Hurricane Andrew
On most of my adventures, no old flame pops up and takes me for a ride.
So I've got my good habits, and one of them is to never be late to work, not even close to being late. My strategy is to start out at a time that will get me to work with up to an hour to spare. That gives me an easier time with the morning commute. I had a small project tricking out the library of a music professor and composer of operas. I arrived at the composer's house a good 45 minutes early and settled down to read my morning paper by the dome light, and finish my coffee. I was only half listening when a public service announcement came over the radio, "Blah, blah...Hurricane Andrew...blah, blah...urgent need for inspectors...blah, blah...If you have a valid California Contractor's License and a few weeks to spare, call this number 415-6-blah, blah..."
I thought to myself, "Wait, what? What was that again?" It was sinking in, but I hadn't caught the phone number. I had my mobile phone right there in my truck, so I called the radio station and they told me the number from the PSA. I called that number and sure enough, they got my Contractor's license number, checked it instantly, then they said, "Can you leave today?" I said, "No, I've got to finish up this job today." "Can you leave tomorrow?" "Well, yes." "Okay call this number, it's a travel agency, and arrange your ticket to Miami. They will be expecting your call. Rent a car and show up at this certain hotel in Miami Beach as soon as you can. Headquarters will be in the conference room."
I was still sitting out in front of my jobsite in the Berkeley Hills, drinking my coffee in the dawn light. Without even getting out of my truck, a whole new adventure I had never considered before came on my radar. And I took the leap. I made the calls, I got the job without an application or an interview, and scheduled a plane flight to the other end of the country before my feet hit the ground when I got out of the truck that morning to begin another workday.
The next morning I was packed and on my way to Florida and arrived there in the afternoon. I rented a car and drove to Miami Beach. I didn't know a thing about this part of Florida, but I do now. Miami is a city on the 50-mile wide tip of the Florida peninsula. The greater Miami area occupies a 10-mile wide strip along the Atlantic coast; the other 40 miles to the west is the Everglades. Geologically, this part of Florida is an ancient bed of coral limestone. It's an enormous slab of ancient coral reefs and is tilted over so in that 50 miles the elevation in Miami rises to 6 feet and by the time you reach the west coast the elevation is minus 10 feet; underwater, in other words; hence the shallow swamps of the Everglades. At Homestead, the area south of Miami that took the direct hit by the hurricane, the elevation is 3 feet above sea level.
The way a hurricane works picks up strength over warm ocean waters and weakens when it hits a landmass of any size. There is no buffering landmass on the tip of Florida. Hurricane Andrew raked across the flat, warm, soggy peninsula with wind speeds up to 175 mph like there was nothing there and literally destroyed all in its path. The city of Miami, just to the north, was spared a direct hit.
Miami Beach is on a spit of offshore barrier islands that form Biscayne Bay. It was built up as a resort with Art Deco hotels in the 1920s, '30s and '40s, including the Essex House hotel I was heading. I had made a reservation from California to stay there the first few nights, but found cheaper digs after that. In the lobby the entire wall over the fireplace had been devoted to a stunning mural by Earl Lapan. It was a life size scene of an indigenous Seminole woman, plying a shallow canoe through a natural Everglades setting of waterways among the mangrove trees, birds and alligators.
In the conference room I found a chaotic scene. They took my picture and in a short time they produced a laminated photo ID and a "FEMA Emergency Vehicle" placard for my car. I was run through a quick orientation course, and put to work. Step one was to get a hold of 10 or 15 applications. Applications had been collected from walk-in and call-in interviews. Each one listed various details; names, address of the property and contact phone numbers. Amazingly, the Weather Service had seen the hurricane coming and the governor ordered the evacuation over one million people from its path. All their homes were destroyed and all the power and telephone lines were useless. So the contact numbers were from outside the area, where evacuees had found places to live temporarily with family or friends or whomever.
