Hurricane Elena

As the hurricane season drags on, it’s increasingly looking as if we (in northern Florida) are going to be spared once again. And being in Gainesville, the only way that we could really be devastated by a strong hurricane would be if it came point blank at us from the Gulf of Mexico, coming ashore at Cedar Key. And that actually almost happened in August, 1985!

I remember that I had been working late on my job one Friday night and had checked out the status of Hurricane Elena, which was fomenting out in the middle of the Gulf. The projected path had it going north and hitting around the Pensacola-Mobile area sometime Saturday or Sunday. I was especially tired that night and slept in quite late in the morning, waking up at about 11:30 AM. I thought, hey, I think I’ll just mosey on down to the Publix that was across the field from where I lived and buy me a couple of their tasty doughnuts to start my day off right! Fortunately, I just rode my bicycle over there, because the parking lot was packed solid, with several cars driving around looking for empty spots. And Publix was packed like I’ve never seen it! I asked someone there what was going on and he said that Hurricane Elena was just off the coast from Cedar Key and headed straight for Gainesville! Well, living in an apartment, I figured that my landlords could take care of their own property. I wasn’t exactly in the mental state to dash around scooping up items like water and batteries (and there probably weren’t any left anyway), so I just got my two doughnuts and got in what I saw as the shortest check-out line (they fortunately were running all of the registers). As I stood there, I heard someone far behind me say loudly, “Excuse me, sir, the line goes back here!” I looked and there was a long line going halfway down the aisle toward the back of the store! I meekly trudged all the way back to the end of the line and then said to myself, “Oh, forget it (only I was muttering in much stronger language)! I laid my bag of doughnuts on the shelf and left the store. I just hung around my apartment and calmly waited for the torrent to come sweep us away. Only it didn’t: Hurricane Elena, after it had suddenly changed direction and sped toward us, just as suddenly screeched to a complete stop and hovered a few miles out in the Gulf for about a day! Then, it changed directions and ended up hitting the Pensacola-Mobile-Mississippi area anyway!

Gainesville has been “hit” from the east, albeit very rarely. In 1964 (when I was living in Hollywood), Hurricane Dora came straight in from the Atlantic and blasted Lake City, causing flooding and wind damage in Gainesville. The 2004 hurricanes Frances and Jeanne (to be discussed in greater detail in a later article) came over much land from the southeast and did not score direct hits over Gainesville. Gainesville lies a little closer to the Gulf than the Atlantic and is much more vulnerable to a tropical storm strike from the southwest. I’m actually quite surprised that we’ve been spared a direct, devastating hit from a hurricane all these years. But it almost happened in 1985!