Well, there was no sleeping in for us this morning. Rodney and I both woke up to what sounded like a deafening, on-going explosion. The wind was insane. There was no rain.
We live in a cement house on the Intracoastal Waterway constructed to withstand serious hurricanes. You generally can’t hear anything inside the house. In fact, you can tell when a serious storm is coming in from the east if you actually hear the ocean roaring.
Thus, when we heard the explosion sound, we knew something big was happening nearby. I ran to Elise’s room and pulled her out of bed.
We seemingly do not have tornado sirens here like we did when we lived in Texas and Kentucky. But our phones started blowing up with tornado warnings. After is was over, you could hear emergency vehicles coming from every direction.
I have lived in the South my entire adult life and I have never seen or heard a tornado. As much as people worry about tornadoes, I have had more experience with major earthquakes from my childhood in California. I’ve turned into one of those Southerners who runs outside to watch insane storms rather than hiding away. Now I am kind of surprised anyone ever stays outside long enough to get videos of tornadoes listening to that awful sound that is enough to make you feel physically ill.
The local news reports said the damage was mostly small – some people lost their roofs and it apparently ripped the Florida room off of someone’s house. (Small on a community scale; those are obviously not “small” concerns to the owners.) It damaged some of the restaurants on the beach. Calls related to the tornado were apparently quickly dwarfed by lightning strikes and arcing power lines.
I haven’t had the chance to walk around my gardens to see what the winds from the storm last night did. But I can already see it shredded my ten-foot tall bird of paradise, which had survived Dorian unscathed. I’m a little angry about that.
Anyway, how about that…. a tornado on the coast? Florida is wild.
Days of Sunshine 