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Nicole McCoy is an adjunct faculty member at the Key West Center, who decided to share her personal story involving Hurricane Irma.
I live on Cudjoe Key, which is where the forward eyewall of hurricane Irma struck on 9/10. I first became aware of Irma’s potential (and her potential track) on 8/31, which is quite a few days before most people, because I follow the amateur meteorologist blogs during hurricane season. You would think that a long lead time would be good, but in many ways it was a slow-moving torture. I think I wasted hours analyzing data on these blogs over the next few days; hoping against hope that they were wrong and Irma would turn out to sea. By Labor Day it was fairly clear that Irma was a substantial threat and we frantically began buttoning up the house.
We have lived down here for five years, but had just purchased this house 10 months before and were completely unprepared to seal up a house and our lot for a hurricane. We had never tested our hurricane shutters and found out the previous owner hadn’t left us the key. We learned that hurricane shutter locks can be picked fairly easily!
It took us almost three days to get the house ready and there was still more that we could have done. I had an office in our downstairs enclosure and I moved everything that was important or that was less than 2 feet from the floor (Wilma’s storm surge in 2005 was 18”) to our upstairs. My husband Sean tied down our boats. Our bigger boat was anchored to the house and the ground out front, and our small older boat, a 1971 Seacraft, which we had been restoring and was 95% done, was secured on the dock and davits out back.
On [Thursday], we packed up our two cats, two dogs, and 11 year old son into our 16-year old Ford King Cab pickup and headed for Sarasota. We had to leave our Honda Civic behind, as it was broken and the part needed to repair it had arrived the Friday before the holiday weekend.
It was absolute agony watching Irma – an enormously powerful hurricane- head west and hearing the meteorologists tell us that she WOULD turn north, somewhere over the Keys. She slowed down substantially, and her arrival was delayed by almost a day. I couldn’t believe it when we watched her arrival as a Category 4 hurricane on Cudjoe Key Sunday morning. I thought for certain that my house, with its shingle roof, would be gone.
It was a couple of days before one of my friends, who is a first responder, got down to the Keys and sent me a picture of my house–it was still standing and looked to be relatively okay. NOAA imagery confirmed that we still had a roof (missing shingles and more damage inside that would be discovered later). The relief we felt was enormous. And our big boat, that we had just purchased in February, had barely missed being crushed by a tree.
Unfortunately, we got 33 inches of storm surge inside the lower enclosure, which is more than we expected, and combined with the mold that occurred in the 8 days we were prevented from returning to the lower Keys, we had extensive losses downstairs. The 1971 Seacraft we were restoring is severely damaged, and we will be starting over again on that project. Our Honda is a total loss due to storm surge.
Nonetheless, compared to the other losses on Cudjoe, as well as the very severe damage on Big Pine, No Name Key, and Marathon, we feel extremely lucky. I had thought that getting the eye of Irma, where the winds are most intense would be horrible (and it was), but it turned out that the east side of the storm was substantially more damaging. Had we had the east side of the storm instead of the eye, I don’t think we would have had a house to return to.
