Diary of Hurricane Michelle
Darryl November 15th, 2000
The Hurricane Song
Hurricane’s a’comin’,
So big and strong,
Hurricane’s a’comin’,
You better get along.
Variation, Bahamian pop song
The winds had been howling incessantly for a week, coming from the north east, an uncommon direction. We had been looking forward to an end to blustery days and noisy nights.
Our favourite internet weather service suddenly threw an alert. Local wisdom says that hurricanes
don’t happen after the middle of October and everyone thought the condition was just something delayed in the rainy season. Michelle, a tropical storm 1200 miles to the southwest was now predicted to upgrade to a level four hurricane, and was coming our way.
Friday, November 2
By the next day, with the forecast being an arrival into our area in 72 hours, we decided to treat the situation as potentially serious. Early in the morning, we stocked up on water and gasoline, and topped up our storm stock - candles, canned food, propane and batteries. The store owner was a little surprised. “Been watchin’ the storm?” she said to Nancy.
Saturday, November 3
Saturday, the last of our guests left for Nassau, and we spent the rest of the day on a painting job we were trying to complete, stopping every couple of hours to check the internet. As the reports moved Michelle from storm to Level one, then jumped to Level 3, the time before Michelle’s arrival also began to shorten.
Sunday, November 4
We hurriedly picked up Nancy’s cousin Becky, at the Rock Sound airport, and began to doubt if our kids would make it in on their scheduled Monday flight from Ft. Lauderdale.
By mid-day, we had our answer. Michelle was due to hit the next day.
Racing against increasing winds to tie everything down, we prepared the yards, beaches and gardens for the onslaught. The winds howled around us, and a steady driving torrent of rains keeping us all soaked to the skin.
The shop was completely sealed up this time, having had the hard lesson that salt rain drives itself
through the smallest openings. I had a two week rust recovery session on my shop tools after Hurricane Floyd.
The drop shutters on the store houses and other outbuildings were wedged tightly shut, the sailboat clamped to the ground under a ladder lashed between two trees, and the rare plants from the shade house moved into the shop.
We started shuttering the main house at about 8 in the evening, and finished the last shutter at about 10:30. This time the installation of the seventy panels went like a military operation. Two of us then jumped in the car and headed down to seal up the house of an absent friend.
Fighting our way home through flying coconuts and 35 pound fronds flying like wraiths, we couldn’t believe how our little community looked so fragile in the depth of a howling midnight, Michelle beating on every door and window.
Remarkably, even though the winds were steadily increasing, the power and telephones had stayed on, and with a last minute call from our children now safely trapped in Ft. Lauderdale, we settled to sleep.<
Monday, November 5
By early light, the front of Hurricane Michelle began to beat on us. Raging in from the Atlantic side, the swell was running 12 and 13 feet. The roar of the ocean steadily underpinned the howling wind, now steady at 90 mph, and gusting to 100.
Awakened by the beeping of the computer UPS, the power had shut down. But as I was shutting
the systems down, the power suddenly come back on. I quickly brought down a Hurricane progress report. Michelle was on us. Then at 6:35, the power went off, and this time stayed off.
As the dull morning light came up through the dawn, we could now see the storm through the only unshuttered window in the front of the house. Our front door coconut tree became our gauge of Michelle’s strength as we watched its top fronds almost touch the ground, as it bent but held against the force.
Stealing along a sheltered part of the house, I hurriedly snapped a few pictures of the fury of the wind.
We sat in the darkness of our shuttered house, huddled under the soft light of our only skylight. As the storm howled, we sat reading magazines and drinking coffee made on our camp stove, now the new hearth of our kitchen.
Then the winds began to slow down. The last report had placed Michelle’s centre so far away from us, it was possible that this meant that the storm had passed.
With the winds now down to about twenty miles per hour, I went on a tour of inspection.
Our immediate yards and gardens are whipped leafless, the bougainvillea recently in magnificent bloom now naked. The coconut grove on the way to the Atlantic is carpeted in fronds, seed branches and coconuts, with one 60 foot coconut prone.
The Atlantic beach is eroded out about thirty feet, leaving a one to two foot ridge right at the vegetation line. The cabana is intact, and our old Haitian boat that we had quickly “moored” between two large casuarinas about five feet above the high water mark has not moved an inch.
There are some new trees by ValleyView House that have been blown down, most sadly a tree hibiscus given to me by my good friend the artist Lord Macmillan-Hughes, recently passed.
As the sun broke into a beautiful version of a Bahamian day, we jumped in the Volvo and went to the Bight Side to inspect.
When we arrived on the beach, a remarkable sight told us we were actually experiencing the eye of
Hurricane Michelle. We could see the clearly formed wall of the eye over thirty miles away, neatly ringing our line of sight all around us on the full horizon.
Quickly determining that there was no damage to the Bight Side beach to that point, we walked quickly back to the car with the wind picking up steadily behind us. After a little trepidation when the car wouldn’t start, it suddenly rumbled to life after wiggling a couple of wires. By the time we arrived back at the house on the Atlantic, the wind was back up to gale force. We battened in for the last half.
This time, the force of the storm came at us from the southwest, dipping down to touch us over the hills sheltering our house. Our coconut tree storm monitor out the front window bent almost to the ground, this time the other way.
Tuesday, November 6
Rising with the first light, we took stock of Hurricane Michelle’s damages.
The Bight Side beach, untouched before the eye, now had given us great quantities of sand, and the surge still lay a quarter of a mile inland. Our handsome old tire collection, built to create the foundation of a new seawall, is now strewn throughout the bush. Two casuarinas in the lane are over, one weakened from disease now snapped, and the other uprooted.
Back in the main yard, all our citrus trees are salt-burned, and hundreds of grapefruits, sours and oranges scattered all over the ground. The ground is a solid carpet of leaves and short branches. About seventy shingles now need replaced on the roofs.
All in all though, we made it through without too much lasting damage, and will not be too long recovering.
Then as evening fell, Nancy reminded us of the real importance of the day after Michelle.
It was Becky’s birthday! Over a candlelight spaghetti dinner, we drank a nice bottle of wine to Becky’s health, chilled with the last of the freezer ice.
November 12, The Aftermath
It took a week for Marcel, our gardener to make it out from town after hurting himself in his own cleanup. Our kids finally made it in, and the extra hands were appreciated. We spent the whole week cleaning up SeaView Cottage with some seasonal repairs and a thorough paint job from top to bottom. We finished just in time for our friends Dave and Kay, to make it by the following weekend.
Our provisioning did us well, and we wanted for nothing during our confinement. Here is our list of items and tasks that we made note of, for next storm:
- Tab the shingles on the edge of the roof
- Fill the bathtubs with water before the power goes out to refill toilets
- Think seriously about a generator
- Finish installing the shutters that were missing
- Make lots of ice to cool things.
Rock Sound had many homes that lost appliances in the post-eye flooding, with many waterside homes receiving two to three feet.
As for the rest of the communities, the damage was extensively distributed but seems slight, with a few shingles lost here and there, lots of salt-burn, and trees pushed over. The electrical company had our power back on in less than 60 hours, and the local phones never went down. Just minutes ago, the international circuits came to life, signaling the end of Hurricane Michelle for us.