The next step was to sort through your applications and map out where they were. Homestead had a very predictable grid of numbered streets and avenues, where the addresses corresponded to the numbers of the cross streets. The disaster area had about seven zip codes, so we were encouraged to swap applications with other inspectors so that all your inspections would be grouped close to each other. So in the conference room we were waving a handful of applications in the air and shouting out possible trades. Finally you had a stack of applications that you took responsibility for, you wrote down their application numbers and your inspector number on a clipboard, and then you were out of there.
My entry into the world of FEMA was at a pivotal time on many levels. First, the mass evacuations became a model that has saved many, many lives over the years. Second, the disaster exposed how your average building could fail in high winds and led to many changes in the nationwide building codes. Third, it was the last time the applications were done in this crude way with pieces of paper being passed around a conference room, like commodity traders in the pit. The next time and thereafter it was done on tablet computers.
Once he's taken responsibility for some applications, the inspector's next task is to make phone calls and arrange to have a meeting with the claimant at the damaged house or apartment at a particular time. This took some doing, since everybody was so scattered and had to come from a distance through traffic jams. At the appointed time, the inspector was to meet the people, inspect their ID's and proof of residency, whatever insurance policies they had, and to document specific details and measurements of the damage. I got on the phone from my hotel room and arranged for a number of inspections the next day. It's not like making a sales call. People are eager to hear from me and cooperate in every way to get the meetings arranged.
In the morning, I headed south on the elevated freeways. One lane had been designated for emergency vehicles only, and since I was officially an emergency vehicle, I could bypass the heaviest traffic. Often I had police cars and fire engines in front of me and behind me with their lights flashing and we were all zipping along past bumper-to-bumper backups. Everyone wants to speed the FEMA inspectors in getting their jobs done. Once we've done our part, money can start to flow to where it's needed most in an orderly way, and life can get sorted out again.
I could see out over the neighborhoods for miles to each side. The streets of Miami's sprawl are continuous with the bedroom communities of Kendall, Naranja, Florida City and Homestead. As I drove on toward the center of the storm's path, each successive mile showed a greater degree of destruction; first, just the roofing materials exposing bare plywood roof sheathing of a few, then all of the buildings in sight; then roofs that were partially, then completely ripped off, rafters and sheathing all gone; then increasingly buildings torn into standing piles of broken framing lumber. By the time I reached Homestead, as far as the eye could see, miles in all directions, everything was knocked completely down. The streets were valleys through the wreckage strewn with downed power lines.
The hurricane had occurred a week before, August 24, 1992, and inspectors like me were part of a second wave, when the needs of the disaster victims had overwhelmed the existing contingent of FEMA inspectors. By the time I got there quite a bit had happened. Everywhere there were electric power company trucks, with booms and cherry pickers, and trucks laden with new power poles, from all over the Southeast US. When something like this happens over a 100 square mile area, there's no sense in trying to test and repair individual lines. The only practical way to deal with it is to cut them all down and start completely over with new wires and many new poles and leave the old wires lying on the ground, to be salvaged later.
You could see society rebuilding itself out of the wreckage. No traffic lights would be functioning for months and at most intersections drivers instinctively worked out how to let each other through without the lights. On particularly busy intersections there would be a self appointed "traffic cop"; just somebody standing in the center, sorting out the crisscrossing vehicles, and everybody cooperating with his hand signals. On major intersections and roads leading on and off the freeways, the more professional National Guard MP's conducted the traffic flow.
