[W4HM Spaceweather] My Hurricane Irma Experience

[Thomas F. Giella]

Well okay I'm alive, just got power back on after a 24 hour failure. I've been through many hurricanes and chased huge tornadoes but this is the first time that I actually gotten scared. I had decided to hunker down and ride the hurricane out AND BOY WHAT A MISTAKE!!! 


To try to make things brief because I'm tired, sweaty and stink, everything with Hurricane Irma was tolerable and manageable at first, with steadily increasing gale force wind and increasingly heavy rain. But then her eye wall or what was left of it came right over my house beginning at 12:26 am. The wind abruptly increased to NE at 82 mph sustained with a gust to 111 mph. Then it went calm at 12:31 am and the barometric pressure dropped to it's lowest point of 28.43". Then at 12:36 am boom the wind increased to SW at 82 mph again with a gust of 110 mph. The wind was singing like a soprano for what seemed like forever.


It did seem to last forever as we heard and felt big trees crashing down around us. Two big ones just missed my house by a foot or so. We heard large branches hitting our house including windows and bouncing on and off the roof. We ended up with 3 cracked windows but no other damage, amazingly not even any shingles on our hurricane roof took off. It was an explosion of flying tree branches, roof shingles, street signs and mail boxes.


And no I didn't board up my windows like a big moron. I was stupid about the whole thing and used very poor judgment. I had actually expected at least category 2 conditions but somehow thought that my windows would be fine. Next time I will board up the windows and leave. 


Again I have say that it was very scary. I couldn't see anything outside, it was 100% dark, except exploding power transformers, it was very eerie. In my mind, at the beginning I thought that I was emotionally still in my 30's but found out that I am in my 60's or older.


And my yard is a horrific mess and I'll have to hire someone with a chain saw to clean it all up.This evening I took a spin around the immediate neighborhood and it looked like it was hit by a hurricane. OH WAIT IS WAS. I also saw lot's of big trees down and others stripped of leaves, houses missing shingles, mail boxes and street signs missing.


As far as rain I measured 8.79" but I'm sure that my two CoCoRahs rain gauges under measured due to the sideways rain and threaded leaves blocking the funnel openings. By the way my Davis VP2 weather station rain gauge measured very close to my CoCoRaHs manual rain gauges.


BTW I'm not sure that I trust the 110-111 mph wind gust readings. I think that they are to high. I'll have to investigate closer.


As far as hamateur radio antennas I lowered 3 of the 4 wire antennas to the ground and the 3 on the ground still got trashed by falling trees and flying tree limbs, including expensive really tough #12 stranded wire, center and end insulators and long runs of RG-213 and LMR-400 coaxial cable. A 4th antenna away from my trees survived up in the air but the wire was missing some insulation probably removed by flying debris.


I will no longer be able to use any of my oak trees as supports for my antennas as I had done since 2005. That really stinks because in order to get back on the air with a competitive signal I'll need to use steel towers and/or steel push up poles. I'm not sure if I even want to bother with that.

And last but least the only bright side to the hurricane strike was a zero noise level on the MW and SW bands for 24 hours. Boy was that nice.

73 & GUD DX,
Thomas F. Giella, W4HM
Lakeland, FL, USA

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