I come from an island seasonally battered by hurricanes. Cuba, being the largest of the Antilles, is almost every season in the eye of a storm. As we all know last year Cuba was affected severely by Dennis which affected almost every corner of the island. Charley, in 2004, affected many of my family members. My aunt was directly under the eye of the storm.
I came to Miami on November 26, 1999, with my parents and my sister. Before I had always liked science, but not one in particular. I really don’t know how it started, but suddenly Meteorology, especially hurricanes, became not just a future goal, but my passion. My godmother encouraged me to call John Morales. At that time Mr. Morales, a well-known and respected Meteorologist was working for the Spanish broadcasting station Univision 23. A cousin of my mom got me the phone number of Univision 23 and I called to speak with John Morales. He was pretty cool and encouraged me to continue calling with weather information like how much rain had fallen during the day and/or the temperature extremes (high/low).
As years passed I didn’t just got older, but my passion for hurricanes just increased as well as my knowledge. Today John works for Telemundo 51 and our friendship is as strong as ever. I continue helping John especially with hurricane records, I’m kind of his hurricane records person. Every time that he has a question about a possible hurricane record, he always asks me to investigate the possible record.
On May 20, 2004, I found Storm2K and I have to agree that my life hasn’t been the same since. Before, I didn’t have a lot of persons to talk about weather, and especially, about hurricanes. In Storm2K I found a community that is like me, lives and breathes hurricanes! We never stop, when the season is over in the Atlantic, hey, the Southern Hemisphere has summer and cyclones too! Also, the WPAC is like a sleeping volcano, is always active year-round, and when it erupts, be careful. During this nineteen month period that I have been a member of Storm2K I have learned a lot, and at the same time, “enjoyed,” discussed, and gained lots of knowledge from the two worse hurricane seasons in Atlantic history, 2004 and 2005. I wrote enjoyed in quotation marks because it has been a roller coaster of feelings. First, I have been amazed by many of these past seasons hurricanes with their beauty and extreme velocities. Examples are many, Katrina, Rita, Wilma, Charley, Frances, Dennis, Emily, Ivan, Jeanne, and more. But at the same time it has been a time of so much grief and horror for so many residents along the Gulf Coast of the US and for so many residents of some Caribbean Islands that it has been a really hard time for all of us.
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Katrina was my first real hurricane. I felt at one moment during the passage of the second wall very scared, it wasn’t funny like when you watched in the TV but you’re not in the middle of the action. I looked outside through the window of the family room and it was like a tornado was moving alongside the street. Lots of trees were down, no electricity for days. At night it was so hot that I had to sleep in the pure floor to feel some cold. Then during Wilma it was kind of cool! The wind was blowing against my porch so I was able to open my front door and since it was during the morning hours I took almost an hour of film until the batteries ran out. Since Wilma was more extensive than Katrina, the damage was more widespread over South Florida. Fortunately after Wilma a cold front did a total clean up of the atmosphere and sunshine was abundant as well as an unseasonable chill in the air that made it possible to resist seven days without electricity. I know many have gone through worse things than me during these two-year period, but believe me, if I felt desperate and ready to send FPL (Florida Power and Light) to hell, I kind of have an image of how people felt after hurricanes like Katrina, Rita, Charley, Ivan, and more. Not a complete image because fortunately my house didn’t have any real damage from the storms and our lives here in South Florida have not changed from what they were before the hurricanes. By the way, we are still waiting for the stoplights to get repaired, the government response to this problem has been kind of slow. Let me clarify that stoplights are working, but where you had three hanging stoplights, after Wilma if you were lucky one was left working.
In the future I will continue tracking and studying tropical cyclones before, during, and after they are formed. I hope in the future we will be able to understand better subtropical cyclones in the Atlantic and how they create kind of an immunity for adverse situations like relatively cold water and hostile environmental conditions like wind shear and dry air. I also hope to in the future get my PhD as a Hurricane Expert and be able to help educate the public on how to always be on the safe side and to explain how hurricanes should be looked in general more as a necessity for the Earth and not just devastating monsters. I also believe that in the following years tracking tropical cyclones will get easier and even more fun with new tools and even better satellites. I hope satellites in the future will replace the RECON missions as the method to acquire the most accurate information from a tropical cyclone, therefore, we will always be dealing with the most accurate and recent information. This will provide us with earlier advisories on tropical systems and furthermore, more time to get prepared. Just get ready and put on your seatbelt, because like the Discovery Channel said, “The Future is Wild!”
-Sandy (HURAKAN)
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