In the first days after the storm, there were some people who had ridden out the hurricane and survived somehow. In a few days people who had evacuated, returned because they had no place to stay. The National Guard had set up a tent city, and FEMA had "disaster assistance centers" where people could apply for assistance, and in those early days FEMA had been literally giving money away to get people able to start taking care of their basic needs. Armed National Guardsmen stood around a portable "bank" building the size of a mobile home. A Brink's Truck was unloading a lot of cash and as I walked toward the scene with my camera up, one of the soldiers turned and raised his rifle up to a more ready position. People often had lost their ID's, checkbooks, credit cards and debit cards in the chaos of the storm. Money is how people manage the resources necessary for life. The bank's principal function was to dispense cash, by giving access to ATM machines or by cashing checks or FEMA vouchers. Once people had cash, they could use it to buy generators for instance, and begin to have a functioning household. Next to the bank, McDonald's had a large portable fast food outlet on wheels; it looked like two red mobile homes connected end to end. They pretty much offered the whole McD's menu. In the midst of all this wreckage, whoever you were, you could get some cash and you could get a cheap meal.
I started in on my inspections. Most of the wrecked structures had their street number spray painted on the wreckage, so it was not difficult to find the find the locations, though the people who had lived there could hardly recognize their homes or their neighborhood. In a lot of cases the houses were so far damaged that there was no point in a detailed inspection. They were considered a total loss, so our inspection consisted of simply going over their documents.
Many homes in this vast suburban area were in walled-off developments to keep the through traffic and business traffic off the residential streets. Most of them were very cheaply built and it was evident that many had been shoddily constructed and so obviously not to code, that an inspector couldn’t have looked at all. The notoriously corrupt building officials had signed off on them. One claimant stood by her demolished house and picked up a soggy piece of the particleboard siding and squished it in her hand. "My house was made of cardboard!" They had looked nice to the untrained eye, but these flimsy structures had no chance against a hurricane of any size. Farther north out of the direct path, there were some houses that survived intact and kept their roofs on. They were the older houses built with care and less concern with extreme cost cutting.
Oddly, I had become a representative of the US Government in the eyes of these claimants and I recognized that each wanted to tell the story of what happened to them, and for once in their lives they had Uncle Sam right there in person to pour out their heartaches to. I listened carefully. Their stories ran a wide range; some were in deep depression for their way of life that was suddenly gone; all the possessions and property they had lost, friends and neighbors that would never share life with them in the same way, some were grieving over lost pets, and people they knew who were killed or seriously injured; and some were coping admirably, one old couple saying to me "We're so happy to be alive...Our whole family survived...We don't care about any of the stuff."
I interviewed one woman who had ridden out the storm with two small children when she wasn't able to join the evacuation in time. They had followed the classic advice for such a situation: go to a closet in the middle of the structure, close the door, get down on the floor, and cover yourself with blankets. They had done that, and when they crawled out an hour later, the closet was still standing in the center of a pile of rubble that had been their home.
I got to examine hundreds of houses besides the specific ones I inspected, and I learned a whole lot about hurricanes, about building houses in hurricane prone areas (mainly don't do it). And I gained a vision of exactly what's happening at the height of the event. One man rode out the storm in his house and watched it all happen. He was lucky to be alive. A hurricane is a circular low pressure windstorm that moves along a 20 mph or so, but the winds rotating around it reach speed up to 200 mph. This one had max speed 175 mph. So the storm is moving in off the ocean but the high winds that hit any given spot depend on which side of the eye is passing over. If you are on one side, the high winds will be moving in the same direction the storm as a whole is moving. If you're on the other side, the wind will be moving in the opposite direction. If the eye goes right over you, first the wind is blowing sideways to the storm's path, then it stops as the eye passes, and then the wind blows fiercely in the opposite direction.
This guy's house was hit by the fastest moving part of the vortex, all from one direction. He had some sliding glass doors on that side covered with plywood, but the plywood had come down. He watched through the cracked open door of the closet where he had taken refuge. Winds and rain pounded the house, it shook and groaned and distorted the structure. He could feel the air pressure dropping quickly as the shrieking wind sucked on the house until it was wobbling there like a giant soap bubble. At the storm's height, the wooden back gate was torn off its hinges and came flying into the sliding glass door, popping the bubble. The sudden rush of air into the house blew out most of the windows and made the entire wall opposite wall of the building bulge out. Similar houses on either side of him survived with just their roofing material torn up, but his whole house was demolished because his bubble got popped.
