Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Hurricane Earl Passes North of Antigua giving us only Tropical Storm conditions

Just uploaded a photo on my twitter showing what a nice morning I am waking too. Looking ay what Earl became, I'm just so happy that Antigua was spared. Only a few places had bad flooding and I didn't hear of any structural damage. We drove across the island yesterday and all seemed fine. Some visitors and others who have never experienced a hurricane will be annoyed to hear that Antigua didn't actually get a hurricane yesterday. We received Tropical Storm conditions from a weak hurricane Earl as it missed us passing to our north. Even Barbuda which was close to the eye of Earl experienced only Tropical Storm conditions according to the Daily Observer today. Of course the flooding, all gone by now, was bad for some low flood prone areas, but for the rest of us who have experienced real hurricane conditions, this was nothing more than a very good drill getting us prepped for more to come. This brings me to the very weak Tropical Storm Fiona just east of the Caribbean. All forecasts show Fiona passing further away from us than Earl did AND as a weaker storm. We have to prepare for it just in case the forecasts are wrong but it looks like Fiona wont bother us. Further east the next blob is being given a very low chance at developing at this point. All good news for Antigua and Barbuda at this point. Sadly the same can't be said for other places that experienced Earl are are still in its path. I will take more photos and upload them to http://www.stormcarib.com/ later if i can. I just did this little video with my phone to show that the area that i live is normal.

I don't hear of any bad reports from the hotels and I think most are up and running cleaning up broken branches. The beaches on the west and south coasts will have had some erosion too. Freemans Bay was washed out due to all the rain waters coming down from the hills around it. I know that the same happened at some other beaches close to big runoff areas too. Darkwood Beach took a beating sadly and after years and years of Govenment permitted sand mining, the beach nothing like we remember.
I plan to be doing boat trips this week and could even start tomorrow.


Eli Fuller

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