Here in our neck of the woods, we went from forecast of little impact as we would be on the west side of the storm, to mandatory evacuations in case of storm surge since the eye would pass directly over us, to ultimately having the storm pass so far east, that sustained winds here only reached 90 mph (of course there were gust here and there that registered higher).















We had portions of 5 trees down in our yard, plus a whole host of branches.  Our two massive banyan trees in the front yard, had the tops break out of them.  We have two palm trees completely down in the back. And the top of our nearly dead mulberry tree broke out, but it's not in the yard, so we don't know where it went.  We also have 5 Norfolk Pines next to the house, some of which are missing half their branches or more.  Gary warned me that they resembled telephone poles, but it's not quite that drastic.  Our neighbor to the east also has small trees and bushes planted down his property line, and several of those either broke off or completely came down along our yard.  It's strange now we can actually see neighbors on both side of us, that we couldn't before.  And, there are so many leaves down we can't see mulch stone, or even some of the low plants in the kids' garden spaces.  We also had two small leaks, one in our bedroom over my desk, and another in the back porch.

Before

After

It's straight up miraculous though that none of the trees fell on the house.  I'm not sure that there is 2 yards between the Norfolk Pines which are apparently very brittle trees and Britt's bedroom wall.  Those massive Banyan trees could have EASILY ended up on the girls' bedroom, and gone through the roof.  After the initial reports we expected to lose our shed and the carport, but everything was fine.  It was shocking to see all the trees down though.  The yard's going to look really different.  I suppose it might speed up when we get the tree work down that we've been talking about doing since January.



This year has been one of those weather cycles, for big Hurricanes.  They expect to have 19 named storms this year that would put us up to the letter S.  Harvey, Irma, and now Maria have been strong storms, one a rain maker, the other a wind maker, and Maria and strong fast developing storm.  We have friends who have been affected by all three.  I especially feel for those on the Caribbean islands.  Many of the houses aren't built to the requirements that homes in Florida are built for, and being barely above sea level they have trouble with storm surge, that we don't have inland here.  But most of all they are on the path for storm after storm.