FEMA inspectors work 12 hours a day seven days a week. Not because anybody tells you to, it's just the way the process is structured. As a private contractor to a larger private contractor that has a deal with FEMA to manage a team of inspectors, you are responsible for all your own expenses except the plane ride to and from the disaster. You arrange and pay for all your food, lodging, rented car, gas, stationery supplies and phone calls. You put that all on your personal credit card. The deal is you will get paid a particular amount for each completed inspection, and you probably won't get paid until a few weeks after your "deployment" is over. After you get your check and all your credit card statements you can figure out how much you made. It isn't a whole lot, but you get better at dealing with it as time goes on. There was a time set after which you couldn't make calls in the evening, and a time before which you couldn't call in the morning. Some people still had jobs and couldn't make it to an inspection except on Saturday or Sunday. Since your costs continue whether you work or not, and you want to help as many people as you can and then go home, you work seven days a week until they let you go.
There was one oddball inspection that I recall. It was out on the edge of the Everglades. It was built on an island in the swamp with the driveway a long causeway to it. It was substantially built and only had some minor damage. It was occupied by a renter who qualified for FEMA assistance for the expense of having evacuated and some minor water damage to his personal belongings. He had some tales to tell about this house. It had been a mobster's fortress.
Inspecting the house I realized it was probably true. Like the house I just described in which the bubble popped, there were big glass doors on the side that took the brunt of the high-speed wind. Again flying debris had hit the glass, but unlike other houses I inspected, the glass on these doors was an inch thick. It was bulletproof glass. It cracked, but did not fail. The kitchen was a 24-foot long by 12-foot wide peninsula off the main house. It was all stainless steel inside and the windows made of that really thick glass. It pointed straight up the causeway across the swamp to the main road, the only way in or out.
At first glance, the exposed foundation looked like the common 8" X 16" hollow concrete blocks. Looking more closely, the foundation and the walls up to the windowsills were cast concrete, and the exterior below the siding was covered with 8" X 16" grey ceramic tiles that imitated concrete blocks. The corners had L-shaped tiles to complete the illusion.
In short, this was a fortified castle with the vast Everglades as a moat, and alligators.
There was one room in the house that clinched the mobster story for me. The renter told me that someone had been murdered in there. If I ever needed to build a room that felt evil, I would know how to do it. It had dark wood double doors and as you stepped down two steps from the main floor of the house you were in a 16 X 20 foot oval chamber with dark paneling up 8 feet on all four walls. There was a small dark conference table in the center of the room and some black leather chairs. The thing that made it feel spooky though, was that you couldn't see the ceiling. Above the wood paneling there was nothing. I believe it was a large radiused curve up to a 10-foot curved ceiling painted flat black, but I could not focus on it. Your eyes couldn't gauge where it was. It felt like an unfathomable over-arching darkness above you: a limitless dark universe with no stars. The power had not been restored, and the only light was through the open doors, but the room's sconces seemed to direct the light only down and would not have cast any light upward. That room gave me the willies. It gives me the willies to recall and describe it.
Then one day, my deployment was over and they set me up with a plane ticket back to where I came from. I took another day to sightsee while I still had my FEMA Emergency Vehicle placard. It would get me through roadblocks to off limits places. Large dump trucks had come in from all over the Southeastern United States and the National Guard had lots of big front loaders. Day after day, night after night, the debris from all those destroyed structures was being scooped into these trucks, hauled out to the edge of the Everglades and burned. There was just no other way to deal with it. The mixture of destroyed buildings, people's possessions, and smashed and spoiling foodstuffs, couldn't be left very long; it would stink and it would quickly be colonized by rats.
I drove out to take a look at the actual Everglades, refused all offers to eat alligator, and then flew home. The whole adventure took less than two weeks, and I was back drinking my coffee before dawn in the Berkeley Hills at a new jobsite.
