Gallatin R-5 alumnus Amy Woodruff LaBrie lives in Miami, FL, with her husband, Keith, and young daughter, Sara. Amy kept a journal as they waited for Hurricane Irma to pass.
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Irma disrupted, and continues to affect the lives of millions of people from the Caribbean islands and now up through Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina as it continues to move north as a tropical depression.
Here is Amy’s narrative:
Wind had circled the courtyard outside Sara’s second-story window all night, but this squall was different. The thin palm trees moaned as they swayed, and leafy bushes shuddered as they were slammed against the interior corner of the cement building.
Sheets of small drops of rain pelted the double-thick panes of glass that separated our family from the wrath of what was touted as the strongest hurricane to hit south Florida since Wilma in 2005.
The time was 4 a.m. on Sunday and the worst of Hurricane Irma was hitting our apartment two hours earlier than the meteorologists had predicted. The clack of the exterior screen against the glass window above my head had startled me awake. The red hue of the bedroom told me that we had progressed through the colors on the television’s radar maps.
We had passed the lime green bands of rain, and the orange tropical storm winds with tornadoes were in our past. Now we were beginning the six-hour window of the heaviest hurricane-force winds and rain.
I felt apprehensive about continuing to lay under our four-foot square window, but my husband, Keith, our four-month-old daughter, and Bella the cat were peacefully asleep, so I put my arm around Sara and held on tight for the next 20 hours.
No one in our Doral, FL, apartment had experienced a Category 5 hurricane, including my mother-in-law from Maine, who seemed to have chosen a bad week to visit her new granddaughter.
As Irma crept along, leveling islands in the Caribbean, Keith and I decided our family would not evacuate our four-story cement complex mainly because our hurricane-proof windows face an interior courtyard and our vehicles are in a covered parking structure. I heard a news anchor say, “You run from water and hide from wind.”
In our location 14 miles from the ocean, we would have vicious wind, but no storm damage. Our concern was the possibility of trees in the courtyard being uprooted and coming through our window, but we have an interior bathroom and walk-in closet that we could camp in. Despite the urges from family and friends to join the five million other evacuating Floridians, we knew our home was the safest place to be. We were confident in our decision to stay, and we were at peace as the eye of the Cat 5 storm swirled our way.
We prepared as well as we knew how, Googling Floridian hurricane tips and texting with friends who had just survived Hurricane Harvey in Houston. As gas stations in the area ran out of fuel, we waited a comparably short 30 minutes to fill up our tank. Luckily, our cabinet was already stocked with black beans, tuna and peanut butter because the grocery store shelves of non-perishables were already wiped clean, except for pickled pig’s feet, and canned squid and herring. I filled Ziploc bags with water and froze them for drinking water, put a box of valuables in the waterproof dishwasher and filled the bathtub with water to be used to bathe and flush the toilet, if we lost electricity.
We were ready.
On Friday evening, Irma changed her path. She hit Cuba, slowing her devastating winds to Category 4 levels, and she made a westward turn, which took Miami out of her direct path. The tension that had silently been building in our apartment was released. We knew we would still get bands of heavy rain and tornado-like winds, but we would not experience the destructive eye of the storm.
Irma made landfall 160 miles west of us as a Cat 4 hurricane. We experienced constant 50 mph winds with gusts clocked around 80 mph, but a few as high as 99 mph. From inside our apartment we could hear every gust and saw numerous palm fronds snap and fall from the skinny trees that were swaying in our courtyard. We did go out into our garage and listened to the wind sweep down our street. It definitely didn’t sound like a freight train, as I had heard on videos from Puerto Rico. But there was a constant low hum below the sounds of rustling trees.
Ultimately, Saturday and Sunday ended up being like many other rainy Miami weekends, except for the overhanging edge of uncertainty that came with the worst six-hour window Sunday morning. We were among the 25% in our county to never lose electricity, despite a few long flickers late Sunday afternoon. So, we were able to cook, use our phones and watch the U.S. Open. Luckily, the storm hit us during daylight hours, taking away the uncertainty of the darkness of night.
By nightfall Sunday, her winds had dropped to 35 mph and we were done with Irma.