The air surges fierce, but it's taken a long time to reach this.
Today has been a beautiful day, sun, gentle warmth and a breeze that has kept a constant flow from the SW. There's a wierd undercurrent to everyone's mood, calm panic.
Most of the shops are well boarded up, the local chemist has wood covers nailed up, the supermarket pull-down shutters, the pizza chain place aluminium shielding, the sandwich shop has cardboard sheets sellotaped to the windows. Guess which one has my money to not do well. All the shops have notices they were shutting early to let their staff get safely home to prepare, no-one appeared too bothered apart from the numerous teenagers filled with nervous excitement as though they were hanging around a mall with security guards on the prowl for them. There did seem alot of people out for a Sunday night pushing trollys filled with water bottles. I've stocked up the fridge and freezer with water, I estimate I've 3 days worth, but without air-con, hard to say for sure. Hopefully won't need to start drinking my own wee till Wednesday night, not sure if I should eat/drink stuff now to give it a better flavour.
Powers the first thing that pops with a strong breeze around here, and effective as the local power company is around here, if it goes down, looking at the scale of the problem, I'd understand if it took them a while to get it back on again. Got a few candles, BBQ brickets, matches, lighter, fully charge moby phone/gameboy/psp. Lighting shouldn't be a problem.
I saw cars parked in the same semi-underground car parking spot as the last hurricane that filled it, destroying a few cars that had water up to nearly the roof. Guess people don't learn too quick.
The initial reports of it being a cat 1 storm heading far to the north of us have now turned into a cat 3 hurricane passing very close. It's 2:50am now and the storm is just starting to hit. The winds that have been a steady push all day are now gusting and there's a sound of something banging against something else in the distance. All the buildings are locked down tight with shutters only allowing a small peek of light through, the island seems unusually dark and forboding.
Storm surge, whilst expected to be 10-15 feet on the west coast, should be around 5 feet on this side of Florida, it's rain and blocked storm drains that messes things up round here, not really the rain, I'll keep popping out to make sure they stay clear of debris. Estimated to get around 8inches of rainfall. Katrina was 13 inches as it passed over, but how this'll work with the storm drains being raised in water level, I've no idea how it's going to be. Katrina did hover over us for a fair time dumping water, Wilma should move over us alot quicker, so I'm hoping we don't see the flooding we did last time.
I'm going to try and get a bit of kip earlier than usual, think our customers will understand if we're not quite as responsive as we usually are. Got the UPS/spare servers raised a few feet off the ground, hopefully it's enough. When Hurrican Andrew came in, apparently there was fish in the parking lot and the high water mark was up to my shoulders on the wall of my appartment block. With it coming in from the SW, everything /should/ be a lot less.
After power pops (and it will), I've got enough charge in UPS/phones to pop on once an hour to check email for about a day, so will continue posting hurricane reports as it filters in. I'll try and get a few pics of the post damage, but it may take a while to get them uploaded somewhere.
Taken me 15 mins to type the above, and now I can hear thAe wind starting to howl past the window. It's picking up noticeably.

See you all soon.
Rob