Copyright © 2022 John Oliver
All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com
So I've got my good habits, and one of them is to never be late to work, not even close to being late. My strategy is to start out at a time that will get me to work with up to an hour to spare. That gives me an easier time with the morning commute. I had a small project tricking out the library of a music professor and composer of operas. I arrived at the composer's house a good 45 minutes early and settled down to read my morning paper by the dome light, and finish my coffee. I was only half listening when a public service announcement came over the radio, "Blah, blah...Hurricane Andrew...blah, blah...urgent need for inspectors...blah, blah...If you have a valid California Contractor's License and a few weeks to spare, call this number 415-6-blah, blah..."
I thought to myself, "Wait, what? What was that again?" It was sinking in, but I hadn't caught the phone number. I had my mobile phone right there in my truck, so I called the radio station and they told me the number from the PSA. I called that number and sure enough, they got my Contractor's license number, checked it instantly, then they said, "Can you leave today?" I said, "No, I've got to finish up this job today." "Can you leave tomorrow?" "Well, yes." "Okay call this number, it's a travel agency, and arrange your ticket to Miami. They will be expecting your call. Rent a car and show up at this certain hotel in Miami Beach as soon as you can. Headquarters will be in the conference room."
I was still sitting out in front of my jobsite in the Berkeley Hills, drinking my coffee in the dawn light. Without even getting out of my truck, a whole new adventure I had never considered before came on my radar. And I took the leap. I made the calls, I got the job without an application or an interview, and scheduled a plane flight to the other end of the country before my feet hit the ground when I got out of the truck that morning to begin another workday.
The next morning I was packed and on my way to Florida and arrived there in the afternoon. I rented a car and drove to Miami Beach. I didn't know a thing about this part of Florida, but I do now. Miami is a city on the 50-mile wide tip of the Florida peninsula. The greater Miami area occupies a 10-mile wide strip along the Atlantic coast; the other 40 miles to the west is the Everglades. Geologically, this part of Florida is an ancient bed of coral limestone. It's an enormous slab of ancient coral reefs and is tilted over so in that 50 miles the elevation in Miami rises to 6 feet and by the time you reach the west coast the elevation is minus 10 feet; underwater, in other words; hence the shallow swamps of the Everglades. At Homestead, the area south of Miami that took the direct hit by the hurricane, the elevation is 3 feet above sea level.
The way a hurricane works picks up strength over warm ocean waters and weakens when it hits a landmass of any size. There is no buffering landmass on the tip of Florida. Hurricane Andrew raked across the flat, warm, soggy peninsula with wind speeds up to 175 mph like there was nothing there and literally destroyed all in its path. The city of Miami, just to the north, was spared a direct hit.
Miami Beach is on a spit of offshore barrier islands that form Biscayne Bay. It was built up as a resort with Art Deco hotels in the 1920s, '30s and '40s, including the Essex House hotel I was heading. I had made a reservation from California to stay there the first few nights, but found cheaper digs after that. In the lobby the entire wall over the fireplace had been devoted to a stunning mural by Earl Lapan. It was a life size scene of an indigenous Seminole woman, plying a shallow canoe through a natural Everglades setting of waterways among the mangrove trees, birds and alligators.
In the conference room I found a chaotic scene. They took my picture and in a short time they produced a laminated photo ID and a "FEMA Emergency Vehicle" placard for my car. I was run through a quick orientation course, and put to work. Step one was to get a hold of 10 or 15 applications. Applications had been collected from walk-in and call-in interviews. Each one listed various details; names, address of the property and contact phone numbers. Amazingly, the Weather Service had seen the hurricane coming and the governor ordered the evacuation over one million people from its path. All their homes were destroyed and all the power and telephone lines were useless. So the contact numbers were from outside the area, where evacuees had found places to live temporarily with family or friends or whomever.
