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Hurricane Matthew – The Prelude

by Bingle on Oct.06, 2016, under Richard Bingle Family

The local news has been doing hurricane coverage pretty much non-stop today as Hurricane Matthew is projected to skirt the coast of Florida as a category 4 storm overnight tonight.

I spent Tuesday afternoon and evening and all day Wednesday trying to get the hurricane shutters up at the folks’ house in Viera. Apparently during the estate sale, the cleanup, or the house being on the market, all of the specialty bolts and wingnuts for the shutters disappeared. After a ton of running around out on the coast I managed to get 75 wingnuts and 100 substitute bolts. Unfortunately, I ended up needing closer to 100 wingnuts, so ran out with two windows left. I managed to buy the last 1/4-20 nuts in Brevard County to get one of those two windows covered, but was still not able to get the garage window shutters put up. That window faces east and breakage would mean that the wind would get into the garage and cause potential roof damage. Hopefully the house insurance includes hurricane coverage! Guess I should be happy that I was able to scrounge the parts I did to get the majority of the shutters on.

Here in Orlando we’ve got our two Mazda’s, most of the patio furniture, the garbage/recycle cans from next to the house, and our grill in the garage. The rest of the patio furniture is in the kitchen and pool bath. The van and Intrepid are on the driveway. The Mazda6 and the van are gassed up. Got some cash. We have basically a boulder resting against the double door at the front of the house (Charley blew hard enough to cause that door to almost open despite being locked) and the door is taped up to prevent any water from blowing in. Being this far inland we never invested in shutters or plywood for our house (even after being hit with Charley, Frances, and Jeanne in 2004).

Now we wait…

– Rich


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