SURVIVING WILMA

We have just cycled to the supermarket which in itself is an odd thing to do in this petrol-driven country. In the elevator I met a woman who gasped in amazement when I told her that I was sprouting my own beans and eating them with brown rice and that they were delicious. ‘Where do you grow them?’ she queried and looked horrified when I said that they were doing famously on the balcony. I think she had visions of me up there with a ton of topsoil and a mechanical digger instead of my dinky little sprouter. We set off around Country Club Drive that has been cleared of fallen trees, snapped-off lamp posts and mounds of broken storm shutters, and realised that instead of cars racing past us they normally do, everyone was moving at a slow steady pace. These are the gas hunters, and the SUV’s (Sports Utility Vehicles) are moving slower than most. A week ago, they were the Miami status symbol, but now they are an albatross around the neck of the owner. The millionaire houses that lie between our high rise condo and the beach have no electricity as despite their grandeur, they are only single family units, and the power company is desperately trying to reconnect the larger buildings that house more people. The owners of these luxury homes now need gas to fill their expensive generators but first they need gas to drive their SUV’s to get to the gas station to get gas for their plastic drums. You see what I’m saying. Suddenly from being at the top of the financial pecking order, they have plummeted to the other end of the spectrum, and find themselves queuing in the hot sun alongside the lower income group. We made it to the supermarket and chained our bikes to a pole. They don’t have bike racks – nobody ever expected that a customer might cycle to the shop. Marching in with a back-pack, we foraged among the half empty shelves. At last fresh produce had appeared but now our shopping came down to how much weight we could carry. In the normal course of events, the only time a shopper touches his shopping is when he takes it from the shelf and puts it into the trolley. It is then transferred by the packer and taken to the boot of the car where it is offloaded into another trolley at the condo and taken upstairs in an elevator. Back onto the shelf went the wine, the milk and the orange juice. The cereal came out of its excessive packaging and the back-pack was carefully filled to capacity with immediate necessities. This time the credit card machine was working and cash back was available. This is great because cash is needed to purchase the limited amount of gas that might become available, but in the meanwhile, we cycle everywhere and conserve the half tank that we have got. Stories are now being told of bikes being stolen and gas siphoned out of cars at night. It’s becoming a dog-eat-dog world but I have found that the best currency is a smile and a sympathetic ear. Everyone’s got it tough, and right now we measure our luxuries in electricity and running water. That puts us in the millionaire bracket and for once, the millionaires envy us. So you see, it wasn’t just the dustbins that got upset during Wilma’s visit; the social order went for a bit of a loop as well.

Gone But Not Forgotten

I heard the other day that the names of killer storms such as Andrew, Ivan and Katrina are retired and will never come back to haunt us. One can only hope that Wilma will be among this pantheon of dangerous names and that she never returns. It is now four days since Wilma lashed Southern Florida in general and Aventura in North Miami, in particular. We could have coped with the 100 mile an hour winds, the flailing storm shutters that were ripped off, and the crashing banging mayhem; but did she have to throw in a tornado for good measure? All around our area we see trees that have been twisted out of the ground rather than snapped, metal poles that look like piles of spaghetti and heaps of traffic lights that swung this way and that until they flew off their supports. During the daylight hours, all we hear are the constant buzz of chainsaws as years of patient growth that block the roads, are cut free and reduced to wood chippings. At night-time, the area hums with the sound of a thousand generators where those unfortunate souls who still have no electricity, battle to keep milk for babies and insulin for diabetics cool. The endless search for petrol, ice and water continues unabated and for senior citizens trapped in the upper floors of condominiums that no longer have lifts, each day is a dice with death. Will a kind neighbour climb up to bring them water and at least one meal a day, and will anyone be prepared to stand in long queues at the pharmacy to fill their prescriptions? Certainly everyone was given plenty of advanced warning of Wilma, and we took the warnings seriously and filled the petrol tank, stocked up on water and canned goods and made sure that we had cash on hand. For many who didn’t take the warning seriously or who thought that no storm could begin to equal the wrath of Hurricane Andrew, and who were rather more casual about their preparations, life has been reduced to an endless queue. People queue to get into queues. The queue to get into the car park at the supermarket is followed by a queue to pay for whatever is left on the shelves, provided that you first queued at a bank and drew cash as plastic is no use at present. This is followed by a queue to turn left or right at the busy intersection that has no traffic signals, presuming that you have queued for up to five hours to fill your tank with possibly only $10 worth of petrol. More and more bikes are appearing and the uncommon sight of people walking home carrying the shopping is something that we have never seen in this petrol driven society. Our electricity and water has been reconnected, and we still have a balcony on our 17th floor apartment which was on the north side of the building. Friends in the south facing apartments that took the full brunt of the storm didn’t fare so well and over two hundred balconies have been ripped off. We have bikes, strong legs, experience of living in Africa in fairly trying conditions and the all important sense of humour, but then again, we aren’t frail, in our eighties and living on the tenth floor relying on a walking frame. Thanks for the visit Wilma but please understand that we won’t be inviting you back.

WATERVIEW TOWER ONE

 

The entrance to Waterview 

Balcony damage at Waterview 

Wilma sorts out the parking 

Wilma, I'm Home!

The roughly painted sign on a boarded up window said it for all of us. "Wilma, go back to Bedrock". But Wilma didn't comply and instead she carved a pathway through Miami that few of the residents will ever forget. The problem with hurricanes in Florida is that Hurricane Andrew is the benchmark by which all hurricanes will be forever measured, and those people who lived through the evil fury of that storm always sneer at anything of a lesser category. I think that many of those sneers were wiped off faces when Wilma rampaged through on Monday morning. We awoke to hear the howling whining wind and the insistent rattling, shaking and banging of thousands of storm shutters that were steadily being worked loose. Within the hour, all we could see from our 17th floor apartment was a white-out of wind and rain and the whirling strips of metal and mesh as they were stripped from the four hundred balconies on our twin tower condominium and sent flailing out into the upper vortex of wind before spiralling down into the car park where they gashed paintwork and smashed windscreens. Rows of parked cars were shunted into mangled heaps, or nudged towards the edge of the Intracoastal waterway that runs past our building and a constant crashing sound could be heard as fronds and coconuts were ripped from the sturdy palm trees and sent thundering in among the wreckage below. At one point I watched the light fittings swaying back and forth and realised that the entire building was rocking from the force of the 100 mile an hour winds, and we stood back from the windows as debris smashed and flew about. And then Wilma passed over us and a light along the western horizon told us that sanity was returning. However, that light was the only one that was visible. The power went off by eight o clock in the morning, taking with it the air conditioning, most of the lifts in the building and we were left with just the emergency lighting in the hallways and stairwells. We had organised a gas cooker and camping lamps and had stocked up on water and apart from tramping down seventeen flights of stairs to take coffee to a thirsty friend, we spent the rest of the day "hunkering down' as it is termed. By the early evening the weather was gorgeous with light breezes, cool clear weather and an almost apologetic feel about Mother Nature. The sea was a beautiful aquamarine and the air quality was crisp and fresh as though some almighty spring cleaning had been done. We ventured out only to find roads blocked from thousands of trees, no traffic signals anywhere, people standing in the streets looking up at mangled apartments from which hung large sofas that had been sucked out through broken windows. Now for many the endless search for ice, water and petrol commences, but for us, the power has been switched back on, there is water in the taps and the air is cool. Hurricanes bring out either the beast or the best in people, but Floridians on the whole are a resilient bunch. We left Midhurst for Miami just over two years ago and have experienced the worst two hurricane seasons in recorded history. But we don’t take it personally; it’s the price you pay for a little piece of paradise.