The next step was to sort through your applications and map out where they were. Homestead had a very predictable grid of numbered streets and avenues, where the addresses corresponded to the numbers of the cross streets. The disaster area had about seven zip codes, so we were encouraged to swap applications with other inspectors so that all your inspections would be grouped close to each other. So in the conference room we were waving a handful of applications in the air and shouting out possible trades. Finally you had a stack of applications that you took responsibility for, you wrote down their application numbers and your inspector number on a clipboard, and then you were out of there.
My entry into the world of FEMA was at a pivotal time on many levels. First, the mass evacuations became a model that has saved many, many lives over the years. Second, the disaster exposed how your average building could fail in high winds and led to many changes in the nationwide building codes. Third, it was the last time the applications were done in this crude way with pieces of paper being passed around a conference room, like commodity traders in the pit. The next time and thereafter it was done on tablet computers.
Once he's taken responsibility for some applications, the inspector's next task is to make phone calls and arrange to have a meeting with the claimant at the damaged house or apartment at a particular time. This took some doing, since everybody was so scattered and had to come from a distance through traffic jams. At the appointed time, the inspector was to meet the people, inspect their ID's and proof of residency, whatever insurance policies they had, and to document specific details and measurements of the damage. I got on the phone from my hotel room and arranged for a number of inspections the next day. It's not like making a sales call. People are eager to hear from me and cooperate in every way to get the meetings arranged.
In the morning, I headed south on the elevated freeways. One lane had been designated for emergency vehicles only, and since I was officially an emergency vehicle, I could bypass the heaviest traffic. Often I had police cars and fire engines in front of me and behind me with their lights flashing and we were all zipping along past bumper-to-bumper backups. Everyone wants to speed the FEMA inspectors in getting their jobs done. Once we've done our part, money can start to flow to where it's needed most in an orderly way, and life can get sorted out again.
I could see out over the neighborhoods for miles to each side. The streets of Miami's sprawl are continuous with the bedroom communities of Kendall, Naranja, Florida City and Homestead. As I drove on toward the center of the storm's path, each successive mile showed a greater degree of destruction; first, just the roofing materials exposing bare plywood roof sheathing of a few, then all of the buildings in sight; then roofs that were partially, then completely ripped off, rafters and sheathing all gone; then increasingly buildings torn into standing piles of broken framing lumber. By the time I reached Homestead, as far as the eye could see, miles in all directions, everything was knocked completely down. The streets were valleys through the wreckage strewn with downed power lines.
The hurricane had occurred a week before, August 24, 1992, and inspectors like me were part of a second wave, when the needs of the disaster victims had overwhelmed the existing contingent of FEMA inspectors. By the time I got there quite a bit had happened. Everywhere there were electric power company trucks, with booms and cherry pickers, and trucks laden with new power poles, from all over the Southeast US. When something like this happens over a 100 square mile area, there's no sense in trying to test and repair individual lines. The only practical way to deal with it is to cut them all down and start completely over with new wires and many new poles and leave the old wires lying on the ground, to be salvaged later.
You could see society rebuilding itself out of the wreckage. No traffic lights would be functioning for months and at most intersections drivers instinctively worked out how to let each other through without the lights. On particularly busy intersections there would be a self appointed "traffic cop"; just somebody standing in the center, sorting out the crisscrossing vehicles, and everybody cooperating with his hand signals. On major intersections and roads leading on and off the freeways, the more professional National Guard MP's conducted the traffic flow.
