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02 September, 2007

B-B-B-B-Bummer, Dude

At 3:00PM, Hurricane Felix was declared a category four hurricane.

THE CENTER OF HURRICANE FELIX WAS LOCATED NEAR LATITUDE 13.6 NORTH, LONGITUDE 72.0 WEST. FELIX IS MOVING TOWARD THE WEST-NORTHWEST NEAR 20 MPH or 32 KM/HR AND THIS GENERAL MOTION IS EXPECTED TO CONTINUE FOR THE NEXT 24 HOURS. HURRICANE FORCE WINDS EXTEND OUTWARD UP TO 25 MILES FROM THE CENTER AND TROPICAL STORM FORCE WINDS EXTEND OUTWARD UP TO 115MILES.

The National Emergency Management Organization (NEMO) of Belize is holding a meeting to consider
the threat of hurricane Felix. The meeting is being held in Belmopan at 4:00 PM Sunday afternoon.

I think I can sum up the consensus of the meeting: "Oh Shit! We're in for it now..."

We're in for a real pasting this time around. Before we had the southern side of the storm, which was the gentlest side, and helped lessen any potential storm surge. This time, it's looking like we either get run over by the eye of the storm or at the least, get the northern rotation, which will help generate the surge we missed last time.

Lots of folks are still without power in the villages all around us. Same for telephone service (our landline is still out having gone down a couple of days after Dean. All the phone repair folks for BTL have been recalled and sent to Belize City, so it could be a month or so before we get functioning landlines.

We still have huge piles of debris and lots of phone/power lines down all over town. It's so common, you don't even notice them.

We have pretty much everything we need. I talked to Cody this morning and tomorrow morning he's going to move Tony's boat and Jeep out from under the palapa. We don't expect it to make through this blow. We'll probably park them over by the other boats.

Cody is planning to bring his family up here again. I suspect we're going to get much more rain than we did last time. So, I think his house will definitely be wet this time. I'm going to buy some tarps tomorrow to finish covering stuff in the meat house - where we have all our stuff stored.

There's a ton of trees everywhere leaning crazily, along with power poles that haven't been attended to yet. I'm guessing most of that stuff will be down all over the place. The only saving grace this time is that it's going to strike us in the daytime. That'll be good for taking pictures... But, other than that, I'm not sure it's much of an advantage.

Bob's hoping to get our septic tank pretty well completed tomorrow so that should be ok, even if there's a surge over the property (I'm glad we're not in there yet. We did tell Franz we wanted to go with concrete posts and beams to support the Mennonite house. I think that's a good move.

Dianna took advantage of a lull and went with Connie and Lynn over to Chetumal for shopping. She's not back yet. This is her first excursion alone since we've been here and her first to Mexico. I'm looking forward to hearing about her adventure - and seeing what she bought! It may be a while before we can do much fun shopping for a while. I'm guessing it'll be pretty much subsistence shopping for whatever is available in whatever store is able to open.

The old toast - "May you live in interesting times" - I think we are, I think we are.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, the latest report here shows Felix moving a little South; not good for Honduras but hopefully you will not get a second hit.

Your blog is great; I'm getting more news from it than anything else.
Take care
Elsie

Anonymous said...

We're crossing our fingers and toes that all humans and critters come through Felix as well as you all did with Dean.
Jim & Jennifer