Goodbye Fay

There are many advantages to living near Savannah, Georgia. It is a beautiful, historic city that is not too big nor too small (population of about 250,000). As far as the weather goes, it's also a good spot. We don't have blizzards, ice storms, fire storms, earthquakes, or dust storms. Because the east coast of the USA is farther west on the Georgia coast (named the "Georgia bite") than it is at either the North Carolina coast or the Florida coast, we don't often take direct hits from hurricanes. In fact, the last hurricane to make a direct hit on Savannah was Hurricane David in 1979.

Every once in a while we do have to deal with tropical weather that does something strange. If you have been watching the news, you know about the weird path of Tropical Storm Fay. Over the last few days, it has dumped vast amounts of rain on central and northern Florida (it now appears to be finally headed westward across the panhandle). Unfortunately for us, tropical storms and hurricanes are strongest on their northeastern quadrant. Therefore, if a storm hits central to northern Florida, we take a hit here in Savannah.

On both Thursday and Friday, we experienced band after band of wind and rain coming in off the coast. The sky would be light for about 30 minutes and then turn dark and ominous. I'm sure we received several inches of total rain. The wind gusts, which probably reached 40-50 miles per hour at times, for the most part knocked down just tree limbs. I'm glad to say that although a few large limbs fell to the ground behind our home, they only crunched part of an aluminum fence.

Things could be much worse here. Much of central Florida remains submerged and the latest reports indicate that seven people have died.

I'm thankful to God for the rain. We needed it. I'm also thankful that Fay didn't seem to do too much damage here.

I'm also thankful to see Fay go.