Things Are Serious

At first I took this as a joke and refused to evacuate because for the 20 years that I have lived, never has a hurricane been directly through our city. And now, it is too late to evacuate and so I have to deal with it. For those of you that know me, I live in Saint Petersburg, Florida (Tampa Bay Area) and for now it looks like Hurricane Irma is heading straight towards us. The last time Florida had a major hurricane was in 1992 from Hurricane Andrew. Right now Hurricane Irma is twice as big and is one of the biggest Hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean with over 170 miles per hour winds. It was currently category 5 but it's expected to go down to category 4 before it hits the coast in Florida. However, the warm waters of Gulf of Mexico might fuel it to grow again...

Governor Rick Scott has ordered everyone to evacuate from Florida. I live in zone A and that happens to be the most dangerous zone to live in. The police has been driving around my neighborhood and telling everyone to evacuate. For the past 3 days, every store that I have been to did not have any water and batteries left. All the gas stations that I have been to have all been out of gas. In my city it is expected that in some areas the surges and rise in sea level(flooding of ocean water in the coast) is expected to be 10-15 feet.

Image Credit

Hurricane Irma compared to Hurricane Andrew

Image Credit

Here is some footage from the Caribbean on how powerful the storm is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ea-_ZzTZBdg&t=573s

We Are Preparing

Since I live on the first floor I went to get some sandbags

This is my balcony, hopefully these sandbags can help a little bit in stopping the water from going in. I know it's a long shot but I had to at least try.

Here goes nothing

This is an an older picture before I put another layer on top. The above picture is the latest one.

And last but not least, water is the most important so good thing I stocked up in advance with a bunch :)

I will go to my parents home during the storm because they live on the second floor and I don't want to take any chances. On my next post, I will try to have before and after images for you guys, If I manage to get through the storm that is, fingers crossed.

References

http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/09/us/hurricane-irma-cuba-florida/index.html

Best regards,

Generation