Ian is coming straight for Tampa. I live a bit north of Orlando, about an hour and a half away, but we are still supposed to get a strong tropical storm and buckets and buckets and buckets of rain and hours and hours of wind. Wind and rain for days.
If you don’t hear from me, assume I’m sitting in the dark, sweating and coated in cat hair, hating life.
I saw the landfall and projected track near you. Hoping you don’t lose power for long and that your place and car aren’t damaged. Send up the bat signal when you get back your power?
I’m sending the best karma I can, sorry it wont be enough to spare you the misery. When I was young and foolish, I used to think hurricanes were exciting. Now they are nothing but awful. The flooding is going to be ginormous from this one, I’m afraid. And like you say, trees are going to be popping out of that saturated sandy soil and taking down power lines. Take care.
I’ve been MIA from your blog but came to wish you luck with Ian. May the SOB fizzle utterly and/or wobble to the west. Post when you can so we know all is well, eh?
Oh thanks Caroline! Glad to see you! Ian is not going to fizzle and is wobbling around planning landfall as possibly a Cat 4? My mind is blown. Right now it’s looking like Cape Coral to Sarasota, but then it’s going to keep on going and be a Cat 1 here in Seminole County, with an anticipated FOOT of rain. So, yeah. If you don’t hear from me for a few days, I’m most likely alive and well and miserable, or at work on storm duty and also miserable.
Best of luck! We’re hoping we hear something from our friend in St. Petersburg but probably won’t for awhile. I saw one projection that they think it will come in somewhere south of Tampa and then cut across the state and ultimately continue causing problems for Georgia and NC. Bad vibes from that storm.
It’s going to be a bad one. It’ll blow out most of the dramatic storm energy at landfall, but retain enough to make a HUGE path of damage all the way up the state – we may see a foot of rain in my area on top of an already very wet summer, so places that have never flooded may flood, and trees are going to fall. A lot of St Pete is under mandatory evacuation. I live near the middle of the state, slightly east of center just a bit north of Orlando, and we are where people evacuate TO, and it won’t be any better here, except for the storm surge thing. It’s a measure of how bad it’s going to be that Disney World is closed for the next two days. I can’t remember them ever closing for more than a day. Guests already there are told to hunker down in their rooms because it won’t be safe to leave and there won’t be any transportation even if they try. (This is probably a reason to stay at a deluxe resort in storm season, because if you have to get stranded, you might as well do it in relative comfort.)