A year and a half ago, when I moved from New York City, where I grew up, to Hollywood, Florida, a small coastal city of about a hundred and fifty thousand in Broward County, thirty minutes north of Miami, I’d never before experienced a hurricane firsthand. There was Matthew, that October, but it largely missed Florida, and ended up affecting Haiti instead. Irma has been my first true hurricane—my baptism as a Floridian.
By the first of the month, I’d began hearing rumbles of the storm in the news and online. Neighbors in the building where my fiancée and I live, a compact five-story structure full of concrete lofts, began to talk about it in the elevator or while getting into cars in the parking lot. Instead of a normal nod or hello, they asked, simply, “You staying?” My mother was planning a trip to visit on the 9th of September, and she asked me the same thing. Like a seasoned Floridian, I told her confidently, “It will turn.”
But, by September 3rd, the models made it clear that it would not turn, and we stocked up on canned food, water, and gas. In the following days, people were scrambling: supermarkets were full to capacity, and snarling lines of cars waited for gas at stations. Irma had become a Category 5 storm, with sustained winds of a hundred and seventy-five miles per hour. It was headed toward Puerto Rico, and I was scared for my family in Loíza, a small coastal town of thirty thousand where many cousins and aunts and uncles live, and where two-thirds of residents are below the poverty line. There were reports that Puerto Rico could lose power for months. I monitored the storm closely as it ripped through the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands. On the news, we saw aerial shots of Barbuda in a heap of rubble, and the Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda described the island as “barely habitable.” In the end, my family in Puerto Rico was largely spared.
Last week, millions of people fled South Florida on the roads, driving as far north as Atlanta and Virginia, and others got flights out to New York and New Jersey. In total, close to seven million residents evacuated. Roadways were clogged, and we heard stories of people running out of gas on the highways, abandoning cars. In the airports, there was a mad rush to get on any flight by Thursday the 7th. We were at the Hollywood-Fort Lauderdale airport, my fiancée trying desperately to get her eighty-year-old grandmothers on a flight to New York. Once they were in the air, we thought about evacuating ourselves, but the models were all over the place, and we weren’t sure where Irma would turn next. We had heard stories of people going north to Tampa to seek refuge, only to have to relocate when it became clear that they might get hit, too. Also, evacuating is costly—last-minute hotels in the Atlanta area were well over a hundred and eighty dollars a night.
We decided to stay, reasoning that our building was constructed within the past decade, under the strict codes that were set in place after Hurricane Andrew, and thus would likely be able to weather the storm. We were promised that the windows in our loft were impact-resistant, capable of withstanding winds of up to a hundred and seventy-five miles per hour, but still we inflated an air mattress and pushed it against the front door, rather than sleep in our bed, which is flanked by two large windows. We packed two book bags with provisions, in case we needed to make a sudden run for a nearby stairwell.
On Friday, we took our last pre-storm stroll around downtown Hollywood, which is famous for its diverse strip of bars and restaurants. We walked north toward a Target, in search of an AM-FM radio, but found only shuttered businesses and desolate streets. Back at our complex, there was a problem with the emergency-exit door, and neighbors gathered to construct a makeshift handle out of some bungee cord. Later, some of us went over to a neighbor’s apartment to drink and eat some hogfish he had recently caught with a spear gun. Before that night, we had never spoken much to each other.
The next morning, September 9th, we awoke to howling winds. A 4 P.M.curfew had been issued for residents of Broward County. The models showed that the storm was turning toward the Gulf Coast, and, while I still had power, I called my aunt and grandmother in Tampa to try to convince them to evacuate to a shelter. My grandmother, a hairdresser who has weathered multiple hurricanes in Florida and Puerto Rico, was working on a client and refused to leave. By nightfall, the skies were a deep blue-black. We watched the news and fielded calls and texts from concerned family and friends. We joked that, to those outside of the state, the news always made the storm seem worse than it was. But soon we were seeing pictures on social media of trees crushing cars and flooding in downtown Miami and Brickell. We received our first tornado warning around 8 P.M. We put on our shoes and sat near the door, keeping our eyes glued to John Morales, the chief meteorologist for our local NBC affiliate, as he called out tornado warnings like a quarterback shouting audibles. There were ten in total throughout the night. At 9 P.M., the cable went out. The sky outside was punctuated by lightning and bursts of green light, as a result of nearby transformers exploding. Thick water sprayed the windows as if we were trapped in a big car wash. One of our windows began to leak through the framing and onto our carpet. The next morning, we lost power as we tried to make breakfast.
When you ride out a storm, there is a lot of downtime as the winds and rain pound outside. We tried to conserve our phone batteries, since we didn’t know when we’d have power again. I read. My fiancée painted. Eventually, we roamed the dark hallways of our building with a flashlight, the halls pitch-black except for the flashing of the emergency-exit light. We found a neighbor in the stairwell smoking a cigarette and reading a Faulkner novel by lantern light. We talked about how insignificant a hurricane can make you feel. How, despite all our technological advancements, we could still be wiped out by a single lashing from Mother Nature. How there was a humbling feeling that came with that knowledge. By Sunday evening, we rounded up more neighbors, whom we now considered friends, for a game of Cards Against Humanity. We spread our flashlights around our table and shared what alcohol and snacks we had.
On the morning of September 11th, the sun came back. The apartment became unbearably hot, and the carpet had a moldy smell. We went for a walk to survey the damage in the area. There were several downed trees that covered whole streets and sidewalks, but already crews of people were hacking at them with saws. Florida Power & Light trucks were driving around to repair outages. Store awnings were torn up and light poles were knocked over. A few roofs had caved in, and at a nearby gas station one of the pumps was turned on its side, ripped from the ground. We passed people on the street who screamed, “We made it!,” and smiled.
That, thankfully, seems to be how most of the state of Florida is feeling. Many streets were flooded, from the Keys to Jacksonville; roads were cluttered with debris and close to nine million residents were left without power. But among Floridians there is, over all, a strong sense of gratitude that we escaped the fate of the Caribbean islands, where Irma struck much more ferociously and claimed at least thirty lives. In Texas, Harvey dropped considerably more rain than Irma, resulting in at least seventy deaths and leaving thirty thousand people displaced. In Florida, there are days and, in some cases, weeks ahead with no air-conditioning or electrical appliances or gas to power the stove. We will make our meals over grills or eat canned food; we will miss days of work, and some residents who live in the harder-hit Keys will have to rebuild homes. Those who evacuated will make long, cumbersome journeys back. But we will do all this knowing that, this time at least, we were the lucky ones.
