REBUILD Northwest Florida is finished with us

The final, final inspection is done. The inspector, Dale, took the construction permit and all the paperwork with him. He also removed the REBUILD lawn sign. He said to expect big savings on the insurance. Final paperwork will be mailed soon.

Almost the Final Inspection

An inspector from Escambia County came by this afternoon to sign off on the work done by the contractors who did the retro-fitting of our house. He says there will be one more inspection, but we can put things back in the attic now. Just one more step and the project will be done?

It's the end of the REBUILD Project

The final step in the house's wind mitigation rebuild was today's installation of new impact-resistant garage doors.


Installing the new impact-resistant garage doors.

We got a call last week to expect the installers on Monday between 8:00 and 10:00 A.M. They arrived at 9:45.

As with all the REBUILD Northwest Florida work, replacing the doors was a noisy process. And this procedure took longer than the earlier ones. The two installers were here over six hours. It seemed that one of them was a trainee and he was doing a solo installation of one of the doors.


The new, reinforced door panels -- ready to install. They are much stronger than the old doors.

Almost all of the retrofitting is invisible. You can see the new garage doors but the old doors were in great condition, so the new doors look about the same. The rest of the work was inside walls, under soffits or in the attic. Invisible.

Final inspection comes next.

Hurricane Shutters

The hurricane shutters are installed and stored away in the garage. We are ready for the next big storm.

At 9:30 A.M., right on time, an installer arrived. A few minutes later another one appeared. After lots of very loud drilling of holes and the placement of anchor screws they were finished right at noon. Done.

We have a total of ten windows, including a set of French doors leading to the backyard.

The shutters consist of overlapping galvanized steel panels, about a foot wide and as tall as the window plus a few inches to fit over anchor pins. The panels are attached at each end with washers and wing nuts.

When not covering the windows the panels fit together in one neat cluster in the garage. The footprint for shutter panels for all ten windows is amazingly small, about a square foot.

Now there's one final step, we get new, reinforced garage doors.

REBUILD Northwest Florida, continued

The last work done by the REBUILD folks was on December 1. Since then no one had called regarding the last two steps in the retrofitting of the house. At 5:30 P.M. today we got a call from the people who install the window covers: they can come tomorrow morning and start work between 9:00 and 10:00. It should take about three hours.

They must have had a cancellation.

Reinforcing the Roof, Day 3

A pickup truck, with a crew of two men, arrived with a big trailer
full of hoses, heaters, pumps and goo.

Today there's another crew here to inject a foam adhesive sealant into all the roof-to-wall connections. This is done with pressure hoses. They got here a little after 1:00 P.M. and spent an hour assembling hoses, heaters and goo. The goo apparently has to be heated then sent up a hose to the guys in the attic.

There should be no discomfort to the residents of the house. The fumes are totally safe to breathe. But "it would be a good idea to air out the house for a couple of hours" after they are finished. They were finished around 4:30.

The installers were wearing hazmat suits and they were breathing through respirators.

Two more steps and we will be finished with REBUILD Northwest Florida:
(1) new, reinforced garage doors;
(2) shutters on all the windows and over the French doors to the backyard.

The Retrofit Continues, Day 2

Monday's crew reappeared 7:05 this morning ready to put the soffits back up and finish the other two projects they started. There was talk on Monday that they might be back yesterday afternoon to finish up but they didn't have time.

We needed Monday's work completed today because the roof deck attachment people want to start tomorrow afternoon. They cannot begin until the current roof work is finished.


The photo above shows walls, roof beams and a hurricane strap. After they removed the soffits, the ends of the roof beams and the top of the wall were exposed. The strap was securely attached to both with screws. This isn't exactly how our roof beams look. I got this photo from Google. But the concept is the same. And the strap is the same.

(1) We have a new front door. This one is wind and impact resistant and it works beautifully. And locks easily. I mention this as we had planned to get our handyman to replace the old, rusted and cranky front door that was getting very hard to open.

(2) All the roof-to-wall connections along the non-gable ends of the house have been reinforced with metal clips and big thick screws. All the soffits are back in place and the wood trim to cover the joins has been painted with white primer. Very neatly.

(3) Up in the attic they added lots of wood 2 by 4's for bracing and more metal clips. This was done inside the house, to reinforce the gable ends.

