After daughters, Michelle and Cortney, said their goodbyes to us here in the States and turned off their phones to conserve their batteries , they began to hunker down for what would be the most catastrophic hurricane to ever hit St. John.
They were with friends, Robbie, Colby, Al, John and Susan. Dave, who was off island at the time and a mutual friend of all mentioned, offered up his home and the small rental apartment below as a shelter for the approaching hurricane.
At first, they were sharing food and drinks—-let’s face it alcohol was appropriate at this time—- in Dave’s home while boarding up his windows and moving lighter furniture to back bedrooms.
The weather started looking threatening around 11 AM so it was time to move down to the small one-bedroom lower apartment which was more secure as it was walls of cement and only a few windows situated on a lower part of the incline up to the street.
Michelle decided it was time to give a vet prescribed sedative to her dog, Fern, who has a super anxious personality even on good days. (Monkey, Robbie’s dog, was happy just to have so many people around him🤗) The wind and the rain was starting to really pick up as you can see by the video posted below.
After this video, it was time to move inside to avoid getting hit by any debris flying around from the high winds. The horrible noise began of breaking glass, metal and wood hitting the apartment, trees snapping apart…..but most of all the raging, howling wind.
You can hear on the video Colby’s description of some debris coming into the apartment entryway from Miss Gwen’s to-go restaurant which is located across the street! And this was just the beginning… though you can start to see the leaves are starting to be stripped from their branches.
Again, it was interesting to see how the different personalities were handling the approaching storm. At first everyone was filming the approaching storm. Then as the hurricane gained intensity, John decided to lay down in the back bedroom and sleep through it all, as water started seeping in, all the women and Colby started soaking up the water that was coming in with the generous supply of towels stored there, Al was starting to feel cagey and pacing a bit and Robbie was fascinated with watching the storm through the windows and the peculiarities as the barometric metric pressure started to fall and the water in the toilet was swirling backwards and shooting water up and out.
Barometric pressure drops as hurricanes form, fueling energy into the storm when moisture from the warm water of the ocean is converted to heat in the bands of rain that spiral around the eye of the storm. The lower the barometric pressure, the stronger the hurricane. A category 1 hurricane is above 980 mbar, a category 5 hurricane is less than 920 mbar. (Later it would be found out that hurricane Irma was at 915 mbar being the lowest pressure recorded of an Atlantic hurricane)
For some reason, the bathroom windows were not boarded up🙄so everyone was able to see how fierce the wind and rain was escalating.
Now, there was great concern about the front door ,which was built with glass louvers, would shatter but they did not have any plywood left inside to shore it up. That’s when Robbie got busy dismantling a beautiful teak bookcase to use as a barrier against the storm. Then Michelle held up the pieces of wood while Colby used a battery-operated screw gun to attach it to the door. Cortney, afraid they would get hit by the glass if it did shatter while they worked, tied towels around Michelle and Colby’s heads😨
It would be several hours before they finally heard the winds and rain stop. As they emerged from their tiny protected living space, they were not prepared to see the cataclysmic devastation of their beloved St. John…
Traveling Rose in St. John 