There’s more to surviving hurricane season than knowing how and when to evacuate. Even in summers without any significant hurricanes coming near the island, I have noticed that hurricanes still interfere with life, and cause stress.
We usually are very lucky to get plenty of warning about every major storm of the season. The tracking begins very early, when they still are far from Florida. Although this early warning can save lots of lives, it also wears on the nerves, as we pay attention to every single storm for days and days. There’s usually a storm somewhere, so this means we are looking at storms and worrying about the results for most of the summer. If nothing else, it is distracting and tiring.
From June through October, we tend to obsess about watching tropical updates on the local news channel and on the Weather Channel, at ten minutes before the hour. Then there are all the programs about storm disasters. It’s enough to make you nervous even if no storm comes your way.
Then, if it looks like a storm might be coming your way, life is interrupted even more. At our house, we begin to pay attention to how many bottles of water we have, and to how much canned and dried food. If the predicted cone-shaped path of the hurricane continues to include Anna Maria Island, we then start organizing our important possessions. We make sure we have enough plywood for the windows. In the years before we had a mainland evacuation destination, we also would look around for motels on the mainland, and often we’d make a reservation just in case we needed it. The problem is that it’s sometimes difficult to know, ahead of time, exactly which nights you might need that reservation. And you might not need it at all. But if you wait, the motels will be full and there is the risk of having nowhere to go.
Anna Maria Island has a lot of little old houses with little old windows. I live in one of them. The windows are the old jalousie style, which crank open like blinds, in horizontal sections. The seals on the metal frames around these old windows are poor. The fit of the window sections into the frame is not always tight. In one case, I’ve even used tape to cover a gap between the window and window frame. The glass is thin and weak. It’s time for new windows!
Ideally, my new windows would meet the standards of the Miami-Dade building code, which is the gold standard for all windows in hurricane territory. They would pass the large missile test, namely, they would not shatter if a six-foot-long two-by-four hit the window at 34 miles per hour. And they would pass the small missile test, enduring ten ball bearings hitting the window repeatedly at 50 miles an hour.
A month ago I got the renewal notice for my home owners insurance premium. Although it had actually gone down a little after the policy was sold from Citizens Insurance, the Florida-run insurer of last resort, to another carrier, I still thought that it was a lot of money.
But how can I save any more on the cost of home owners insurance? The last thing I needed was being underinsured with inadequate coverage.
One mistake that was made on the Citizens policy was the description of the roof type. It was marked ‘gable’ when it was actually ‘hip’. I had asked for a correction to the policy but from the renewal notice I found out that the correction had not been made a year ago.
But I also requested a discount for having hurricane clips or anchors on the roof trusses and framing. It is easy to see from the outside what a roof shape is, but not so easy to prove there are anchors in the walls and rafters. I needed a certified inspector’s declaration to satisfy the insurance company.
Anna Maria Island beaches felt the effects of Hurricane Ike this week with several days of high surf and high water.
Every day this past week brought a good swell and copious waves as Ike passed 300 miles away to the south west of Anna Maria Island.
The storm emerged off the coast of Cuba into the Gulf of Mexico with Tropical Storm strength winds and soon intensified into a Category 2-3 hurricane heading northwest.
Then, if it looks like a storm might be coming your way, life is interrupted even more. At our house, we begin to pay attention to how many bottles of water we have, and to how much canned and dried food. If the predicted cone-shaped path of the hurricane continues to include Anna Maria Island, we then start organizing our important possessions. We make sure we have enough plywood for the windows. In the years before we had a mainland evacuation destination, we also would look around for motels on the mainland, and often we’d make a reservation just in case we needed it. The problem is that it’s sometimes difficult to know, ahead of time, exactly which nights you might need that reservation. And you might not need it at all. But if you wait, the motels will be full and there is the risk of having nowhere to go. 
