Forum Discussion
With Hurricane Irma breathing down our necks, being in Tropical Storm Warning zone by Saturday morning, and under Hurricane Warnings by Saturday afternoon, we here in North Florida will undoubtedly be without power by Sunday morning. And prior to that, what with the heavy cloud cover, we will be without satellite communication/reception by Saturday afternoon - definitely by Saturday night. And while the storm will be past us by Monday afternoon, it COULD be weeks before power is restored to somes areas of North Florida (Jacksonville and surrounding area). Bottom line: Our mainline communication will be either battery powered radio or cell phone for some time to come. With Hurricane Matthew we were without power for about 12 hours, but this storm is MUCH larger, faster and more dangerous than either Matthew or Andrew. Texas took a huge hit with all the rain from Harvey and it will take them years to fully recover. We may not get all the rain like Harvey, but we sure as heck will get a lot of high wind damage. Gonna miss my internet and DirecTV for awhile.....
57Nomad wrote:With Hurricane Irma breathing down our necks, being in Tropical Storm Warning zone by Saturday morning, and under Hurricane Warnings by Saturday afternoon, we here in North Florida will undoubtedly be without power by Sunday morning. And prior to that, what with the heavy cloud cover, we will be without satellite communication/reception by Saturday afternoon - definitely by Saturday night.
It's was an interesting weekend, Governor Scott ordered a mandantory evacuation for East Hendry County for Friday at 8:00AM, including the area I live in, I having no interest in evacuating over a CAT 3 storm got the shutters up took down the HughsNet antenna and set the genertor to standby.
On Wednesday the EOC went to level 1 (full operation) and the powers to be decided they had everything under control and advised the volunteers (local Ham's) our services would not be needed.
Saturday with the storm bearing down on Hendry, the EOC put out a message seeking volunteers to work Net Control and to staff the shelters, we managed to scrape up 5 bodies, one for Net Control, three for shelters and myself doing storm tracking and forecasting.
The county lucked out as the 800MHz system they relied on for communications failed and we became the counties only form of communications for first responders.
On Monday we began digging out, there's no power out here so ADSL is down Century Link's RT's are DOA and my cellular backup was running at dial-up speeds, I reinstalled my HughsNet antenna and it linked up and has been working flawlessly ever since.
I have been monitoring our repeaters and taking calls from Hams around Hendry and Lee as to where where gas can be found and have been pushing that information out over our maillist, so yes internet here is a necessity and i am damm glad I signed up with HughesNet as a backup plan a few weeks ago, because without it I would be dead in the water and screwed good as I work from home and need internet to do my job and to help out our community too.
