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.