Hurricane Wilma Eats The House

Actually, Wilma had a bigger appetite for vegetation and fences. Great good fortune for us, there.

The pix below are of my humble abode. It's just an ordinary Florida bungalow with little curb appeal. That's one reason I put a lot of effort into the landscaping. It looked truly terrible when we bought it. Naturally, we bought it that way on purpose. It looks much nicer inside than out. The equity looks good too.

You will see a fair amount of ordinary deferred maintenance - I need to paint and such. It's not because I'm lazy or I don't care. I trust, therefore, that you'll kindly overlook it. On the same grounds, I hope you'll also overlook the lack of sophistication in presentation here.

You who've seen the house recently - pre-Wilma, I mean - rest assured. The queen palm is already spiking new fronds, and the orchid tree has lots of new branches and leaves. The front yard dragon tree is sprouting new branches, too. The big dragon and dracaena marginata branches that got lopped off by the queen palm will all be replanted and make new trees.

And amazingly, when they all came down on the roof, they made no through-and-through punctures. Of course it'll need work - but so far, no leaks.

It isn't what it was. But if you compare how much growth has already taken place in barely over a month, you'll see why I say it'll come back before you know it. And remember: not a single one of these basic plants actually died. The pictures I took today are there to prove it to you. I'll walk you by all your old favorites. They're doing just fine and all say Hello! to you.

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Below are three different sets of pictures showing k's house and yard. The first set was taken a couple days to one week before Wilma. We knew she was coming for a long time, so we had lots of prep and picture time.

A couple of days before she struck, we had one of our occasional little flash floods. These aren't the monsters you Westerners are used to, but they do mess up my pine bark nugget mulch. It tends to float down the street, and sometimes up the neighbors' driveways. Then I have to go run down with my wheelbarrow and rake it all back up and wheel it back home. (Surely none of the neighbors' pine bark nuggets get relocated to my yard that way.)

The city in general, and myself on my own property, have greatly improved local flooding issues, and we're also on high land for this area. Still, when we get 6"- 12" of rain in a couple of hours, it overloads us. We had another one with Gamma.

The "ff" pictures are from the pre-Wilma rains, and are actually a result of Wilma herself. The flooding rains came from one of her outermost rain bands.

The second set of pix was taken today, November 27, 2005. The front yard is still a bit messy, the back yard hugely so.

The third set of photos was taken just after the hurricane. Most are from the afternoon. Wilma ended as a hurricane around 2pm or so on landfall day. Since my digital camera was a hurricane fatality, I took these with my old Nikon, and had them transferred to CD yesterday.

Some of the hurricane photos were taken a day or two after the storm. Bear with me, I wasn't as careful with dates as I like to be. If the background looks like the hurricane hasn't quite left yet, it's still Monday, October 24, 2005, in the afternoon. If the sky is blue and the dead leaves aren't very green, it's after that.

The title codes are:
w1 is 10/24/05, Wilma Day One (Landfall)
w2 (or higher) are the days post-landfall
pw is pre-Wilma
ff is flash flood - meaning I took pics to show the flood mess.