There She Blows!!
Way back in 2004 I was living in the crazy college town of Gainesville Florida, where I was working as a desktop support tech at a local college. It was a pretty care-free time for the most part. I spent my days re-imagining faculty and staff computers while creating workorders and constantly taking calls. Some of the calls I got were hilarious, such as the time a teacher left a voicemail threatening to put peanut butter in his CD drive if someone didn't fix his computer soon. But that's another story for another time!
We were always getting threats of hurricanes, which never seemed to amount to much. This year felt much the same as before so people just kind of ignored the warnings and went on with their lives. We were used to daily rainfall, seemingly at the same time everyday like clockwork. It was just part of Florida weather!
I remember one afternoon I was sitting at home hanging out with some Venezuelan dudes drinking beer when we saw the warning that a huge hurricane was headed our way. I remember it was eerie because it was dead silent outside. Not a cloud in the sky, nor a hint of wind. This was actually kind of odd for this time of day as usually by now it was at least sprinkling.
My friends and I were sitting on the porch, looking out into the distance and we could see some really dark clouds forming way out there. We kind of forgot about it and started talking about normal young people dumb things when out of nowhere the wind kicked up with a force I'd never experienced in my life.
One or my friends, Julio, probably weighed about 100 pounds wet and thought it would be hilarious to see how far he could jump with the torrential winds blowing. He stood at one side of the yard, went running and jumped. Holy crap! He went absolutely flying across the yard and landed right in the middle of a bush. We were in tears laughing at this point.
Afterward, he grabbed onto a telephone pole and let the sideways wind lift up his legs and he just hung there like a flag for a while. We went on goofing off for quite some time until the completely horizontal rain started to come in. At this point we went into the house and started watching TV... But then the power went out!
Lights Out
The Electricity was no more after that. It wasn't just a brownout either! It was more than a week before power was finally restored! It felt like we were in some kind of post-apocalypse, but without the zombies. I was running around unplugging my UPS backups so that I could use them to power a small radio or anything else we might need. At this point I was super jealous of a neighbor who somehow had a massive gas powered generating hiding in his tiny shed all this time. Needless to say, we all spent a lot of time hanging out next door!
In a way, it was kind of fun being completely without power and nowhere to go and nothing to do. Mostly because a bunch of us friends were now stuck together and we spent the time talking, telling stories and reminiscing about old times. The other cool thing was I didn't have to go to work! Everything was closed and it was impossible to travel. The rain was absolutely non-stop!
The Aftermath
I still remember the afternoon when the lights came back on. We were sitting in the livingroom and had finally resorted to playing Monopoly. You know you are desperate when the 'bored' games come out. Everyone jumped up yelling "Yes!" and we all ran outside.
What an absolute disaster! There were fallen palm trees everywhere and roof tiles everywhere. But the worst part was the flooding! So much flooding. Cars were completely submerged in water. I wish I had gotten a photo of it, but there was an alligator swimming around the bottom of the steps near my front porch.
The apartments I lived in had a swamp nearby behind an 8 foot fence, but that fence was completely underwater and the swamp was now at my front door. I can't remember how long it took the water to recede, but there must have been millions and millions of dollars worth of damage done. We eventually got back to normal life, but I will never forgot that crazy, long couple of weeks of madness back in 2004.
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