Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Forum Hurricane Irma & Our Members

To all of our members (and guests/visitors) ...

If you are in the path of this storm, please seek safe refuge now.
If you've already been effected, let us know how you are doing when you are able.

Obviously the most important thing is your safety and the safety of your family, friends, pets.

Know that your Piano World family is thinking about you, and let us know if there is anything we can do to help.

Be SAFE, and let us know how you are doing as soon as you are able.

My partner Kathy has lots of family in Florida, we are both concerned about them, and we are concerned about our extended piano world family.
For those of you in the path of this monster hurricane we sincerely hope you come out of this ok.

PLEASE --- Let us know that you are OK as soon as you can.

Side Note: I saw a picture of a baby grand with a bucket under each leg, done to try to keep water from the piano (provided it didn't get more than a foot deep inside the house). Of course pianos can be replaced, people can't. The safety of you and your family is the most important thing.


All the Best,
Frank, Kathy, and your Piano World family

Another thought if you anticipate flooding. It might be helpful to pull the action from a grand if you have one, and take it upstairs and wrap it in plastic. At least that would gain you a few inches from the keybed to the bottom of the sound board.

It looks like this storm is going to be a truly bad one, particularly for Florida. We have family, friends, and our extended Piano World family in Florida, worried about all of them.

I'm sure if you are in the storm you aren't checking Piano World, but when you are able please let us know
you and your loved ones are ok.

For those of you trying to stay in touch there is an app called Zello for your cell phone that works something like a long range walkie-talkie. I've installed it on mine so we can stay in touch with Kathy's daughter in St. Pete. A number of Kathy's family members live in western Florida so we have a vested interest in people's safety.

This is a list of live cams you can use to watch the storm in real time (without the nutty weather person)

Florida Keys
http://www.floridakeyswebcams.tv/
Southern Most point, Key West
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hlr1ePqj6H0
Miami
http://www.miamiandbeaches.com/plan-your-trip/see-miami-webcams
Ft. Lauderdale
https://www.sunny.org/webcam/
Cocoa Beach Pier
https://www.surfguru.com/florida-surf-reports/cocoa-beach-pier
Tampa
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRAN9TSj5Kc
Fort Myers
https://www.earthcam.com/usa/florida/fortmyers/?cam=fort_myers_gullwing
Bay News 9's live images across Florida, from the Tampa Bay area to Orlando to Daytona Beach.
http://www.baynews9.com/weather/web-cams.html

EarthCam's live feeds are usually ideal for virtual tours of of Miami and Tampa. Now they'll come in handy to show the hurricane's effects in large metropolitan areas.
https://www.earthcam.com/usa/florida/miamiandthebeaches/?cam=tampaskan

Hi Frank
Zello is a useful tool but Cellular data services are not working, Zello will not function
Zello info

And yes the hurricane will hit here about this afternoon So I'm trying to reduce my anxiety by scrolling through piano world

Please come back after the storm has passed and let us know you are ok.

Good luck dogperson! I'll be thinking of you today and tomorrow. Although we're well clear of the really bad stuff here in central GA, I'm worried for my parents primary residence on the Gulf Coast in CC - the forecast just keeps looking worse over there.

The Hurrican had slightly dissipated with winds around 100 when it reached here. Quite frightening, but everything is OK except for lost electricity pretty early. No obvious house damage will check later when the weathers better

Hope the other Floridians fared as well. Thanks for the thoughts during the storm

That's good news dogperson! So glad you're safe.

Great news! I was watching the reports and relieved when I saw the storm weakening. I know the storm surge was still serious, but at least the winds were lower than expected in most of Florida.

Center of Irma will work across AL, today. Smack-dab diagonally across Birmingham. There has been some wind damage, trees down, in the area of Auburn University.

We're getting "Irma Lite," as the air mass over the state was cooler and drier to begin with. The bad part of hurricanes, once they move inland, is the northeast quadrant above the former eye--so the bad stuff is now in GA and SC.

Best wishes to dogperson and other Floridians.

Glad to hear you're okay, dogperson. Hope everything gets back to normal quickly.

We actually got hit much harder by Irma here than I had expected: lost two trees, road to the house was impassable and still unsafe (downed power lines/limbs), power's out for roughly 1 million folks in GA. We were really getting pummeled by the east winds (they come at us via a mile of fetch across a large lake...nothing to block the wind). People in the neighborhood have been incredibly helpful-- we even have an emergency generator to borrow for the night. Rumors abound as to how many days we won't have electricity...

