Don't you people bring up hurricanes and intensity! Safely tucked away in the middle of the state, and only catching a fading Frances & Jeanne, and just the edge of Wilma...Disney was the place of refuge most of my friends and neighbors went to from down here to escape the hurricane eyes!
You can check out my Frances gallery...3 days for the fat, lumbering storm to pass by - fortunately only a cat 1-2:
http://pic1.funtigo.com/zackiedawg/?b=1 ... start&cr=1
Or you can check out my little gallery of Wilma, as seen from the center of the bullseye, right under the eye wall of a cat 2-3 hurricane!:
http://pic1.funtigo.com/zackiedawg/?b=2 ... start&cr=1
I spent 8 days without electricity or phones after Frances, 5 more days after Jeanne, and 10 days after Wilma including no water either. $17K in damage from Wilma - the Banyan tree in my pool was fun! Months of cleanup - the World's largest mulch piles after the city collected all the downed trees. Commuting to work 23 miles with no stoplights at intersections for more than 2 months, turned a 40 minute drive into a 1 1/2 hour drive.
Guess what I did after going through hurricane Frances and having no power for 8 days? I went to DISNEY WORLD to get away! And what happened? Hurricane Jeanne decided to come. I decided to bail out of Disney the day she was supposed to hit so I could rush home and batten down the hatches, since I had left the home unprepared (not expecting a second hurricane so soon). I was the only car driving south on the Turnpike - the northbound lanes were a parking lot for the entire 160 miles from people trying to evacuate Florida. The irony was that all the people who fleed South Florida for Jeanne ended up heading to central and north Florida - where they ended up closer to the hurricane's center! Down in South Florida, Jeanne wasn't that bad - never went over 90MPH, and Frances had already cleared everything away that was going to fall down. She knocked the power out again - but that's because the system had only just been jerry-rigged with duct tape and coat hangers a week or two before.
It's funny...still when I go back to Disney even just a few months ago, I still look at all the fallen trees in the pine forest areas. And they were putting tiles back on the resort roofs for a year after the storms. Between late 2004 and mid-2006, any drive up from South Florida to Disney became known as the Blue Roof Drive - from Ft. Lauderdale to Orlando, thousands and thousands of blue tarps covering the roofs of houses and businesses!