Good morning
I am writing this on Saturday morning
(Sept 9th) at about 5am. As of right now, hurricane Irma is a few hours away from Key West and is expected to move up the Gulf Coast side of Florida over the next 48 hours.
IF the hurricane actually takes the path predicted, then we can expect slightly less than hurricane force winds at our home near Pensacola on Monday. Just to be safer, we will be installing our hurricane shutters today
and helping our neighbors put up theirs as well.
We are not in an area that would be affected by a storm surge as our home is about 50-feet above sea level and several miles inland. We haven't had any problems with flash floods in the past as our property is at the highest elevation for several miles around.
On the downside, it seems like our power
flicks off and on whenever a butterfly burps within 10 miles, so I fully expect electric and internet outage during the storm and afterwards. We have a mid-sized generator and fuel that should be able to run our refrigerators and freezer if needed. However, we can't do anything about internet outages.
To give you a picture of where we are in relation to Irma, here is a picture as of this morning from the National
Hurricane Center. I have added a red arrow pointing to our location. The cone in white shows where the storm center is expected to be with a 66% certainty. If it stay on the black line track, then we expect 40-70 mph winds. If it moves to the left side of the white cone, then we can expect 150-mph winds, in which case we will evacuate on Sunday morning.
