Hurricane Ivan 2004

Hurricane season 2004 has been a busy one.

Then there was Ivan...

Tropical storm Ivan stirs from the Atlantic on the heels of Hurricane Frances Sept 04. Ivan grew to a massive CAT5 storm, but it lost and gained strength along the way and ended up taking a little trip by Grenada, Jamaica, Cuba... and finally setting a course for the United States.

So, what does that mean to me?

A lot when it is aimed at your back door!!

After working a half day making preparations for the shelter on Keesler AFB for 1300 people in the building I work, I was released to finish making preparations to my house, and hopefully to get the hell out of dodge.

14 Sept 1300 - So I started to board up the house, luckily my wife found a place I could get plywood (thanks sweety) I rushed out there and bought 15 sheets and got started...

Click on images for full size view...

Now the house is ready.

Very tired, we load up the van, put the trailer lights on my 1966 VW beetle, getting it ready to tow so I could at least save one of them. The 1969 Beetle went under the carport.

Northbound U.S. 49 between the Mississippi Gulf Coast and Jackson was bumper-to-bumper Wednesday with people who had fled coastal areas of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida Panhandle. Hotels were booked solid as far north as Memphis, Tenn., nearly 325 miles northwest of Mobile.

Adding to the South Mississippi traffic problems were motorists leaving the New Orleans area. U.S. 49 from Gulfport to Jackson moved at a crawl and north-south interstate often resembled parking lots.

We had planned way in advance to evacuate to Columbus Ga., Atlanta Ga. or even Jacksonville Fla. All depending on where the storm was to hit. But the following made us think otherwise -

As it turned out we didn't want to take a chance on getting caught in traffic, running out of gas, as we were hearing reports of gas stations shutting down for safety reasons. We could not really go west, as there was no place to stay, all motels as far as Dallas TX, Oklahoma, Arkansas Tennessee were all booked solid. They evacuated 1.2 million out of New Orleans alone, and these people were jamming the roads to the west. 65 heading north was out of the question because of tornados, and I-10 to the east was just going into the storms path

So we decided it was probably best to hunker down and ride it out at home... which by the way is a concrete block structure that endured Hurricane Camille, A VERY powerful CAT5 that hit Gulfport a few miles away back in 1969.

15 Sept 2004 - Ivan approaches the coast

We live right next to Keesler AFB, MS. About a mile from the Gulf of Mexico, and about 1/2 a mile from the Back Bay of Biloxi.

6 hours out

2 Hours out

Landfall

Shrimp boats seek safer waters in the back bay

The power blinked a few times and then it went out for good at around 9:30 or so. From there we had a battery powered radio and listened to the wind get worse and tracked the storm which seemed to be headed right for us. Ivan made a slight turn to the North-East towards Mobile Bay in Alabama, to finally come ashore in Gulf Breeze. We were lucky that we were on the west side of the storm, the worse winds are on the northeast side of the storm!

Ivan Hit the shoreline as a CAT 4 Hurricane which isn't a breezy day in the park.

Click here for a 2MB radar loop

The worst winds hit us at around 2 a.m. and that's when my wife woke me from a light sleep... She said she heard something outside, creaking noises and like something hitting the house. Then a crashing noise off to the east side of the house. I grabbed a flashlight to see what it was. I opened the side door and looked out. Wind was rushing in the house as I looked out and at first I didn't see it. But then I realized there was not only one tree down but TWO trees down. A cedar tree and a huge pecan tree. It didn't hit the house so I closed the door and sat listening carefully to the wind... Very stressful!

However, as the hours went by the winds diminished and I actually went out side in the from yard at around 6:30 a.m. to do an assessment of the damage. We had hardly any damage other than a few branches down off our pecan tree in the front yard. The winds had died down to around 25-30 MPH with gusts to 45 MPH at this point. Some branches were down, but all in all everything looked ok.

At 9:00 the sun was out and a light breeze was blowing at around 10 mph and we started to clean up. Funny thing about it... we never got the torrential rains even afterward, it hardly rained at all! But this is how is was and what I saw in my yard after a CAT 4 hurricane hit roughly 70 miles away -

The tree's that fell were in the neighbors yard, and almost hit our gas meter. The pecan tree is lying on the shed next door and lying on top of the fence. I think the only thing that kept it from hitting our house was that there were a few trees that were in the way.

Interestingly enough, there was a man that came out about a month before the storm to trim the tree branches from over the house. He looked at that pecan tree in the neighbors yard and said, "If we get a hurricane, that tree is going over." He was right. Actually, that tree had been partially uprooted back in 1998 when Hurricane George came through.

Power finally came back on about 7 p.m. Good thing too.... it was starting to get hot!

That's about it.... from here which is a far cry from what happened over in Pensacola.

Hurricane season 2005 hopefully its not as bad...

It was in retrospect... Katrina