Local

In the last few days I’ve learned a lot more about lift stations than I ever wanted to know. We usually don’t think about where our waste goes until something goes wrong.

Our community has a lift station which pumps out to the city’s lift station, both of which run on electricity. Since the power went out, of course, they stopped pumping. We only got partial power back here, which isn’t enough to run our lift station, and the city’s station has no power. On Saturday, we had three truckloads of sewage pumped out, which cost us $4500. Three times since then we had someone connect a generator to our lift station to get it working. Since the city’s lift station isn’t working, our sewage started coming up in the street when we ran ours. As you can imagine, it’s a very messy situation.

I’ve been without power from 7AM on Monday Oct. 24 until 9:30AM today, Nov. 2 after Hurricane Wilma, which is why I haven’t posted anything in the last week. Luckily I didn’t have any damage and nobody here was injured. A few people had generators, but most of us gathered around the clubhouse every night and set up a few charcoal grills to cook dinner. I spent most of the time cleaning up the mess from all of the trees we lost.

We already got rid of most of our big black olive & ficus trees, so the damage wasn’t as bad as it could have been. One big tree fell on one of the buildings, but thankfully it didn’t do any serious damage. A lot of roofs lost metal & tile, but they’re all mostly intact. We have a lot of leaking roofs, of course. Many of the remaining trees came down or were seriously damaged.

When we weren’t cleaning up the mess, we spent the rest of our time on a quest for food, ice & water. Meat was scarce, and the few supermarkets that were opened only had non-perishable items. Gas was very difficult to find and any gas stations that were open had long lines. Almost all of the traffic lights were out (and still are in most places), so all intersections have to be treated as a 4-way stop.

Flooding

Originally uploaded by mike3k.

We’ve been spending the last few days watching the news & waiting for Wilma. We already have a lot of flooding from the heavy rains we had Friday night.

Hurricane Wilma may hit us this weekend. This has been a hell of a season, and it’ll probably be like this from now on. So far we’ve been lucky and avoided any damage, but our luck can’t hold out forever.

I don’t think I can take another season like this one. Enough already!

There must have been a lightning strike right outside my window. I saw it and heard the thunder at the exact same moment. That was scary! The cats are still hiding. My DirecTV has been out for almost an hour.

Despite fears that gas prices would rise after hurricane Rita, I found that gas prices actually went down. I had half a tank but I filled it up today at $2.79/gallon. Last week the same station was charging $2.83/gallon.

Hurricane Rita is now heading into the gulf after missing us. We got some rain with very little wind, but no flooding or other damage. Unfortunately it’s probably going to hit Texas or Louisiana as at least a Category 2 storm.

Let’s see if this works…

Sun-Sentinel’s downtown Fort Lauderdale webcam

Hurricane Rita hit us. It’s now raining very hard, although the wind isn’t too strong. We’re not getting a direct hit – this is one of the outer bands.

Tropical Storm Rita is heading towards us, with the worst expected to hit tomorrow. We’ve already been getting some rain today.