Fabian Strikes, Continued

At 3.25pm on Friday afternoon, while in the middle of an IM conversation with my dad and shortly after my last post here, the power finally went out. It was at that point that we entered the worst phase of the storm.

Without any light in the house except that coming through the porch door and around the edges of the shutters you really noticed how much the shutters were straining. As they flexed in the wind you saw little flashes of light from the gaps between them, which I kept mistaking for lightning. We turned our battery-powered radio on but even with the volume up to max I could barely hear it above the noise of the wind. The sudden gusts were the most scary - you could feel the wooden floor quivering beneath your feet and the wind's roar became all-consuming. Every now and then my ears would pop with the pressure, despite us having all our windows on the leeward side of the house open. The cats seemed to handle it all remarkably well though - Dark spending most of the time curled up asleep on a bookshelf, Stormy under the bed.

At around 4pm we started to hear a banging from below us - the apartment of Verna's other tenant, Stephen Pett. It sounded like his front door had blown in. After that we started getting wind coming up through the floorboards and through the gaps in the platform across the stairs too, but there was nothing we could do about it. Being a volunteer fireman, at that point Stephen was out on the Causeway trying to help people who had gotten themselves stranded out there. Added to the cacophony of the wind was the steady beep-beep of his burglar alarm.

Water was by now streaming in through all the south facing windows any way it could - under the bottom, between the sealant around the panes, vertically upwards from between the two sections. We stuffed towels and T-shirts across all the windows and for the next 90 minutes or so entered a frenetic cycle of wringing and mopping and wringing and mopping to try to keep on top of all the water. Discovered water coming in from behind the TV, through the hole in the wall for the aerial, and had to hurriedly stuff a couple of T-shirts behind there and move my new AV amp and DVD player.

By 6pm, exhausted from mopping water, it started to feel like the wind and rain was easing up a little. The beeping of Stephen's alarm was much more noticeable now. The four of us flopped into armchairs, lit the urricane lamp and took the chance to munch on some chips and dip. By 6.30pm it was becoming more obvious that the worst was definitely past. Visibility had improved sufficiently that we could see the dock area again, and some of the damage that had been done: several coconut palms snapped in half, the chain link fence partially brought down and a sizeable portion of the roof of one of the sheds on the wharf competely disintegrated. Although still blowing hard, Newstocks now seemed to be in the lee of the wind. Down on the wharf a guy had turned up in a truck to pick up all the coconuts that had fallen.

By 7pm the wind had died down enough that we felt safe enough venturing out onto our flooded porch. It was an amazing sight: it must have been half an inch deep in water and debris. It was then that we first discovered we'd lost a large corner of the porch roof - the heavy white slate lying smashed on the ground below. Stephen below us had lost a shutter and sustained a broken window. We could see a line that had come down across the road - whether a power line or telephone we couldn't be sure. Our frangipani tree in the front yard had been snapped in half. All the walls inside the porch looked like they'd been sandblasted with a mixture of small leaves, twigs and dirt.

After a cold dinner of egg sandwiches by candlelight we turned in early to our stuffy, airless rooms at 9.30pm, exhausted.