Just over a week ago, the Royal Gazette ran a story on how quiet this year’s storm season has been, so I blame them for jinxing us! It is true, though – we hadn’t had a decent storm in a while. But then last weekend we were surprised by a near-hurricane Fay, and now not even a week later, we get knocked around by hurricane Gonzalo!
We were well-warned for the storm, which turned out to be just a few kph under the ‘official’ Category-3 ranking when it hit. The island was as prepared as it could be; with Fay fresh in everyone’s minds even we were inspired to fill up our bathtubs and had about 100 water bottles ready to go.
As is tradition, we wandered down to a beach for a view of the surf the evening before the storm. On the way back we stopped at House of India for some dinner before hunkering down for the night. We assumed we’d wake up to no power as the storm was close, but were surprised the following morning when it was only breezy and we could still watch TV!
A view of Gonzalo from space as things were picking up (but before we lost power) – Bermuda is that little blue ‘blip’ in the middle, you can see the eye of the storm to our southwest.
A typical storm warning from the Bermuda Weather service… note that to get kph you multiply a knot by 1.85…!
View on the radar of the storm approaching…
The storm finally hit us on Friday afternoon. I say finally as we had been given lots of warning and spent most of the week preparing – was even given Thursday / Friday off work (Jenn had to work most of Thursday). We were expecting it to start Thursday night / Friday morning, so it felt like forever when we were ready and waiting for it to arrive, which I would say was officially around 3ish on Friday afternoon, when the weather started deteriorating into tropical storm conditions.
We lost power at 4:30pm on Friday; we entertained ourselves in the waning light of day playing cards or Pictionary on the white board. Jenn had some glow-sticks handy as well, which provided some entertainment before bedtime, then it was off to bed, armed with fully-charged iPads.
Jenn and I had been through a hurricane before (Fabian in 2003) so were familiar with what a storm like this might entail; the situation was a little different this time around – mainly the added responsibility of having the kids here now – thus it was much more stressful! I stayed up for the duration of the storm (wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway), reading a book by flashlight in the living room. Listening to the eerie howling wind and my ears perking up like a dog every time I heard a noise that was out of place.
The first half of the storm had the wind coming from the south / southeast / east, so in terms of how our house is situated, it seemed much less violent coming from this direction (the opposite corner of the house from our living room). There are only a few windows on these sides, plus we have neighbors situated on these sides relatively close at a slightly higher elevation, so there was some shelter. The winds built up slowly but surely, storm force winds started around 3-3:30pm on Friday afternoon and built up to what was nearly Category 3 winds before receding quickly down to nearly nothing (over the course of say 20 minutes) when the eye of the storm was over the island around 9:00pm.
After about 30-45 minutes of near silence interrupted only by the loud chirping of our tree frog friends, the winds picked up again as quickly as they receded, only from the opposite direction. This was more concerning as now it was blowing against the big living room window, which flexed and shook with every gust, the likes of which were reaching speeds of 230kph. Around 11pm, I heard a bang on our roof above where I was sitting (on the couch, beside this large flexing pane of glass) – I found the following morning that it was just a small piece of our chimney coming off and hitting the roof. Of course, I didn’t know this at the time, so my imagination immediately turned to our roof being torn into pieces… at any rate I took refuge in the bedroom for a few hours until I could hear the storm letting up a bit. After a brief survey of the house I hung out on the couch and fell asleep, satisfied that the worst had passed. Whew!
In terms of the damage to our place – this is it (above). TS Faye did quite a number on the trees earlier (which was a point of concern as all these downed trees could be potential missiles in another storm such as Gonzalo!), so there really wasn’t much left to come down around our place. One more small tree came down into our yard from the neighbors, but other than that our big tree in front didn’t lose any more branches, and cleanup for me entailed only picking up a few small branches from the yard and grabbing the few pieces of debris on the roof from the chimney. We were very lucky – our neighbor to the south (you can see in the picture above as well) lost part of his roof, as did our neighbor right behind us to the east. The only other thing was that our car apparently isn’t entirely hurricane-proof, as evidenced by this puddle in the foot well of the back seat! Eww. (Next time I’ll take a page out of this guy’s book.)
We were ready to live without power for what we assumed for at the very least a few days, likely a week or so (Belco reported that out of their 36,000 customers, 31,000 were without power after the storm, a few of whom were still without power from TS Fay nearly a week earlier). Generators were buzzing around us, helicopters were surveying the damage from above, crews are / were on their way from other countries to assist with the cleanup / power restoration. Full recovery will take a while, no doubt. However, to our surprise, just less than 24 hours after the lights went out, Belco had our electricity back on. Lucky. And grateful! (As of the time of this post, Belco has about 6,100 customers left without power, so they’ve made a good dent.)
So, life returns to normal for most of us tomorrow – school / work are reportedly good to go.
I wasn’t able to get out and take pictures like I did after Fabian, but there are tons of pictures, stories, and video available on the Royal Gazette and Bernews websites – like the photo gallery here and here.
I put together a little video as well, featuring our own little weather reporters!