Thought you might like to see this prediction report:

http://www.prweb.com/releases/...

Ugh. Ugh. ugh.

I survived 2004 Hurricane Season and I had hoped I would never go through that again. I hope this does not turn into a repeat. Ugh.

It has been very quiet for us up here since 2005. The worst we had was TS Kay who blew here for a week (I think in '07?) She blew water up under my mobile home siding wetting my walls and carpet and caused more leaks in my roof.

I put on a new metal roof, and now have vinyl on the floors in my main living area. Luckily, in our business, we do painting & carpeting so my son can do the carpet change outs.

It is scary when the storms have been quiet for so long, what the future has in store.

That's an interesting read, @beckygardener. Having lived on the Mississippi Gulf Coast for 25 years, and in New Orleans 4 years prior to that, watching the Atlantic and the Gulf during hurricane season is second nature for me. In fact, I had a 2x3' hurricane tracking chart each year, prominently displayed in my dental office. Patients and staff alike loved to put a tack noting the latest position of an ongoing hurricane. I have been through six major hurricanes including Camille and Katrina. I miss living on the Gulf Coast but I sure don't miss dealing with hurricanes. By the way, though Starkville is approximately 250 miles north of the Gulf, when Katrina made her way through, Starkville got 95 mph winds.

We went without power in the heat of September through early October for almost 5 weeks total after being hit by Hurricanes Frances and then Jeanne. We had damage to our roof which caused other damage to our home. My backyard was wrecked. It was a disaster all over the entire county. Then we had to battle the insurance companies and rip-off construction crews to get our homes repaired. It took some homeowners almost 2 years to have their home repairs completed. It was nothing short of a nightmare! Seriously!!!!

I never want to go through that again in MY lifetime. But I live in Florida, so the odds are not in my favor. It's enough to make me want to move to another state in the middle of the USA. Myself and many others nearly had panic attacks every year for many years after 2004. It's been so calm all these years since, that I have not been nervous until reading that forecast. I knew it wouldn't last, so we savor every year we have a calm Hurricane Season.

The scary part to me is that with the climate change, the hurricanes have become much stronger and more deadly. I've lived in Florida for most all my life. Hurricanes never used to bother me until 2004, after that year .... I take it VERY seriously! In the past we typically had category 1 or 2 Hurricanes, rarely 3 or stronger. Now many of the hurricanes are 3 or 4. Deadly hurricanes. If you don't live in Florida .... count your luck! It can be very stressful here each summer/fall when hurricanes become most active.

I remember Camille and then Andrew. They were whoppers, I guess the climate changed...and is changing back.....or maybe the earth is just doing its thing. Non-the-less, if in the path of one of thee beast, its awful, and for the others, to me, the worst is just hat you mentioned, lack of electricity, in what is usually the hottest moths of the year.

My husband was going thru chemo in 2004 when Charlie hit. Stress???????? Anyway, his attitude is to get out of town. We incurred no damage in 2004 even with 4 hurricanes that came up I-4 to hit us. They were all cat. 1 when they arrived. We just keep out eyes open and take action when we must. I'm going to have a lot of pots this year--tomatoes and peppers. If we leave, we will have space in the garage and I can use the little hand truck I bought. We're ready! He is healthy now so that won't be an issue.

That was horrible, my parents got out of Indialantic, came to gainesville, more damage in gainesville than Melbourne. No electricity here, but still there. Staying put would have been best, it took forever with all the back up traffic heading back...to get back. O, and we had a car stolen right before the hurricane hit, cops took forever, said they were at walmart getting waders. .

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we have no major storms this year! Even Category 1 Hurricanes can do a lot of damage.

I too remember the 2004 season because we had Hurricanes Charley, Frances and Jeanne all come through here within a six week period! We were very fortunate, we were without electricity for a week but had no damage to our roof or house, just a destroyed yard ... but so many homes and businesses did not fare well at all. There were blue tarps on homes and businesses for 1 1/2 to 2 years after those hurricanes. I felt so bad for people in parts of the state that got hit head on; they were all category 1 level by the time they made it to Daytona Beach.

I've had a very healthy respect for hurricanes since seeing the aftermath of Camille which destroyed many areas of the gulf coast in October 1969. My husband and I drove cross-country to California in February 1970 when he had to go to school there for the Navy. Our trip was almost four months after the storms hit and the destruction and devastation was so unbelievable that we couldn't even speak. There were detours in some spots where we had to exit the interstate because it was nothing but huge chunks of cement sticking up in the middle of the lanes. In one area along the coast there were huge ships out of the water and across the highway laying on their sides like they were toys that someone had flung out of the ocean. Along the beach where there had been hotels and homes and businesses, it was like a desert of sand and every so often we'd see part of a wall or a cement piling from what had once been a hotel or perhaps someones residence. It seemed like for many miles, nothing was left intact. We'd see cement slabs where buildings once stood and people had put makeshift stakes in the ground with cardboard scribbled with the former address, I'm assuming for insurance purposes. One image that has stuck in my mind all these years was a vast expanse where buildings had once stood but the only thing remaining were cement slabs and one spot with a single gas pump that had apparently been a gas station.

Camille was the benchmark that pretty much all of us thought would last a lifetime. I know it would be hard to wrap your mind around the devastation after Katrina, but believe me, it was twice as widespread. My wife and I lived on the Mississippi Gulf Coast for 25 years but had moved to Starkville before Katrina struck. We wanted to return to Pascagoula as soon as possible after the storm, but there was not a single filling station left standing along the coastal highway and when you were far enough from the Gulf, often several miles, though there were filling stations still standing, there was no electricity to run the pumps. The loss of electricity extended 100 miles deep. Therefore, because we could not refuel while there, we waited several weeks so that some areas would have restored electricity and thus filling stations could pump gas.

