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Here's the thing about hurricanes. Every season is a crapshoot. A monster like Hurricane Irma in September 2017 is either gonna hit dead on or it's not. When Key West folks went to bed on Sept. 9, Irma was supposed to slam Old Town as a vicious...
June is hurricane prep time in Key West. With so much hurricane prep info floating around, here’s what you REALLY need to know.
When a mandatory hurricane evacuation order is issued in Key West and the Florida Keys, how do you know when to go and what to do? We’ll help you decide.
Four kinds of people ride out a hurricane: Those with no where to go or no one to take them. Those whose clueless bravado having weathered a tropical storm or two leads them to believe hurricanes are just a bit more windy. Those who missed the evacuation window and...
Here's the thing about hurricanes. Every season is a crapshoot. A monster like Hurricane Irma in September 2017 is either gonna hit dead on or it's not. When Key West folks went to bed on Sept. 9, Irma was supposed to slam Old Town as a vicious Category 5 storm. Away...
You'd not be wrong if you glimpsed a cloud of rainbows and fairy dust floating above Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis during his "we're gonna be just fine" hurricane news conference May 20 in Tampa. Bless his heart, there he was blathering on about how Florida is "due for a...
Want a peek into the future of Key West and the Florida Keys? While we've been eating leftover hurricane snacks and feeling darn special because Hurricane Helene did little more here than clean out the dead palm fronds, much of western North Carolina is, well, gone....
A lot of folks learned the hard way in September 2022 that a tropical storm ought not have diminutive adjectives attached. You know the ones: just, only, little. We ignore at our peril tropical storms (or cyclones, to be more scientific) with their 38-74 mph wind...
As 2017's Hurricane Irma turned toward Key West, I was headed to my mother's house in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. Ranger Ed and the Cat5s would eventually end up staying on the island, doing cleanup work at Fort Zachary Taylor and helping neighbors reclaim their...
I used to start my hurricane preparations in early June about the time my mango tree dropped its first fruit. But it occurred to me when scientists made their 2024 hurricane season predictions that maybe I ought to bump up that start date to, well, now. Not for the...
Can we agree on one thing about hurricane evacuation? Can we put aside our fascination with minutiae and our escalating outrage with over-development, failing infrastructure and political partisanship, and agree on this: Monroe County, Key West and the other Keys...
Ran into a friend earlier this week and we chatted over what's become a cliche: How's the repair work going? It's been nine months since Hurricane Ian blasted into the west coast of Florida as a full-on Category 5 monster. That same storm barged into Key West hours...
Each year in the 1950s and '60s, my grandparents left western Pennsylvania for the winter, pulling a trailer they then parked in one or another tiny crossroads towns that were then west coast Florida. They skipped hurricane season and left for home as summer and other...
Ranger Ed and I should make a pact that we won't tell anyone about our visit overnight Tuesday with soon-to-become Hurricane Ian. Our sturdy little mid-1950s concrete block bungalow is so protected by our neighbors' properties, which are taller than ours, and by our...
Once a month I drive to Marathon and back for a board meeting. I've done that since before Hurricane Irma clobbered Key West and the Florida Keys on Sept. 10, 2017. For five years that 100 mile round trip has been my gauge for our recovery from Irma's Category 5...
https://youtu.be/JcxNFlB4aEU Well, that was fun. Perhaps Key West should have a hurricane prep drill every year like Tuesday's Tropical Storm Elsa. Because let's be honest, we don't expect a hurricane until, say, September, even though the season officially...