach houses. I've been on the island after a hurricane, and when you drove down the road there would be all sorts of straw and debris caught in all three strands of the barbed wire fences where the storm surge had been three feet deep all the way across it.

I guess the city zoning boards want the tax dollars and the insurance companies extract enough money to replace them, but there's no way in hell I would have ever bought one.

 

Heck, just this summer a gator was spotted in the canal behind my property in N.C.
I didn't personally see it, but I saw the pictures of it a neighbor got.

 

I tripped over the tail of one of the alligators in Lake Alice while running the parcourse (fitness trail) at dusk for a stupid PE class while at University of Florida. I thought it was a mangrove root until it growled. Needless to say, I set a personal best getting back to my bike.

 

If I’m in the path, I’ll take a page out of the protestors’ playbook ... get out my leaf blower and send the storm over to the coast. Problem solved!

 

Looks like lots of land interaction, which is often the case for storms headed up Florida's urethra (if you will). It's the side-swipers like Andrew that'll kick your shit.

 

New map puts that Sunday afternoon dot directly over Lake Okeechobee, still as a rain-making tropical storm.



Lake O is currently at 13 feet, with flood stage at 15½ feet.

 

1928 - Okeechobee

 

Unfortunately the flood control dikes built since then are strangling the Everglades and causing water inundated with stinking algae to be diverted into the Intracoastal Waterway on the east side of the state — a huge ecological mess all around. I keep hoping that someday a real frog-strangler will park atop Lake O and overwhelm the Corps of Engineers’ best misguided efforts.