September 16th will mark 10 years since IVAN came ashore. I cant even begin to tell you how after all this time I think it has affected me more now than the day I walked up to the destroyed home I had lived in, searching for anything I lost, mostly family photos. I was in shock I believe. Im choked up after viewing these photos, most I have seen before. The memories are flooding back to me (no pun intended) of the Red Cross lines, lines for water & ice, the lovely ladies from the Red Cross who delivered hot breakfast & lunch daily in my hood before I could GET TO anywhere that had a line for food or water, bathing with body wash/sanitizer, MREs, some were actually quite tasty, generators running all night, sleeping on a couple musty blankets on my slab....my dog Vincent being quite the little sniffer dog and helping me find family photos in the muck, the deputies from Tampa who helped me clean up.....I could go on and on. I always tried to focus on the good, it brought our neighbors closer together (a neighbor up the street whose home was not destroyed had a generator and made coffee in the morning!) and the way that all of us set out WHATEVER we found that wasnt ours in the front of our homes so that all of us could peruse at the end of the day, to see if anyone found anything that belonged to us. (I found one of my photo albums 4 blocks away on a neighbors display of found stuff) The aftermath, once the trailer arrived that I would live in for a year was a bit bittersweet. Trying to hold your tongue & smile when others would comment about how they were out of electricity for a week. A WEEK? :) Try well over a month, phone lines for 2 months, cable? LOL. (keep in mind this was before smart phones) I WAS able to get dial-up internet when I finally got a phone line in November. Decorating the trailer w/Xmas lights was fun though. The PNJ even did a story on a couple of us who decorated our trailers and they had photos of a little tiny tree I found and decorated it with tiny Xmas ornaments I found in the debris. I was alive, my dog was alive, and my 2 parakeets were pissed off, but alive. :) When it comes down to it, thats all that matters. nwfdailynews/local/hurricane-ivan-a-decade-later-photos-1.372623
Posted on: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 10:56:54 +0000
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