In the first days after the storm, there were some people who had ridden out the hurricane and survived somehow. In a few days people who had evacuated, returned because they had no place to stay. The National Guard had set up a tent city, and FEMA had "disaster assistance centers" where people could apply for assistance, and in those early days FEMA had been literally giving money away to get people able to start taking care of their basic needs. Armed National Guardsmen stood around a portable "bank" building the size of a mobile home. A Brink's Truck was unloading a lot of cash and as I walked toward the scene with my camera up, one of the soldiers turned and raised his rifle up to a more ready position. People often had lost their ID's, checkbooks, credit cards and debit cards in the chaos of the storm. Money is how people manage the resources necessary for life. The bank's principal function was to dispense cash, by giving access to ATM machines or by cashing checks or FEMA vouchers. Once people had cash, they could use it to buy generators for instance, and begin to have a functioning household. Next to the bank, McDonald's had a large portable fast food outlet on wheels; it looked like two red mobile homes connected end to end. They pretty much offered the whole McD's menu. In the midst of all this wreckage, whoever you were, you could get some cash and you could get a cheap meal.
I started in on my inspections. Most of the wrecked structures had their street number spray painted on the wreckage, so it was not difficult to find the find the locations, though the people who had lived there could hardly recognize their homes or their neighborhood. In a lot of cases the houses were so far damaged that there was no point in a detailed inspection. They were considered a total loss, so our inspection consisted of simply going over their documents.
Many homes in this vast suburban area were in walled-off developments to keep the through traffic and business traffic off the residential streets. Most of them were very cheaply built and it was evident that many had been shoddily constructed and so obviously not to code, that an inspector couldn’t have looked at all. The notoriously corrupt building officials had signed off on them. One claimant stood by her demolished house and picked up a soggy piece of the particleboard siding and squished it in her hand. "My house was made of cardboard!" They had looked nice to the untrained eye, but these flimsy structures had no chance against a hurricane of any size. Farther north out of the direct path, there were some houses that survived intact and kept their roofs on. They were the older houses built with care and less concern with extreme cost cutting.
Oddly, I had become a representative of the US Government in the eyes of these claimants and I recognized that each wanted to tell the story of what happened to them, and for once in their lives they had Uncle Sam right there in person to pour out their heartaches to. I listened carefully. Their stories ran a wide range; some were in deep depression for their way of life that was suddenly gone; all the possessions and property they had lost, friends and neighbors that would never share life with them in the same way, some were grieving over lost pets, and people they knew who were killed or seriously injured; and some were coping admirably, one old couple saying to me "We're so happy to be alive...Our whole family survived...We don't care about any of the stuff."
I interviewed one woman who had ridden out the storm with two small children when she wasn't able to join the evacuation in time. They had followed the classic advice for such a situation: go to a closet in the middle of the structure, close the door, get down on the floor, and cover yourself with blankets. They had done that, and when they crawled out an hour later, the closet was still standing in the center of a pile of rubble that had been their home.
I got to examine hundreds of houses besides the specific ones I inspected, and I learned a whole lot about hurricanes, about building houses in hurricane prone areas (mainly don't do it). And I gained a vision of exactly what's happening at the height of the event. One man rode out the storm in his house and watched it all happen. He was lucky to be alive. A hurricane is a circular low pressure windstorm that moves along a 20 mph or so, but the winds rotating around it reach speed up to 200 mph. This one had max speed 175 mph. So the storm is moving in off the ocean but the high winds that hit any given spot depend on which side of the eye is passing over. If you are on one side, the high winds will be moving in the same direction the storm as a whole is moving. If you're on the other side, the wind will be moving in the opposite direction. If the eye goes right over you, first the wind is blowing sideways to the storm's path, then it stops as the eye passes, and then the wind blows fiercely in the opposite direction.
This guy's house was hit by the fastest moving part of the vortex, all from one direction. He had some sliding glass doors on that side covered with plywood, but the plywood had come down. He watched through the cracked open door of the closet where he had taken refuge. Winds and rain pounded the house, it shook and groaned and distorted the structure. He could feel the air pressure dropping quickly as the shrieking wind sucked on the house until it was wobbling there like a giant soap bubble. At the storm's height, the wooden back gate was torn off its hinges and came flying into the sliding glass door, popping the bubble. The sudden rush of air into the house blew out most of the windows and made the entire wall opposite wall of the building bulge out. Similar houses on either side of him survived with just their roofing material torn up, but his whole house was demolished because his bubble got popped.
