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Irma's Coming!

Chaos is what's going on in the Caribbean right now. My facebook feed is filled with my friend writing "Searching for So and So" or "Found So and So safe and sound". She's been at it since it passed.

Now it's all about looting, and supplies. They're airdropping supplies but nobody seems to know where they're going from there. I guess you can see the planes drop them, but hours go by and the supplies are not being distributed. I'm afraid looters are getting them first. St. Maarten. It's a damn mess down there right now.
 
Hemingway's Six-Toed Cats Ride Out Hurricane Irma in Key West

The New York Times said:
Entire islands have been reduced to rubble, streets have turned to rivers, cranes have buckled and more than 30 people have died. But the six-toed Hemingway cats are fine.

The 54 cats, many of them descendants of a white polydactyl cat owned by Ernest Hemingway, live at the writer's house in Key West, Fla., which was hit hard by Hurricane Irma.

As the storm approached last week, officials ordered a full evacuation of the Florida Keys. But Jacque Sands, the general manager of the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum, refused to leave. She had an obligation, she said, to see the property and the cats through the hurricane.

Animal lovers fretted. One of Hemingway's granddaughters, the actress Mariel Hemingway, publicly urged Ms. Sands to move to safety. "I think you're wonderful and an admirable person for trying to stay there and to try to save the cats and the house," she said in a video posted by TMZ, but "this is frightening. This hurricane is a big deal."

"Get in the car with the cats and take off," Ms. Hemingway pleaded.

Ms. Sands did not. The cats, she said, would come inside when the barometric pressure dropped, and they and their human attendants would be safe within the 18-inch-thick limestone walls of the house.

It appears she was right: The house's curator, Dave Gonzales, confirmed Monday that the cats, many of which have six or seven toes, were unharmed...
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/11/us/hemingway-cats-irma.html
 
Apparently the house is extremely solidly built and the caretakers believed it would withstand the hurricane. They also believed that evacuating with 50-something cats wasn't practical.

They were dead right all the way. Although Hemingway's grand-daughter's tweet was kindly meant, simply "getting in the car with the cats and getting out" of the Florida Keys at that juncture was surely impossible and would have put everyone in much more danger than they were in that house. They even had enough generator capacity to keep their fridges and freezers running.
 
Rolfe said:
Apparently the house is extremely solidly built and the caretakers believed it would withstand the hurricane. They also believed that evacuating with 50-something cats wasn't practical.

They were dead right all the way. Although Hemingway's grand-daughter's tweet was kindly meant, simply "getting in the car with the cats and getting out" of the Florida Keys at that juncture was surely impossible and would have put everyone in much more danger than they were in that house. They even had enough generator capacity to keep their fridges and freezers running.
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Just fyi, the house is constructed out of the limestone that was excavated from what would become the basement. Its strength is one of the bragging points you hear about on the tour. And, given the popularity of the place and what I presume they rake in, in admissions and souvenirs, I'm sure they could afford their own power plant. I doubt anybody able to shelter in that house will ever evacuate.

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Vixen said:
We no likey category 4. Meeow like dogetory 4.

We no likey feline wet, no siree!
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Maine Coons, known for a tendency toward polydactyly (their gene for it is known as the Hemingway mutant), are also known for their love of and fascination with water. They enjoy swimming, bathing, and just splashing around a lot.

So getting wet might not bother the Hemingway cats that much.

Getting wet in a hurricane could be a different proposition, though.
 
As predicted and expected, the Florida Keys took a hard hit.
Search-and-rescue teams made their way into the Florida Keys’ farthest reaches Tuesday, while authorities rushed to repair the lone highway connecting the islands and deliver aid to Hurricane Irma’s victims.

Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator Brock Long said that preliminary estimates suggested that 25 percent of the homes in the Keys were destroyed and 65 percent sustained major damage. “Basically every house in the Keys was impacted,” he said. In Islamorada, a trailer park was devastated, the homes ripped apart as if by a giant claw. A sewage-like stench hung over the place. Link to Lakeland FL Ledger article
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Is it too soon?
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I didn't realize billboards no longer have plywood on them. Most of them are some sort of plasticy sheet over a wood frame. None of them survived even minimal hurricane force winds.
 
Modified said:
I didn't realize billboards no longer have plywood on them. Most of them are some sort of plasticy sheet over a wood frame. None of them survived even minimal hurricane force winds.
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Probably a good idea. I imagine that would cause far less damage than a large plywood one that does eventually blow away
 
Beady said:
Just fyi, the house is constructed out of the limestone that was excavated from what would become the basement. Its strength is one of the bragging points you hear about on the tour. And, given the popularity of the place and what I presume they rake in, in admissions and souvenirs, I'm sure they could afford their own power plant. I doubt anybody able to shelter in that house will ever evacuate.
....
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It might be great against high winds, but what happens in the face of flooding and storm surge? I wouldn't want to be in the strongest house in the world if it was underwater.
 
Bob001 said:
It might be great against high winds, but what happens in the face of flooding and storm surge? I wouldn't want to be in the strongest house in the world if it was underwater.
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It's 18 ft above msl, the highest point on the island. Too high to flood, and high enough to withstand most storm surges. Put another way, it's been there for ~170 years without sustaining significant damage. It also has a second floor 10'-15' off the ground; it would take a 30' storm surge to reach it.

I'd feel real good about camping out there.

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