Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [94]
Millions of insects and thousands of birds, some of them endemic to Jamaica, were caught up in the violent spiraling winds and flung into the atmosphere. The animals were bruised and torn from their brutal evacuation, and remnants were found in later days across wide swathes of the Caribbean and as far away as Mexico, a graphic illustration of air in long-distance motion.
The storm passed thirty miles south of Grand Cayman. That was not nearly enough for safety. The smaller Cayman islands of Little Cayman and Cayman Brae were evacuated to the main island, but Jamaica had been reporting a storm surge of twenty feet or more, and the whole island of Grand Cayman was not much higher than that.
The scuba divers had all gone, flown out days before, sharing the evacuation planes with whatever holders of the Cayman's famous numbered accounts had been there on business, but the residents who remained reported the terrifying scenes—half the island under water, the airport vanished, one out of two of the island's 13,000 houses damaged (and there were no shan-tytowns on Grand Cayman, which has one of the strictest building codes in the Caribbean), roofs torn off, buildings collapsing . . . The Associated Press quoted banker Justin Uzzell, who was watching from his fifth-floor window before prudently taking refuge lower down, saying that "this is as bad as it can possibly get. It's a horizontal blizzard. The air is just foam." The winds tore the tops off the gigantic waves and drove them clear across the island, reducing visibility to near zero.
The storm was traveling west northwest at 10 miles an hour. The computer models' track estimates were slightly west of their previous day's forecast track, but they all still called for a curve toward the northwest and then north, through the weakness in the subtropical ridge, within forty-eight hours. This new track would take Ivan through west central Cuba, and then up the Gulf of Mexico parallel to the Florida coast, perhaps hitting the Panhandle before exiting through Georgia.
There was no sign the storm was diminishing. On the contrary, the conditions seemed conducive to a further strengthening, with warm surface temperatures and only light vertical shear. Ivan could easily reach Category 3 again before slamming into Cuba.
Its capriciousness began to seem intolerable to those people who were, or could be, in its path.
Cuba had already evacuated more than a million people from the south coast, and now authorities evacuated 300,000 more, moving them from the western tip of the island farther inland.
The Cuban media had taken to calling the storm Ivan the Terrible. The American media—or at least a large segment of the Florida media—insisted on referring to Cuba in their weather news reports as “the communist run island. " Perhaps in retaliation, Cuba boasted of its people-friendly preparations. Indeed, they shut down the electricity grid some hours before the storm arrived, thus preventing hundreds of transformer explosions and other electrical damage. Ivan, which seemed an equal-opportunity destroyer careless of human ideologies, just plowed onward.
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We have a narrow boardwalk down to our rocky beach—it is the same one that Hurricane Juan pushed into the forest a few years ago, now rebuilt—and at the beach end we built a small cedar bench. One winter morning I spent an hour on the bench, watching the restless sea and a couple of harbor seals gliding through the swells, their snouts and whiskers glistening in the pale sunlight. A few eider ducks were splashing near the shore. The wind was somewhere, I guessed, between Beaufort 0 and Beaufort 1, really nothing but a gentle onshore breeze coming out of the southeast. With the glasses I could see a small boat out to sea. There, clearly, the winds were more active, because the boat was rising and falling in the swells and the horizon