The Mad Bull’s Blog, Version 3

This is my first generator-powered post. What should I tell you about on this auspicious occasion? Hmmm… I know! Let me tell you about our experience with Ivan the Terrible… Listen nuh, that hurricane did really wicked for true! It was truly an awesome power!

Still, once we had battened down the house we lived in, I wasn’t too afraid of Hurricane Ivan. I had faith in the house, you see. It was a new house, only two years old, and as such, it had been built to the Dade County Code for construction.

When Hurricane Andrew destroyed Dade County some years back, they revised their building codes and the new codes specifically took into consideration what was necessary for the houses being built thereafter to be able to stand up to the super powerful hurricanes of this hole-in-the-ozone-layer, global-warming period that we are currently living in.

Because of that, plus the fact that we weren’t living right beside the sea and we were on relatively high ground which was not prone to flooding, I was pretty comfortable with the idea of staying at home and weathering the storm, even though others had suggested to me that they thought I would be better off to move into a shelter.

I also planned to open doors throughout the house and to open windows on the side of the house which faced away from the storm to deal with the pressure that would build within the house. As a result, I looked upon the storm more as an interesting phenomenon of nature than as a force primeval and evil, which should have my hair standing on end and which should have had me rooted to one spot as I trembled in fear. I was so calm that even though the wind had begun to kick up quite a bit from about 11:45pm on Saturday night, I went to bed. M’Buthelezi and MBJr. did so as well, but Natty didn’t. She was mega-worried! The whole time M’Buthelezi, MBJr. and I were sleeping, Natty was up by herself in the darkness with a small black and white, battery powered TV and a radio, pacing around the house, checking the windows after hearing things smash into the plywood shutters, and generally worrying herself to death! You see, we had been listening to the Weather Channel until the lights went out, and then we tuned in to Radio Cayman, and the announcers were sounding more and more as if the hurricane would pass near to Grand Cayman. At about 9:00pm or so that evening, she had heard an announcement ” Hurricane Ivan is expected to pass directly over Grand Cayman…it is too late to expect any major change ..”, and she told me that her heart fell to her knees because all evening the impression was that the storm was going to pass closer to Cayman Brac and then go on toward Cuba.

The storm continued to build up throughout the night, and it was upon us and was just beginning to really get strong by the time I got up at about 5:00am on Sunday morning.

As I said, I was sure the house we were in would hold up, and so I was pretty relaxed. I was looking out at the storm all the time, mostly through a peephole. Sometimes I even opened my front door and looked out, as when the storm really started to blow, it was coming at my back door.

Trust me though, even though I wasn’t so worried, I could see that Ivan was a wild beast, ravenous and wicked!

Of course, there is more to this tale…

You could actually see the wind when it was gusting, as it carried rain and / or seawater along with it. When the rain was moving through, it looked like thick white smoke, but it moved so quickly and the wind was howling like a banshee so much that you could never make the mistake of thinking it was smoke, you simi? It was awe-inspiring to watch it, and how it was handling the trees and the bushes in and around our garden.

Eventually, Natty, who was also looking out at the storm, pointed out that shingles were missing from the side of the roof which was facing the wind! I got mildly worried for a second, then I shrugged it off as I told her that the shingles were covering tar paper and then plywood sarking (sp?) which was affixed to the rafters with hurricane straps, and so we didn’t have to worry. My assurances fell on deaf ears though.

The storm continued like that for some hours, tearing away shingles and even the covering that they had put right at the edge of the roof. Eventually, in some spots the wood began to be exposed, but I told myself that was as far as it would go. I wasn’t worried.

At the same time, the wind was forcing water through the crack in the french doors at the back of the house. As the wind roared, you would just see water spurting through the crack and running down the doors to puddle on the floor. In no time at all, there was quite a considerable amount. Natty got newspaper and laid it out on the floor, but it quickly became obvious that the newspaper wasn’t going to be able to sop up all the water that was coming in. After awhile we decided to leave it until after the storm and just clean it up then.

Natty pointed out to me at one point how the back door was being rattled in its frame, and she asked me if I thought the front door would be able to stand up to the gusts of wind. I told her that the front door looked stronger than the back door to me. Natty didn’t put much stock in what I said. She pointed out that the back door opened out, and so it was being pushed in against its frame, but the front door opened inwards, and the only thing which would stop it from opening was the bolt of its lock, and she wasn’t sure that it was up to the task at all! She kept nagging me about it until she got me to help her to brace the front door with my computer table and the big 9 foot entertainment centre upon which the TV and a stereo would be housed.