A relatively busy concert schedule for the fall semester remains, so I'm about to attempt to practice with a dorky battery operated light strapped to my head!

Terminal degree
Glad to hear you are OK, everything else is fixable but I know it comes as a shock to be hit hard when you didn't expect it.

The best purchase I made before the storm was a clip on led piano lamp that works on batteries...... not nearly as impressive looking I'm sure as your dorky headlamp. Hope you will post pictures 😊

Perhaps it could inspire some choices of repertoire -- "Sixteen Tons" -- "Coal Miner's Daughter" ;-)

Well, it has inspired me to upgrade my battery powered lighting for tonight's practice session, if nothing else. If we're lucky, power comes back on in this neighborhood on Thursday. If not: this weekend. Managed to beat the odds and buy a generator today, so at least the food won't spoil and the sump pump continues to run.

What I have in my earthquake kit are five of these:

https://gravitylight.org/how-it-works/

Because there are no batteries or anything else that would deteriorate over time, they should be good to go when the time comes....

What happened to Hurricane Harvey. Unless I missed it I never saw mention of it, Everything on PW seems to be about Irma.

The people in Texas are still having serious trouble.

I don't get it.

Roger, I don't think anyone here has forgotten about Hurricane Harvey or the folks around south central Texas and south-west Louisiana. The damage from Harvey was bad and the folks in those areas are still suffering.

On the other hand Irma was a bigger storm, the economic losses from Irma are reported to be higher than Harvey. But there is no need to compare storms or geographical areas. Both are bad enough and several deaths attributed to both.

On a personal note, like Terminaldegree, here is west central Georgia where I live (about 50 miles south of the Atlanta airport and about half way between Atlanta and Macon, it was pretty bad. Imagine a severe thunderstorm with wind-gusts sustained at 50 to 60 MPH continuously for hours. The thunderstorm may last 30 minutes but these high winds and heavy rains lasted for hours.

My power went out Monday afternoon around 1:00pm and was restored about 4:00pm yesterday. Hundreds of thousands are still without power in Georgia, with several deaths reported. Fortunately, I did not sustain much damage to my property, other that a few sheets of tin blowing off the top of my barn, and lots of small limbs, leaves and debris in my yard.

I suppose the good thing, as opposed to all the bad things, is that I played my pianos a good bit during the power outage. That is the good thing about an acoustic piano; you don't need electricity to play it, even in the dark.

Most all of the public school systems are still closed, as of this past Monday, and the community technical college where I work was closed Monday and Tuesday, and opened at 10:00am this morning.

So, Irma reeked havoc on Florida and most of Georgia, although south Florida got the brunt of the storm. Both Harvey and Irma were mean storms. A lot of folks still need our prayers and support to deal with the aftermath.

Rick

Roger,

The reason I brought up Irma and not Harvey was a personal one.

No doubt about it the folks in Texas are dealing with just as big a challenge, and I'm a bit surprised myself that there doesn't seem to be any mention. Not that Piano World would be the first place people would come to, but I do like to think of us sometimes as an extended musical family.

However I lived in Florida for a couple of years (first in Pompano Beach, then Largo), my partner Kathy's family (daughters, grandchildren, sisters, nieces, nephews) and friends all live along the west side of Florida.

I'm equally concerned about people, pets, instruments who were effected by either storm, it's just that I'm more directly connected to the one in Florida.

What was left of the eye went right through Columbus. We lost power most of the day and night and I had piano and horse worries at the same time. The day before it hit I covered all my pianos and moved everything back from the large front windows at my store. Fortunately we had no damage or flooding at the shop. As Rick said it was just hours and hours of high winds and driving rain. We lost a lot of trees in the county.

At home however we only lost limbs but I had to stay out in it a good portion of the day to take care of my horses who were stuck in their stalls. Right after lunch we had a flooding situation around our well house and I ended up having to trench (dig a big ditch) around it so that the water diverted from the pump. I have never been so wet in my life. I had on a slicker that was tied very tight around my face but the rain was blowing so hard that it blew up my sleeves and into the front so that after an hour I was soaked through. I just kept thinking that this experience was pretty low on my fun list. But you know it was not nearly as bad as an ice storm with horses.