A decade later, Hurricane Wilma memories still strong in Key West

 

BY PRU SOWERS

KONK LIFE STAFF WRITER

 

“It sounded like a locomotive barreling down the street right at your building. I was just waiting for stuff to come crashing down,” remembers Scott Fraser, who left his boat to stay in a resort at the corner of White Street and Palm Avenue when Hurricane Wilma hit on Oct. 24, 2005.

 

“The water kept rising and rising and rising,” said Patty Claro, another Key West resident who didn’t evacuate that day. “It came up to the window of my car. We all thought we were going to drown.”

 

As the 2015 hurricane season kicks off, memories inevitably turn back 10 years to Wilma, the category-three storm that produced two storm surges flooding approximately 60 percent of the island. The second surge of over six feet throughout most of the Florida Keys was the worst inundation since Hurricane Betsy hit on Sept. 8, 1965. Over one-third of the automobiles parked in Key West were flooded and destroyed. Commercial fishermen scrambled for weeks afterwards because the wind and waves scattered or destroyed hundreds of thousands of traps, particularly for spiny lobster and stone crabs.

 

“At nine-thirty in the morning, I walked out the door and the water was knee high. I rode my bike to the Atlantic Ocean side after the first surge hit and watched as the water went down like a bathtub [drain]. Everything was green, like in Ireland. It was the sea grass left behind,” Fraser said. “When I got back to White and Fleming [during the second surge], the water was chest high. I didn’t know where all the water was coming from.”

 

It was the second surge on the back side of Wilma. That surge caused even more damage than the first one. The Key West International Airport as well as the airport in Marathon were both flooded, closing for several days. Most marine navigational buoys were pushed out of position, closing the Port of Key West temporarily and making recreational boating dangerous for over a week. Three feet of water flooded Stock Island in the streets of the Key West Golf and Country Club. Merchandise floated out of the doors of the Kmart store on North Roosevelt Avenue as the parking lot there turned into an extension of the ocean.

 

Afterwards, the vegetation in the Florida Keys looked burnt and dying as a result of the wind, salt water damage and a record-breaking dry season that took place after Wilma. The following spring, most of the Royal Poinciana trees in the Keys failed to bloom. And residents began the long clean-up.

 

“You never realize how many washers and dryers there are until they’re out by the curb waiting to be picked up,” said Alison Higgins, Key West Sustainability Coordinator, who rode out the storm in Big Pine Key.

 

Almost $28 billion in insurance claim payments were made to property owners in Monroe County. One of those claims came from Claro, who lost her car while she waited out the storm in her friend’s house behind the Sears store. The group watched out the window as the water surged past the cars parked in the street and towards the house. Miraculously, it stopped “about an inch and a half” from the building doorway, Claro said. But as the group was heaving a sigh of relief, a boat came roaring down the street, the wake pushing the floodwaters over the doorstop and into the living room.

 

“It was very scary,” Claro said. “I’ve never been through anything like this in my life. It was like a nightmare, to tell you the truth.”

 

Severe beach erosion took place on both the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico sides of the island. South Roosevelt Boulevard was closed for almost three weeks while crews removed tons of sand and huge pieces of concrete seawall that were left in the roadway. And after trying to salvage the 2005 Fantasy Fest, organizers finally threw in the towel, moving the popular tourist attraction to December. However, less than one-third of the normal 100,000-plus Fest crowd attended, forcing the local economy to take another multi-million dollar hit.

 

 

 

 

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