Hurricane Wilma passed over South Florida with a vengence on Monday October 24th. As you all may have seen on the news, Broward county took quite a hit with 98% of its residents losing power, including us. The hurricane was a category 2 as it passed over us.

It was very disheartening to hear FPL (Florida Power & Light) giving estimates that it would take as long as 4 weeks for every resident to get back power. Luckily, we had bought a generator after hurricane Katrina had passed over us. We never got a chance to us it at that time as our power was restored while we were on our way home with the generator. As a result, it has been in the box, unopened, since then. We got it up and running and was able to keep our refridgerator running. We were able to cook using our toaster oven and a small electric burner that we borrowed. We even managed to watch a movie yesterday. Our biggest worry was finding gas to power the generator. We had a 5-gallon container that would have been good for 2-3 days (with us switching it off at night), but all the gas stations were shutdown due to no power and the 1 or 2 that were open had lines up to 2 hours long. We were even trying to figure out how we could siphon gas from our cars as Kim and I both had full tanks of gas. Kim went out yesterday to see if she could find more gas containers and gas, but all she could find were 2 1-gallon containers and no gas.

Water was also a problem. Our water went, but it would come back for brief periods. We suspect they were load-shedding the water. When power went, Kim managed to fill two bathtubs with water “just in-case”, and this was a great decision. Pretty much the whole of Broward country is under a boil-water order.

Being extremely lucky, our power was restored yesterday around 5pm. We were thinking that we should plan to be without power for at least a week.

Like most other people, we had taken this hurricane for granted and wasn’t as prepared as we should have been, but we have now learnt our lesson and we expect to be over-prepared for the next hurricane!