Today's crew was done by 11:30. At 1:00 P.M. tomorrow another crew should arrive. They will use adhesive spray to glue the roof to the walls between the newly reinforced beams.

It's Mitigation Day!

Or more likely Mitigation Week...or Month.

Workers from REBUILD Northwest Florida are here to retrofit the house, especially the roof and windows, to withstand a Category 3 hurricane.


Their website says, "REBUILD Northwest Florida coordinates construction management services for its Residential Wind Mitigation Retrofit Program in Escambia and Santa Rosa Counties."

The workers arrived early, about 7:30 A.M. and we expect this phase of the rebuild, or Mitigation, as we have learned to call it will take a day or two. The front door and its framing are getting replaced by one worker. Two more are removing the soffit around the edge of the roof -- from the outside. Later they go into the attic to install metal clips and wood braces to reinforce the attachment of the roof to the walls.

It's very noisy.

Last spring Jack applied for this and it took many months for estimators to inspect the house and get the application approved.

The homeowner pays 25% of the total cost. The balance, up to $15,000 is paid for by several organizations including FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency; Florida State Emergency Response Team and Escambia County Local Mitigation Strategy. I love the latter's slogan: "A Partnership for a Sustainable & Disaster Resilient Community."

In the next few weeks work will include installing stronger garage doors, foam sealant around all the new construction and removable hurricane shutters for the windows and doors. We expect the whole thing will be done by Christmas.

London News, Talk and Weather

As we gear up for our trip to London it's fun to listen to local London radio news. Their talk radio is considerably calmer and much more fair-minded than most of ours. Very civilised.

• BBC London Radio 94.9, News & Talk


• LBC, London Radio 97.3, News & Talk


• BBC London Weather Forecast

A Snow Day In Pensacola, Florida?

8:00 AM weather map (the crosshair shows where we live)


1:00 PM Central Standard Time

The local schools and government offices are all closed -- in case of snow.

I'll post more weather maps during the day if there's anything interesting. Word is the snow will begin early in the afternoon. And we should get about three inches of it.

At 1:00 in the afternoon the sleet is getting closer, but no snow yet. At 2:00 PM we had a five-minute snow flurry in the backyard and that was all we got. Near us there were snowfalls of one to three inches. My favorite report on road conditions around here was that "all the highways in [some rural] county were closed until further notice." From three inches of snow?

The Pool Is Open

The pool is looking good, the water is clear and the palms and palmettos are green and healthy.

We had a very chilly spring and the pool took forever to get warm enough for a comfortable swim. Usually we are in the pool every day after the first week of May. This year it was early June before we could really enjoy the water temperature.

Now the weather is so hot here in Northwest Florida that it is trying to break 60 year old records. And the pool is almost hot.

Ducky helps steer leaves to the skimmer and in emergencies keeps the chlorine level up.

Lightning Strikes Again

Early in the afternoon last Wednesday, the 27th, in the midst of a heavy thundershower we got hit. There was no delay between the flash and the boom. And it was very loud. Luckily the power stayed on in the house and the air conditioner still worked.

When the storm had passed we discovered the strike had fried all the outdoor electrical outlets including the ones that power the pool pumps and filters. Later we found that the bathroom power outlets were not working either.

In the backyard next to the pool a big chunk of concrete was missing from the pavement and little pieces were all over the place.

The electricians arrived on Friday for repairs and found the the lightning tried to get in the house through the main circuit breaker in the garage. It damaged only one circuit before the outdoor breaker kicked in.

The folks at our local pool supply store said the lightning probably destroyed the pumps and the motors. But as soon as the power came back on the pumps worked fine. And best of all the power surge didn't hit the new air conditioner compressor and fan.

It was our second lightning strike in five years. The previous one was in the afternoon of June 22, 2004 -- just two weeks after we moved here. That strike was much more serious with damage to the plumbing. The repairs required jack hammers tearing up some of the foundation of the house. Noisy, dusty and dirty repairs.

After getting the air conditioner replaced earlier this month and now electricians all over the place, we look forward to a long time without visits from salesmen, estimators or repairmen.

Three Named-Storms Now in the North Atlantic

Late afternoon on Friday it looks like Tropical Storm Hanna has missed us here in the Florida panhandle. It may cause a wet weekend along the Atlantic coast.

[This map is from WeatherUnderground.com. For a larger map click the image above. For more tropical storm information go to the Weather Underground site.]

