First, my best wishes to all my friends in the State of Florida, where I have resided since October 1960 when I first left my native island of Cuba. I pray that you all came out unharmed from the devastation left behind by hurricane Irma – potentially one of the worst hurricanes in U.S. history. If you, like me, just had “minor” damages such as fallen trees, fences, or otherwise are going through a power-outage and are suffering heat-strokes and panic attacks due to hotness in the aftermath of Irma, just count your blessings.
Think of this way, hundreds of thousands in the Florida Keys and the islands of the Caribbean today are homeless, statistical victims of Irma - a storm that flattened their homesteads in its path of destruction - not to mention the 36 people who lost their lives to this unparalleled catastrophe. A friendly reminder to all on how vulnerable and insignificant we humans are when faced-up to the wrath of God and mother nature.
Yes, my friends, from the British and U.S. Virgin Islands located in the Leeward Islands and Lesser Antilles, to the Turks and Caicos, to the island-state of Antigua and Barbuda, to Dutch and French Saint Martin / St. Maarten, respectively, to Haiti, Cuba and the Dominican Republic, and everywhere in-between Irma tore roofs, leveled frail homes and buildings and brought-on fearsome storm surges, destroying thousands of recreational and commercial vessels along wide stretches of susceptible coast lines as millions were told to evacuate their homesteads and seek refuge on higher and safer grounds. Simply put, it is devastation all around us.
I dare say, when it is all said and done, if you add the damages sustained in the Florida peninsula along with those in the Caribbean archipelago, the costs will probably get up there in the billions of dollars. Every year from June 1st to November 30th, [hurricane season] Floridians, for the most part, especially the elderly, those of us who, like me, have been here in South Florida for the most part over the last fifty to sixty years, we all go into this subliminal state of “preparedness” – again, a state of mind, characterized by anticipations for the worst and hopes for the best when it comes to the passing of hurricanes.
Just to give you some perspective, below is a table of Florida major hurricanes since 1960.
Donna--Sept. 10, 1960
Betsy--Sept. 8, 1965
Eloise--Sept. 23, 1975
Elena--Sept. 2, 1985
Andrew--Aug. 24, 1992
Opal-- Oct. 4, 1995
Charley-- Aug. 13, 2004
Ivan--Sept. 16, 2004
Jeanne--Sept..26, 2004
Dennis--July, 10, 2005
Wilma-- Oct. 24, 2005
Irma-- Sept. 10, 2017
My comments on this table are as follows. First, it is common knowledge, according to NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, that our State of Florida’s geographical location makes it one of the most vulnerable States in the Union prone to the passing of hurricanes. Now, if you take a closer look at this table, as viewed strictly from a statistical perspective, there are a few very interesting facts which immediately caught my attention.
The very first thing I noted is the fact that, notwithstanding Florida’s vulnerability to hurricanes, there have only been 12 storms hitting us in the last 57 years. That comes to a little less than 1 every 5 years, right? But, hey, guess what?... You can throw the 5-year average out the window. The fact is that while 5 years went by between Donna and Betsy [1960 – 1965], 10 years went by between Betsy and Eloise, [1965 -1975], another 10 years between Eloise and Elena, and 7 years between Elena and Andrew. Oh yes, and finally, as far as Irma is concerned, it had been 12 years since its predecessor Wilma in 2005.
The point I am trying to make is simple and straightforward. The truth of the matter is that while we do get pounded occasionally, again 12 years in the last go-round, it is certainly not as frequent as many would want you to believe. The down-side to the “infrequency” is that a lot of us, simply tend to put down our guards between hurricanes. Bottom line to this “relaxation” phenomenon is that our state of preparedness both physical and psychological, just dwindles away with time, to where we tend to underestimate, misjudge, and quite often take too lightly the potential risks when hurricanes like Irma do come around. Not this time though – a credit to all in the “preparedness” community. Kudos to all community and government officials for a job well done in preparing us for the worst. Their professionalism in the preparation for a possible catastrophic hurricane was simply said: unsurpassed. The stand-by support offered by our Federal Government, our president and other organizations such as FEMA and the like, also are to be commended for making their presence and support known to all.
I contend that our twenty-first century techno-revolution has brought about unthinkable enrichments to all. As applied to hurricanes, the information age has improved by light-years, and as a result, with the passing of every new storm, millions of lives are saved relative to the preparedness and readiness that have ensued from the applied technologies used in predicting the storm’s path.
Matter of fact, my most impressionable change over the past 12 years since Wilma, however, lies in the way that we now prepare ourselves for the passing of hurricanes, which comes by way of advanced technologies as applied to forecasting and predicting hurricane tracks – an issue which coincidentally brings me to the moral of this story today.
In the very critical hours before we had any knowledge of where Irma was going to make landfall, I remember distinctly as all cones of predictability had the storm hugging the northernmost coast of Cuba, then making a sharp right turn due North, heading straight to Southeast Florida. For that matter, just about all models had the eye of the storm virtually passing directly over Miami. I will never for the rest of my life be able to forget as all the “spaghetti” lines within the models – each representing a path of prediction, converged on making a northerly turn over Cuba, again, one which would put the eye of the storm passing right over Miami, only to have, instead, as you now know, make a last-minute turn which changed it to a north-north westerly course, just in time to spare the brunt of the hurricane from hitting the very populated areas of Dade and Broward Counties as it did.
Again, as far as I am concerned there was a seemingly insignificant or inconsequential writ of passage and moral to the Irma hurricane story, yet to me, it was the principal storyline of this event. I refer to the fact that, for all our “human” might; for all our prowess, for all our technologies, our might; our hi-tech, and our ostensibly invincible ways, we really are frail and insignificant compared to the wrath of God, to his will and to mother nature. It just proves that we, humanoids, are insignificant, vulnerable and susceptible when it comes to understanding the will of God. There are, in fact, no human tools, no hi-tech equipment in the world which can predict with any accuracy whatsoever what the will of God and mother nature have in store for us – that simple.
We should all take precedent in what happened down in Southeast Florida with the passing of Irma. We should all take precedent in the fact, that God and only God can decide what the future holds for us human weaklings. This time around, HE decided, at the very last minute, as if to prove my point, to spare us from the full force and destruction of this horrible hurricane.
The weather-forecasting community, all seemed to agree that the most notable spaghetti plots, we were coming from the European Model and the U.S.’s Global Forecast System – both of them, coincidentally, agreed that Irma was headed straight towards the general area of Miami-Dade and Broward Counties, which again, would have had potentially catastrophic devastation for these areas. The one model that forecasters never counted on; the one model that most everyone left out or outright missed, predictably so I may add, was…you guessed it: God’s Model – the most accurate of them all. You know the one – the one which had this monster hurricane turning West in time enough to spare us a direct hit.
In closing, dear Florida friends and co-neighbors, if you had a few trees and fences knocked down; if you are out-of-power; or, if you are having to wait in long lines to gas-up your cars; if there are a few things you are in need of but stores ran out of, so what? Count your blessings in the fact that God’s Model, spared you getting a direct hit from one of the worse storms in U.S. History. Be thankful to God and be mindful, that your lives are governed by HIS model - the only one that really works. God bless you all.
Obie Usategui (The Patriot Obsever) and also runs AFCV-Americans For Conservative Values. Obie is also the author of The Beginning of the End—“The transition to Communism in our own United states has come peacefully, ironically, via democratically-sanctioned elections”