Eventually, the wind changed, and it began to attack the house from the side with the front door. I think now that it was a good thing that Natty got me to brace the door, because when the gusts began slamming against the front door, the door was bending in at the tops and bottoms, and some spray was coming in through the top of the door. The door actually bent so much that you could see daylight coming through the space between the top of the door and the frame when a strong gust would slam into it.

Closer inspection revealed that the wind, after hitting the front door, would rise up to the ceiling of the alcove the front door was sited in. You could tell because of the water in the wind. Natty began to fear for a huge glass window above the front door, because that window hadn’t been boarded up. I told her that I thought it would be safe, because the direct force of the wind wasn’t hitting the window directly, but Natty would not be convinced!

Soon after the wind changed around to my front door, I noticed a difference… now, when the wind gusted and howled outside, I could feel the pressure build up in my eardrums for awhile, before the compressed air in the house forced its way out through the windows we had cracked open on the leeward side of the house. I couldn’t figure out why this change had come about though! Eventually, I went back to the front door and looked out through some glass windows in it that we had been using as a peephole… I noticed a piece of sheet-rock ceiling lying near our front door, and I said to Natty “Oh look, some sheet-rock from someone else’ house has been blown over to our front door! I hope it doesnt break the glass!”. Then Natty looked up and said ” That is our roof!” and instead of sheet-rock ceiling, I saw the naked rafters of the roof. As I watched, I saw the wind howling up into our ceiling, and I began to feel the pressure changes again. Then Natty shouted to me from the kitchen. When I went to see what was up, I noticed a big part of the ceiling in there had been torn out and was hanging down. The wind was using this opening to get into the house itself! NOW, I started to get worried! I remembered that my father had told me that the real danger for roofs being blown off was when the wind began to get up under the roof! I began to worry that maybe my roof would blow off after all!

By now, Natty and I were becoming frightened, and Natty raised our Terror Alert to red status! She immediately began to put into place plan B. Radio Cayman had been advising people throughout the storm that if the roof began to blow off, they were to retreat to an inner room and cover themselves with a mattress to protect themselves from falling rafters or other debris. This is basically what we did. We went into the middle bedroom, which seemed to be the safest. We took the mattress off my bed and took it in there. We also took the mattress off the bed in that room. Natty and MBJr. took shelter in the cupboard, and I took the smaller of the mattresses and covered them up in there. M’Buthelezi and I used the kingsized mattress. We lay on the floor and we huffed and puffed and pulled the mattress on top of us. Now let me tell you, kingsize mattresses are fun to lie on, but they are absolutely awful to lie under! They are heavy nuh rass, and its hot as hell under there, but we stayed covered up under the two mattresses for the next five hours! We became pretty frightened, because the wind seemed unrelenting and powerful, and we were really afraid that the roof would come off. We all began to pray, first M’Buthelezi led us in a prayer, then Natty said on. Soon after, MBJr. said a prayer too, and quite a nice one it was too… maybe his prayer was why our roof stayed on, but at the time, that didn’t seem enough, so finally, I sallied forth with a prayer too.

There we lay, under the heavy mattress in the heat, with me only coming out to get water or food for MBJr., an expedition which seemed pretty dangerous and heroic all by itself, because by now, the living room was awash in water and you had to be very careful that you didn’t drop and bust your head, and at the same time, you were wondering if the roof would strip off at any moment!

I kept asking natty what time it was and it would only be maybe 5 minutes from the last time i had asked. It was the longest day of our lives so far.

At about 3:30 pm the winds didnt sound as strong as before,so we peeped through the front door and when gusts subsided we stepped through the front door to see our neighbour’s roof totally gone. Powerlines lying across our lawn and drive way. Another neighbour’s roof was partially caved in, and all the windows on the side facing the wind had been smashed. All the trees around were totally stripped of leaves and a good number of them had been blown down. It looked like a hellish landscape.

We eventually went out for a drive around and the full extent of the damage dawned upon us. The hurricane had removed countless roofs all across the island, and many, many houses in close proximity to the shore had been partially destroyed by the storm surge. Some houses had been totally destroyed. I have linked a site previously with pictures of the way Ivan mashed up the place. Here is that link again

Thankfully, we never lost our roof. We ended up having only minor leaks. Many, many others have much more harrowing stories to tell… check this one out to get an idea how awful and rough some other people had it. Thats all for now, folks. By the way, I started writing this post on Wednesday last, I think, but it has taken me until now to finish it, so it wasn’t all generator powered. TTYL.

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