Editor’s note: So, I was with Marlow one night in Key West, and we experienced a un-named tropical shower that dumped water up the wheel wells on his car. Not a big deal, and didn’t even cause the transvestite hookers to go inside their bar, though I am sure if affected business. This one has the potential to make everyone go inside.

The 12-year hurricane respite is over.

– Vic

Irma Not So Douce

We sit and watch with varying levels of detatchedness the tribal goings on in our nation’s capitol, far off war lords killing their own for no discernable purpose other than terror, and the shakedown antics of a little Korean fat man with his growing arsenal of Fat Man tipped intercontinental ballisitic missiles. Our idle responses to these slow moving events is not to stock up or dig hunker down bomb shelters. These learned responses are appropriate for the most part.

My fellow southernmost islanders are watching intently the certain approach of a compact, breezy and powerful woman whose punch could wipe them out when it rushes by or over them this weekend. On the plus side the relaibility of hurricance track landfall 3-day-out forecasting is now well less than 100 miles versus nearly 200 miles from a decade ago. Intensification forecasting is still poor with many storms’ sustained winds being under estimatesd.

In the past, hurricane windy drive by’s have resulted in all tourists being ordered off the island first with mandatory but not forced evacuation orders issued to the locals a day or so later. The tourists invariably left but the locals mostly stayed. This Irma is not so douce. She now is packing sustained Category 5 winds that classify her as a Great Hurricane, which is not so great.

Storm surges could exceed 10 feet. This would flood over 90% of Key West which is the highest Florida Key. Sections of US highway 1 would be washed out, and many structures that are struck by winds of 155+MPH would simply disappear. What the winds don’t get, Irma’s rainfall and storm surge will scour if not clear away.

Irma is capable of annihilating the low lying Keys. Islanders and southern mainlanders have 3 or 4 solid days of advanced warning to protect their property, and pack up and leave, or hunker down.

If we were still residing down there, we’d board up and blow town. A Category 5 Irma winds would be so strong that their force would strip away exposed people’s clothing, overturn their cars, and clear most every tree and building off Key West except for the post Cuban Missile Crisis bomb shelters.

Hurricane Irma could make 2005’s Hurricane Wilma damage depicted above seem quaint
(Images courtesy of Tim Chapman; Chip Kaspar; and the Dale M. McDonald Collection, State Archives of Florida)

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