FEMA inspectors work 12 hours a day seven days a week. Not because anybody tells you to, it's just the way the process is structured. As a private contractor to a larger private contractor that has a deal with FEMA to manage a team of inspectors, you are responsible for all your own expenses except the plane ride to and from the disaster. You arrange and pay for all your food, lodging, rented car, gas, stationery supplies and phone calls. You put that all on your personal credit card. The deal is you will get paid a particular amount for each completed inspection, and you probably won't get paid until a few weeks after your "deployment" is over. After you get your check and all your credit card statements you can figure out how much you made. It isn't a whole lot, but you get better at dealing with it as time goes on. There was a time set after which you couldn't make calls in the evening, and a time before which you couldn't call in the morning. Some people still had jobs and couldn't make it to an inspection except on Saturday or Sunday. Since your costs continue whether you work or not, and you want to help as many people as you can and then go home, you work seven days a week until they let you go.
There was one oddball inspection that I recall. It was out on the edge of the Everglades. It was built on an island in the swamp with the driveway a long causeway to it. It was substantially built and only had some minor damage. It was occupied by a renter who qualified for FEMA assistance for the expense of having evacuated and some minor water damage to his personal belongings. He had some tales to tell about this house. It had been a mobster's fortress.
Inspecting the house I realized it was probably true. Like the house I just described in which the bubble popped, there were big glass doors on the side that took the brunt of the high-speed wind. Again flying debris had hit the glass, but unlike other houses I inspected, the glass on these doors was an inch thick. It was bulletproof glass. It cracked, but did not fail. The kitchen was a 24-foot long by 12-foot wide peninsula off the main house. It was all stainless steel inside and the windows made of that really thick glass. It pointed straight up the causeway across the swamp to the main road, the only way in or out.
At first glance, the exposed foundation looked like the common 8" X 16" hollow concrete blocks. Looking more closely, the foundation and the walls up to the windowsills were cast concrete, and the exterior below the siding was covered with 8" X 16" grey ceramic tiles that imitated concrete blocks. The corners had L-shaped tiles to complete the illusion.
In short, this was a fortified castle with the vast Everglades as a moat, and alligators.
There was one room in the house that clinched the mobster story for me. The renter told me that someone had been murdered in there. If I ever needed to build a room that felt evil, I would know how to do it. It had dark wood double doors and as you stepped down two steps from the main floor of the house you were in a 16 X 20 foot oval chamber with dark paneling up 8 feet on all four walls. There was a small dark conference table in the center of the room and some black leather chairs. The thing that made it feel spooky though, was that you couldn't see the ceiling. Above the wood paneling there was nothing. I believe it was a large radiused curve up to a 10-foot curved ceiling painted flat black, but I could not focus on it. Your eyes couldn't gauge where it was. It felt like an unfathomable over-arching darkness above you: a limitless dark universe with no stars. The power had not been restored, and the only light was through the open doors, but the room's sconces seemed to direct the light only down and would not have cast any light upward. That room gave me the willies. It gives me the willies to recall and describe it.
Then one day, my deployment was over and they set me up with a plane ticket back to where I came from. I took another day to sightsee while I still had my FEMA Emergency Vehicle placard. It would get me through roadblocks to off limits places. Large dump trucks had come in from all over the Southeastern United States and the National Guard had lots of big front loaders. Day after day, night after night, the debris from all those destroyed structures was being scooped into these trucks, hauled out to the edge of the Everglades and burned. There was just no other way to deal with it. The mixture of destroyed buildings, people's possessions, and smashed and spoiling foodstuffs, couldn't be left very long; it would stink and it would quickly be colonized by rats.
I drove out to take a look at the actual Everglades, refused all offers to eat alligator, and then flew home. The whole adventure took less than two weeks, and I was back drinking my coffee before dawn in the Berkeley Hills at a new jobsite.
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