My friend, Ralph T. Castle, lives in Florida, and he was there when Hurricane Wilma hit. He wrote a fascinating, 13,000 word account of his experience, which we are running as a Boing Boing exclusive.
My Week with Wilma
Or, Nature’s Leaf Blower in the State of Denial
by Ralph T. Castle
(Click on images for enlargements)
In the dim yellow glow from a Wal-Mart oil lamp, I sit at my kitchen table, cursing the State of Florida while I struggle to enter a few more keystrokes on a water-damaged laptop with a dying battery. My cat, Eddie, is having a fine time, prowling around outside in the total darkness of a landscape where all street lights are dead within a radius of 75 miles. I would join him for a stroll under the stars, except that the county police are liable to throw me in jail for violating the 7:30 curfew.
According to news estimates I am one of 3.5 million people in South Florida currently deprived of electricity. When Hurricane Wilma blew through a couple of days ago, she ravaged the landscape and scattered power lines like a petulant kid kicking over sand castles on a beach. This of course is what hurricanes normally do, but Wilma’s range has astonished even seasoned veterans of the so-called Sunshine State. The power outage extends all the way from Miami, in the south, to Fort Pierce, on the way to Orlando. By my calculation the affected area encompasses 30,000 square miles.
