I'm very sorry Ralph to hear of how Irma has affected your livelihood. Words don't describe it. Good luck to you in your recovery.
Just saw these photos. So sorry about this, Ralphie. It really puts things in perspective. Don't know what else to say.
Wow, that is just awful Ralph. I am glad that you and your family are personally safe, and hope that something good business wise comes your way.
Ralph are those tree's in the pictures you posted orange tree's and are they a total loss? I can't tell if they are just leaning or they are uprooted and laying on their sides.
Lol, everything we have leans to the west these days....Some are a total loss, others or most will be okay even with a slight westward tilt. Yeah the pics don't do it justice as is the case with most things. Thought is 50-70% of our crop is gone, with 1,000 plus trees uprooted in need of extraction. Lots of work to do if we are going to have any normalcy, I'm nervous for the future but can't control it so I'm taking it one day at a time..A bit bummed my peaches and finger limes are gone but too busy with other issues to dwell on it...
Yes sir, all of the above, at the house everyone has a blue tarp on their roofs (luckily I'm not one of them), pile of yard debris by the curb and doesn't have internet or cable yet but most everyone now has power. At the farm we have power and are doing our best to salvage what's left. This storm knocked back farming in Florida for a while, attended a Farm Bureau meeting and realized that cotton, peanuts, veggies and most greenhouses were flattened by the winds. Citrus being a tree crop took the brunt and many question if this may be the knockout blow. We are arranging the poly irrigation that floated away from the trees from the 21-24 inches of rain and contracted a big loader with a rake to pickup the trees turned over. Tomorrow I have some hand labor coming in to start staking our 20,000 young trees that blew over. Something that was totally unexpected was the continued leaking of our reservoir system and I mean leaking thousands of gallons a minute back into the farm we just pumped dry. We have 500 acres of reservoirs with 48" pipes strategically placed around the dikes that are used to both release and hold the water. Most of these header pipes are 15 foot in depth with boards top to bottom. Because the rain was so great we have pumped our water levels in the reservoirs to well beyond what was engineered and the resulting head pressure against the wooden boards has broken three different boards all ten feet or lower than the water surface. This in turn has sent hundreds of thousands of gallons back into the citrus grove. More than once this ugly old (good gosh I feel old at the moment) farmer and his trusty foreman have stripped down to his undies and went diving in the attempt to stop the leak. It's worked once but I have had to call a diver in to fix it the other two times....Saturday morning my foreman and I were back in the water attempting to stop a leak and realized about 30 yards away an alligator was watching us very intently.... How is Houston making out in its recovery, I can only imagine the amount of repairs from the flooding...
Ralph, the rebuilding will be a long slow process for most. But as much as it can be the city is back to normal....minus a 150,000 flooded homes and the consequences of that, not to mention apartment complexes and office buildings. KBR has a big building close to the Bayou and it's basement and 1st floor were flooded, but even though the tenants above that were fine the building is closed and those tenants have to make other arrangements. Side benefit, in the area I live in which is called the Energy Corridor they over built apts during the boom when oil was up around 100$/barrell. Most of those projects came online just as the boom was going bust. They have had to offer 3 mos rent free to entice people to move in ...now there are all sorts of families paying 1500 to 2500K / month for these places ..bailed the owners out.
Well my heart goes out to all those rebuilding in Houston and to the disaster in the Caribbean, there is nothing fun or easy about it. I was pumped about this seasons football season and after the storm it's as important as checking the mail, there are just more important issues to concentrate on....
Internet came on this evening along with our cable, last vestige to normalcy and running the office side of a business that requires internet service for just about everything The real story is internet is on, fantastic, check it out yep, turn TV on yep, adjust sound nada, do it again nada...Sigh... Realized oh my woofer is unplugged from my Bose sound bar, did I mention I have a sound bar worth more than most TV sets, oh yeah rock your world and thy neighbors...So I get up and plug in my woofer and the roof did a double back flip, the North Koreans thought a nuclear attack was imminent and I lost what was left of my hearing and I may never get my testicles to ever drop again in this lifetime....Dang that was loud....