My Hurricane Vacation Story
What compels a man to drive to the eye of a hurricane twice the size of Andrew when it seems everyone else in their proper mind is getting as far away as possible? Perhaps it’s just a desire to find deeper thrills, perhaps a desire to have a deeper knowledge of my world, or maybe it’s just plain lunacy as most of my friends and family have suggested. I guess the only way I can describe it is that as we drove around inside the storm, I felt like a box was being checked in some mental inventory that said “Go through the eye of a Hurricane.” It was right between “Spend Spring Break in Amsterdam” and “See Phish before they break up.”
I led an expedition of two other UNF students to Hollywood on Thursday night, where we met with one of their friends, Tim Millar, who had a Jeep Cherokee 4x4 that had braved Charlie in the weeks prior. We left at 11pm on Thursday night after loading up on supplies and reserve fuel. I-95 southbound was a pretty lonely route, and even northbound was pretty clear that late a night though the rest areas were filled to the brim with sleeping refugees.
With the latest National Hurricane Center projections and a weather radio, we ventured out of Hollywood north about an hour or so until we reached Fort Pierce. The NHC was predicting a landfall somewhere between Melbourne and Vero, but intuition was telling us to stick further south. After finding a vacant motel in Fort Pierce where several professional storm chasers were staking out, we decided to camp out there and wait for the next day. We had left too early; the storm was slowing down over the Bahamas. We sat in our motel room, watched some movies and kept close track on the hurricanes movement. It was looking more and more like we were going to be in ground zero.
We woke up early on Saturday to a worsening situation. The sky was darkening with thick cloud cover. Every hour or so a strong band would hit with upwards of fifty mile an hour winds and horizontal rain would pound us for 20 minutes. As the day wore on the bands became more frequent, stronger, and lasted longer. In our original drive around Fort Pierce, we discovered the key locations around town to view things. The barrier island had been blocked off by squad cars but there was a Marina on the Indian River where you could watch the wave’s crash against the yachts where we could observe safely without wind gusts throwing formerly landed objects at you.
We used our hotel map to stake out different locations around Fort Pierce to watch the storm. We noticed that as soon as we found a location, professional storm chasers would wind up there a few minutes later asking us about where we had been. In fact, I have a picture of a Miami Herald picture being taken.
She was a slow mover, so we had all day to drive around and find different spots. Our favorite was Jensen Beach, a scenic little retirement town on the Indian River between Jupiter and Fort Pierce, only minutes from Stuart. Along the river were several marinas and trailer parks as well as an unanchored houseboat slamming up against the seawall.
After driving around a bit and scoping out other areas, like Savannas Sate Park, we arrived back in Jensen a few hours later. Our immediate concern was finding shelter for night when things would get bad, so we checked out a local elementary school where they told us that though they had over 600 people inside without power, they wouldn’t turn anyone away. The storm had worsened and the houseboat had disintegrated against the seawall. The trees we were parked under were now fallen. Six foot swells in the river were slamming into the seawall pelting us with thick blasts of salt water. I hid behind another photographer’s car to get the shots I did of the trailer park on the water getting hit like we were. Soon another car pulled up, and an old man came out and starting talking to Tim as he was filming to figure out just what we were doing, to which we always replied that I was reporting for a local newspaper and he’s reporting for a Miami radio station, which was true in the loosest of definitions of free-lancing. He offered us shelter.
After we were done filming and photographing, we followed his directions to a Moose Lodge about a mile away. A sturdy structure, it was a former bungalow that had the insulation ripped out and concrete poured in. We were met at the door by Phillip Black, captain of Lodge 1690 in Jensen Beach. Kenny Murphy, the man who had introduced himself to Tim, was also there.
The Lodge was essentially a bar and restaurant for the older men of Jensen Beach and we were all forty years the junior of any man there. They quickly offered us warm food and cold beer by candlelight and were all curious to know what the four of us were up to, so we fed them the freelance journalist line. Kenny saw right through it and knew we were there on our own accord, looking for a little adventure. He asked if he could come out with us on the next expedition and told us he knew where we should go.
Two of the guys wanted to stay in and dry up a little bit, but Tim and I wanted to go back out and see the storm in different places. We stopped first to check on Kenny’s boat at a local marina on the St. Lucie River. The waters had risen, but his boats were fine. We left from there and drove to Jupiter Inlet. On the Palm County side of the line, we drove into an expensive condo high-rise and snuck through the locked gates out to the beach. The beach was unlike anything I’ve ever seen in real life. It was straight out of a movie. The eye wall was fifty miles off the coast by this point and the surf was easily fifteen foot high, though you couldn’t see more than a couple hundred feet ahead because of the sandstorm blowing against our backs. I made the mistake once of turning into the wind and being stung in the face by millions of sand grains hitting me at 80 miles an hour.
We left there to go check on another yacht club of his on the other side of the inlet. The winds died down a little and we drove around near the lighthouse and found another club right on the inlet next to the jetties with people standing outside watching the storm. We walked up to their balcony and took some photos and video before getting back to the car.