Hurricane Ike may be headed right into the Gulf of Mexico. On its way to Pensacola? That's a possibility. We will find out by the middle of next week.

And it's too early to guess where Tropical Storm Josephine may end up.

Hurricane Gustav Lands

[Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Above, Weather.com's radar map of Hurricane Gustav. This was taken about 30 minutes after the eye of the storm's landfall at Cocodrie, Lousiana -- 70 miles southwest of New Orleans. And about 250 miles WSW of Pensacola, a good, safe distance.

A Quick Roadtrip to Biloxi and the Circus

Usually we wouldn't have gone away when a major storm was heading for Pensacola, but Tropical Storm Fay was moving so slowly we decided we could drive to Biloxi for just one night. We headed over on Thursday morning.

We were off to see Ringling Bros. And Barnum & Bailey's one-ring circus -- Boom A Ring.

We stopped for lunch at a favorite restaurant, the locally-owned Felix's Fish Camp Grill in Spanish Fort, Alabama. It is on the bay across from Mobile with great views of battleships at Battleship Park.

Felix's looks like a fish camp -- old, battered, falling down -- but inside it is a fine restaurant with excellent service and wonderful food. Have the crab soup, it's worth the trip.

From Felix's we continued on to Biloxi and checked in at the Isle of Capri Casino. We hadn't stayed there for a couple of years and we were pleased to find the rooms had been nicely refurbished.



Early in the evening we drove west along the beach road to the circus. It was playing at Biloxi's Mississippi Coast Coliseum.

The show had some very good acts and lots of classic circus elements such as juggling, tumbling and acrobatics. The dog act was unique with its cast of five trained Daschunds. Los Scolas' high wire act was as exciting as ever and this year they added a high energy double wheel as well. Opening the second act was Vicenta Pages presenting her white tigers immediately followed by her aerial act.

In the morning we drove home to wait for Tropical Storm Fay and by Sunday evening it still had not arrived in Pensacola.

Tropical Storm Fay Update

Tropical Storm Fay is heading toward Pensacola. This map from Weather.com shows the storm's path at 10:30 a.m. this morning.

As you can see from the previous post none of the computer projections was even close. Lucky for us it never made it to hurricane level.

Where is Tropical Storm Fay going?

North Atlantic TS Fay landed in Florida again. This morning it came ashore just south of Fort Myers. Yesterday it passed through Key West. From the computer models below you'll see that there are several very different outcomes possible. These seem to be more varied than usual especially for computer models after landfall.

Looks like it is not heading toward Pensacola.

The map is from Weather Underground's Tropical Weather pages.

I'll keep you posted.

Pensacola's Weather Alert

This is what our weather map looked like on Wednesday morning. The line of storms is moving from west to east. The white dot above the word "Pensacola" is where we live. The night before there were predictions of heavy weather overnight (didn't happen) and worse weather in the morning.

The weather system pictured above hit us about 30 minutes after I saved the image. We heard two distant claps of thunder and we got half an inch of rain. That's all. We were lucky to miss the deadly tornadoes and violent thunderstorms they had north of us. But it sure looked dire there for a few minutes.

Fall has arrived

The weather here has finally cooled down. And with last week's rain (and that tornado!), things are looking very green in NW Florida. The storm brought us over 14.5 inches of rain in less than 24 hours.

The heat of August and September had been rough on the trees, lawns and plants. The combination of hot sun and dry weather had bleached the colors out of all the leaves and flowers. But now they are coming back very nicely.

For the past few days the high temperature has been around 76 degrees (24C), Instead of the typical summer temperatures around 96 degrees (36C). It's now perfect for lounging around and reading a book. Sad to say the pool is 63 (17C) degrees now and way too chilly for a dip.

Here are some photos of the backyard I took today. You'll see we have several new pieces of wall art for the garden fence.

Escambia Bay Bridge Construction

On September 16, 2004 the storm surge from Hurricane Ivan nearly destroyed both sections of the Interstate 10 Escambia Bay Bridge outside Pensacola, Florida. Temporary repairs were made and limited traffic was permitted. Both sections of the bridge are now being destroyed and the new west-bound lanes are taking shape.

Here are some webcam photos to show the progress. You can visit the bridge's official site here. I will post more photos as the construction progresses.

In case you are confused by the pictures, the new west-bound lanes will be approximately where the old east-bound lanes were.