Several specific things that will always stay with me, other than the utter destruction that we saw for mile after mile. We had close friends that lived less than a block from our house in Pascagoula. Their house was still standing but only the second floor was livable. That consisted of two bedrooms and a bath. This friend was a judge (and still is). We stayed with them in that extra bedroom, sharing the one bath. There was no electricity even then and it was a month before they got power. He told me that for two weeks after Katrina, he slept in a Lazy Boy that sat in the gutted garage. Night after night he slept with a shotgun in his lap. Gangs from neighboring Mobile would drive over after nightfall, preying on anyone and anything they could rob/pilfer. You never saw this in the national news, did you? Again, he was a judge with close ties to law enforcement, local, state, and federal. This was not fantasy by any means.

Another thing that I will never forget is the day that we all loaded up to tour Pascagoula. As my friend drove out from his house, he asked my wife and I to close our eyes for a couple of minutes. Keep in mind we were still in our immediate neighborhood, a neighborhood that we knew like the back of our hands. When he told us to open our eyes, he asked us where we were. We did not know. There was nothing recognizable to either one of us. That was a shock. We were literally two blocks from our own house. By the way, our house was custom-built to withstand 200 mph winds and was also built up so that its bottom floor was at 13.5' elevation. Katrina brought such a tidal surge that sea water flooded the bottom 12' of the lower story. That means that the surge was over 25' high. A contractor owned that house then and he told us that the house was still solid as a rock and that as far as he knew, this was the only house for miles that got such a surge and was not gutted.

I could write a book about our experiences going through hurricanes. I went through four of them and they were all major ones. Katrina, though something we did not experience first-hand, would be the final chapter.

I have friends who lived through the direct onslaught of Andrew in 1992. Their story about the aftermath is very similar to yours, Ken.

I can imagine. I miss my Gulf Coast but I sure don't miss the constant monitoring, worrying about, and then experiencing hurricanes.

Yes. It's enough to make one want to move much further away. Maybe as far away as another state.

I can handle category 1 and 2, but when the numbers start heading into category 3 .... that's when it becomes much more dangerous.

When Hurricane Frances hit, it wasn't too bad. We had roof damage, trees were down, we lost electricity, etc. But the damage was much less than we feared it would be before the storm hit. And then Jeanne came along a few weeks later. She skirted up the coast and turned to go out to the deep ocean. We thought we were safe. Everyone was sighing a big sigh of relief. That was very short-lived. Jeanne did the craziest thing .... she did a loop around and came right back at us. Hit us hard.

My town was unrecognizable after Jeannne. It actually looked like a bombing site. I imagined that it looked like wartime in another country. The National Guard was dispatched and would not let anyone into town from the main roads. Too many power lines down. No electricity. Concern about strangers coming in and robbing homes. Being the hottest months of the year, we are talking 90-100 HUMID degrees during the day. With no electricity, you couldn't even turn on a fan to circulate air. I remember sleeping in my car and turning the A/C on to cool off. A LOT of damage everywhere you looked. To this day, I wished I had taken more photos. A lot more photos. Words alone can not describe it.

Here are a few photos of my home. We were some of the lucky ones as our damage seemed minor to so many other homes.

This was after Frances. Roof damage, but not much other damage. We covered the roof with plastic until we could get a roofer to replace the damaged roof.:



This was after Hurricane Jeanne:



My backyard fence was destroyed:



We were very lucky to able to get the repairs done rather quickly. My neighbors lived in FEMA trailers for months to over a year. It was unbelievable. It really is enough to make one want to move out of Florida. Or at least far away from the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf Coast.

My son lives just north of me in a new sub-division. All the electricity is underground. Houses are built to withstand high winds. They fair much better than we do here in an older home. If we get hit this year by any category 3 or higher hurricanes, it will do damage to my home. My son, on the otherhand, should fair quite well unless it is a catergory 5 hurricane.

The other bad thing is that there are only so many main roads out of Florida. It was bumper-to-bumper on I-95. I heard there were people stuck in their cars on I-95 when both hurricanes hit. I would not want to be in a car at all during a hurricane.

If you think that living in Florida is paradise. It can be, except during a hurricane.

I am not looking forward to this hurricane season if the predictions are true.

We moved into our new home in Pascagoula in August, 1979. We were less than a block from the beach. Approximately three weeks after moving in, Hurricane Frederic struck. She came ashore with 135 mph winds, a Cat. 4 hurricane. There was a voluntary evacuation but my wife and I stayed home, not the first time we hunkered down at home, nor the last. We were without running water and electricity for over two weeks. At that time we had the only swimming pool in the neighborhood and our pool water became the most important body of water around. People came from all over with 5 gal. buckets so that they could fill their toilets. That pool also became the "bathing tub". No one used soap and no one skinny-dipped, but it was about the only way to not only sort of wash but also to get cool. As has been pointed out, hurricanes typically hit when the weather is hot and muggy, and since Frederick dropped 8-12" of rain during an 8 hour period, it was even more muggy after she passed. We lived in those hot/muggy conditions for ten days and could take no more of it. We hopped in the car, drove 50 miles north, and checked into a motel. That was probably the "nicest" motel I have ever stayed in. It had AC and a shower. We got clean and then slept for 10 hrs., the first comfortable sleep we had had in ten days.

Then Hurricane Elana struck Pascagoula in 1985, a strong Cat. 3 storm.