On the way out of the neighborhood Tim made a wrong turn away from the bridge. Kenny said it was fine, there was another bridge seven miles up the road. It felt wrong, but we went with it anyway. About a mile into the road the winds picked up and we could see the Intercoastal, which was on the immediate left of the Jeep, rising. Trees were suddenly falling all over the road. We put the Jeep in four wheel drive, hit the gas, and started driving around them. The entire island was maybe three homes deep at its thickest and the idea of being caught in a barrier island surrounded by falling trees and rising waters right before landfall was becoming an ever more ominous specter on my mental horizon. We finally hit a tree too big too get around and we had nothing but a hatchet for clearing, so we turned around and drove back even faster. There were even more trees on the road this time, ones we knew weren’t there five minutes before. We made it off the island though and warned another car full of journalist about the dangers ahead, but they proceeded anyway.
After that, we drove through Stuart and shot some video of the St. Lucie River swallowing the local pier. Like in Jensen, traffic lights were lying broken in the road or dangling in the wind by a single wire. Fast food signs were blown out and tree’s and power lines had snapped. We made it back to the Moose Lodge in time for another hot meal – probably the only in the county – before nightfall. The eye would be coming in at 2am.
We stayed inside mostly after dark. Every street light was out and it was simply too hard to see anything falling near you. The vents on the ceiling would slam up and down as gusts would come overhead, bringing in a creepy echoed howl from outside. A gentleman named Allen bought us round after round of drinks to keep the stories and jokes going as the wind became louder outside. He told me his story, mostly of the misfortunes that had befallen him in recent years – both financially and physically. Those who have the least always give the most.
We went outside after getting a little stir crazy. We had an extra poncho so we brought Allen out with us. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were in the eye wall. The trees around the Lodge blocked most of the wind. We walked a block up to a mini-mall and took cover. We could barely hear each other over the constant howl of the wind from above. We shined our MagLite’s around surveying the damage. The landmark Fidelity Financial bank near the lodge had lost its sign. The tin roofing on a bank across the street was making eerie creaks and bangs as it flapped in the 105 mile an hour wind. We could see other searchlights looking up into the sky watching the clouds fly by. Ryan pointed out the smell of fresh cut wood in the air.
The winds slowed down a little bit and we went back inside. One of the men inside the lodge was cranking up his handheld radio. Familiar voices that we had been listening to all weekend were talking about how the eye was making landfall at Jupiter as they spoke. The winds died. The vents on the ceiling stopped flapping.
We grabbed our gear and walked out to the car. It was still a little rainy and still windy. Contrary to my expectations, it was also still cloudy. Turns out the eye had closed off. We drove out and concluded we were indeed in the eye, then after driving little further inland I called my dad on the cell phone to get a radar update of how much longer we had to drive around before the storm picked back up again.
Two hours was what we had. The eye was somewhere between sixty to eighty miles wide and moving at six miles an hour. The four of us drove around the county taping and surveying the damage. Things were a lot worse now than they were eight hours earlier in the daylight. We made it as far as Palm Beach County before we started running into cops again. Police were a persistent fear because of the curfew in place and the “zero-tolerance” approach heralded on the radio.
Eventually we dropped the other two guys from the UNF contingent back off at the Moose Lodge and Tim and I drove out to the river. The water had risen considerably. I took his searchlight and started taping the damage. We drove through the trailer parks we saw getting battered earlier and filmed the damage inside. Eventually we had to turn around because storm surge had covered State Road 707 along the Indian River.
We went back and I fell asleep. Ryan and Tim went out filming earlier in the morning when I was asleep. They woke me up at nine and we drove out back to Hollywood. We didn’t stay in the area long and got on I-95, which wasn’t too damaged, to avoid the roadblocks.
The trip back home from Hollywood was faced with one giant problem from the outset: we didn’t have enough gas to get back home. South of Jacksonville gas was nearly impossible to find. Once we got near Miami, I was able to cap off my tank and had two five gallon canisters with me. We brought the canisters with us in the Jeep and used about four gallons to keep the generator at the Lodge running. Though Kenny had given us two gallons at the Lodge, we still needed enough to get the Jeep back to Hollywood. By the time we left I had 13 gallons of gas on hand, but needed 16 to get home. I called a friend to arrange for him to deliver gas in case we ran out but was informed that all the gas stations were closed in Jacksonville because the power was out.
Before we hit the highway, we found one stations open in Davie. The clerk told us the highway patrol had escorted a tanker in from Port Everglades earlier. We filled up our tanks and drove back. With no cops on the highway, we booked back on 95 until we reached Daytona. Once there, every mile or so we’d find a huge tree fallen over in the right hand lane of I-95. We decided to pull off into Daytona Beach to check on UNF legend Abe Kowitz. We never quite made it because the police were on every street. Daytona was hit a lot harder than we thought and the police were out rigidly enforcing the curfew to stop looters. Eventually we were pulled over and threatened with jail unless we turned around and left the way we came.
We made it home without a scratch, except for the small dent in my car from the encounter with a fallen tree in Palm Coast. It was nice to be home, dry, with hot food and hot showers. It was nice to get the familiar calls from friends and family once I got reception on my phone again, and they all said the same familiar thing, “Trey, glad you’re safe… but that was stupid. I hope you don’t plan a career in this now.”
