Sunday Morning Good News

This morning we got the good news that the National Hurricane Center tracking has Dean drifting further south and now moving at 18 mph up one mile in speed. Cayman is now officially under a Hurricane warning after being on a Hurricane watch yesterday. This morning we will finish all of the small preparations in the condo for the storm. This afternoon we will put all the furniture we can on cans of beans and other canned goods that we bought cheap yesterday not to be part of our hurricane food but just to serve as something to elevate the furniture. I helped our neighbor Keith put up some plywood yesterday and will help him again this morning to finish his place. It sounded like it rained over night but with the plywood up you cant see out so we cant be sure. It is sunny now with a little wind. One thing about the plywood being up is that our house is very dark (Katie reminds me that it is like my den of darkness that I used to keep in Fort Worth with all my blinds shut though this is much darker). It will also make this place hot and steamy when we lose power so the battery operated fan we have will become extremely important.

We don't want to get too excited by the change in track because it has changed so much in the last 24 hours and could move again when it hopefully now skirts Jamaica rather than hitting it head on. There is another sound that is happening a lot this morning, the sound of planes taking off. We are about three miles from the airport and can see them lifting off from our parking lot. Katie and I have talked about going down and standing in the long lines at the airport to try and leave. It would be hard to get on a plane (not to mention outrageously expensive though money wasn't the deciding factor) but together we decided we were staying. This isn't like the US where you can drive away from the coast after you get your house ready. If we leave it could be a long time before we get back in. From the Ivan experience we have heard that the people who left had a hard time finding out anything and the not knowing was worse than the knowing. We are reasonably confident of our safety so while the absolute safest course would be to leave we are calculating that we have done all we could to make this place secure, it is on high ground and we have moved our car to high ground.

Radio Cayman has an 8:00 a.m. update that we are listening to now. Dean is 490 miles from us now. Maximum winds are 145 miles per hour. Hurricane force winds are extending out 60 miles and Tropical storm winds out 205 miles. We should get 10-12 inches of rain. Little Cayman about 80 miles from here is being completely evacuated. They will be instituting a curfew tonight. The police seem to be out making their presence known. There was a lot of looting post-Ivan so obviously the government wants to do a better job this time. There should be a new track around 10 this morning so keep checking the NOAA website. Will update throughout the day on our status.