I am joining the SOS crowd after a rare event, a November hurricane – the third one to occur since the mid 1800s. If you look at the map above – where the red line hits the east coast of Florida, that’s my house. The hurricane, named Nicole, made landfall as a Category 1 (min 70 mph winds) at 3 am Thursday morning about 30 miles north. We all slept through it, the dog included. The hurricane was immediately downgraded to a tropical storm after landfall. I would guess we might have had 50 mph wind gusts, the damage minimal.
Floridians generally scoff at Category One hurricanes. The problem is you never really know where the thing is going to end up and the wind field on this one was so huge it was difficult to drive away from it. The wind kicked up Monday afternoon and continued until Thursday. We put up our storm shutters just in case, my husband is currently outside, grumbling and taking down the shutters.
A scattering of debris from Sabal Palms.
My Rangpur Lime tree is bent over. I guess I should tie it up to the fence to straighten it up? Lime trees are quite thorny and this is almost leaning into the pathway.
Miss Alice Bougainvillea was knocked off her column.
Further north, close to the ocean and rivers, people weren’t so lucky. This hurricane hit during a full moon and at fall king tide time, so the water was already high and the storm surge was 3 to 5 feet. The Daytona Beach area was also hit hard by Hurricane Ian, 43 days before. Some of the houses damaged by Ian fell into the ocean with this additional insult. These images are what you are seeing on the news.
The barrier island protecting us had quite a bit of flooding and an native American burial ground on the beach was unearthed; it will be interesting to learn how old the skulls are found on the beach.
A few images from further north:
Wind and water damage from further north.
Thanks to Jim at https://gardenruminations.co.uk/ for hosting Six on Saturday. To see more posts, follow the link.
Happy Gardening!!
The Shrub Queen 
Looking at the other pictures, we can say that you avoided much more important and serious damage… Yes I think the lemon tree can be straightened (and just for my information, what are the two gray blocks in the first picture? Fans of AC?)
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Thanks, Fred. I wondered what you would think about the lime tree. The grey blocks are air conditioning condenser units behind our garage.
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scary stuff in your neck of the woods … glad to read you escaped the worst of it!
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Thanks, soberbunny – me,too.
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Glad your garden and house were okay and it wasn’t a ‘big one.’ Seeing those photos makes me glad I don’t live in a hurricane zone! Our storms seem mild in comparison.
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Thanks, I think living further inland helps.
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Hi Amy I’m glad to hear it was not too bad. I’m sure Larry is having a great time helping you clean up. Stay safe.
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Thanks, Jon. Larry is not a devotee of yard maintenance though all the palm fronds have been stacked to haul off.
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Oh my, that is unfortunate about the burial ground. One would think that it would have been located farther inland, in a situation that is not so susceptible to erosion. (Perhaps it was not so susceptible to erosion when it was established.)
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Well, it is an interesting place – the biggest rocks I have seen on the coast here are located on that beach and maybe it was a sacred place. A couple of other hurricanes turned up some bones there. It seems they take the bones, ID them and put them back.
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How did big rocks get onto the coast of Florida? Isn’t that region composed of sand and what currents brought there?
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There is bedrock here and something called capstone and a lot of limestone. Sometime I will take a picture.
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The Flintstones are from Florida?!
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Bahaha yes Bedrock is here Pebbles and Bambam run the county land development and wrote the code
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Oh my!
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Well, I am glad that your garden and house was spared. Hopefully that will be the last bad storm this season.
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I’m glad to hear that it wasn’t too bad for you, but there is always work involved in preparing for it and then there is always some cleanup. The question about the AC units reminded me of showing Texans a photo of my Dad using a snow blower. No one knew what it was.
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Thanks, I am not certain I would recognize a snow blower.
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