One of the risks of living in Florida is hurricanes. I have no intention of being in an RV in the path of even a minimal Category 1 (75 mph) hurricane. I was fortunate that Florida was not targeted during the two weeks that I was away for Jett’s funeral. But when I returned I had to deal with Hurricane Eta.
Twice.
Yes, in this very busy hurricane season they ran out of names and had to dig into the Greek alphabet – Eta being the 7th letter there. Eta was a very unusual storm. First it devastated Central America as a Category 4 (130-156 mph, hundreds of deaths and over $5B in damage), one of the most powerful storms ever to appear that close to the equator. Then it wandered around the Caribbean Sea like a drunken sailor for many days, crossing Cuba and the Florida Keys and bringing torrential rains to Fort Myers (hit 1), then curving back out to sea for a few more days. Then, on Monday and Tuesday of this week, it finally decided to head straight north, raking the west coast of Florida (hit 2) before making landfall near Sarasota, crossing Florida and continuing up the east coast of the US as a tropical storm.
Frankly, it was little more than a nuisance for me. The main impact was rain. Lots of rain. The first pass dumped maybe 4 inches of rain on my site and the second pass probably added 2 to 3 more. The winds were strong, but the highest gusts were probably around 50 mph. Enough to rock the RV, but not particularly worrisome. While many sites in the resort experienced minor flooding, mine had none at all. The drainage ditch behind the site filled but didn’t overflow. As the RV is on wheels and the shed is on blocks, even a foot of water would have caused no real damage. I might have had to replace some mulch.
Had the forecast been worse, what would I have done? Well, the good thing about hurricanes – if hurricanes can be said to have any good qualities – is that they move slowly. More slowly than an RV. So I would have hitched up and tried to outrun it. Millions of other people with the same idea would have made the travel very slow, but still faster than the hurricane. And if I couldn’t find a campground with a site available… well, my RV has a bed.
The greatest issue in this case was the condition of the truck. While it had traveled nearly 6,000 miles with nary a problem in the past month, it was due for an oil change and was in fairly desperate need of some new tires. But it could have hauled the RV a few hundred miles to avoid a hurricane.
Fortunately, it didn’t have to.