Hello everyone! Greetings from Northwest Florida. :) We got power back last night, almost exactly 9 days after we lost it and I am luxuriating under the air conditioner, drinking cold water (that I didn't have to boil), listening to a football game on the internet and trying to catch up on almost 2 weeks of emails. The remaining debris in the yard and the impending arrival of another hurricane can wait for another day...besides if another storm hits, it will blow all the debris off the piles along the road back into the yard anyway. :) Just to let you know...the eye came in about 30 miles (about 50 km) west of my house and half that of the college where I teach. The east side of a hurricane is *not* the place you want to be as we got the full effect of the wind and storm surge. I live north of Escambia Bay, about 3 miles inland and 50 feet in elevation, so I didn't get any water in the house, but we had three huge oaks (2 meter+ diameter trunks) uprooted right around us. One of them crushed fences of my neighbors to the north (and destroyed a swimming pool). One crushed a storage building and put a hole in the roof of a detached garage owned by my neighbor to the south. The third crashed onto the roof of my neighbor to the west's house, penetrating the roof in several places. We had several smaller trees down, or snapped off, and limbs down everywhere, but none hit the house so we were lucky. The biggest damage we had was the roof of an old storage building was blown off...and that roof is still sitting there upside down...I'll have to *eventually* tear the shed down and dispose of it, but not now. If you want to *really* see what it looks like over here check out this site... http://www.pensacolanewsjournal.com/news/guides/hurricane/galleries.shtml ... if you find the pictures of the large bridge with the missing sections, a 40 foot high wave lifted them off and dropped them into the bay, and note this was *deep* inside the "protected" bay, not out along the beaches. I live about 4 miles straight north of where that happened. The college sent out emails (like any of us could receive them with our power out) on Wednesday saying we're to report back for a "General Meeting" on 9/27 at 9am at the main campus, and the college will start classes on 10/4, so I guess I still have a job to go back to. I'm just wondering how much good putting plastic bags over the computers in the labs and my office did. The ones in the lab were upstairs, so they wouldn't have had water damage (unless the roof went), but the one in my office is only sitting on a table, and it's vaguely possible water could have gotten that high on the Warrington Campus where I have my office...it's just north of NAS Pensacola, and I'm sure you've seen pictures of what happened there. What worries me most is that we had *lots* of tall pine trees growing near the buildings on the campus, and pines tend to snap off and fall on things in a strong wind. Well, I guess I'll find out on Monday....assuming they'll allow us onto the Warrington campus after the meeting. Eris
