Environment

Well, in most insurance policies, mine included, you pay your deductible for each occurance of a hurricane. My deductible, like most deductibles in FL is quite high when it comes to “Hurricane related wind damage.” And if you got hit by both hurricanes, you’ll be expected to pay two deductibles.

If you are tracking Ivan, you will see that he stayed on a more westerly track over the course of the weekend. He is still a very powerful storm, and will most certainly graze Cuba, and most likely will hit the U.S. sometime Thursday along the Alabama, Florida panhandle coast if the NOAA track verifies.

Here are a couple of pictures of probably the worse damage I’ve seen in our neighborhood. This is just about two blocks from the house. That was a motor home, and a lot of the branches have already been trimmed back.

Thus far, we have survived. We have lots of sticks down, and only a couple of decent sized limbs in

The winds are definitely kicking up and become more sustained. So far, the rain has not been that bad. We’ve had showers throughout the morning. There are have been some heavy showers, but those have not lasted more than a few minutes.

I woke up this morning to some strong wind and rain, but that was just a feeder-band moving through, and things are somewhat quiet again now.

Here’s an update for those of you wondering what things are like here in Tampa right now. So far all is fairly quiet. We had one squall line come through about 2:oopm. The wind kicked up a bit, and there was a very brief shower of rain.

As expected, NOAA has now moved the storm track back to the north. I’m guessing we’ll start seeing the effects of the storm Saturday evening, and should be cleared out of here by Sunday afternoon.