Well, I think it was by rote for many weeks. We lived in our front yard for 3 weeks... I happened to have a screen house from my camping stuff...and we slept there... it rained on and off the entire time...and the sleeping bags often got wet, but at least we weren't in the driven rains...

I set up a wash stand set up like at camp, and cranked up the propane grill for warm water to wash with... One neighbor, a Sergeant who stayed and didn't evacuate, had a freezer full of meat so we ate meat each meal before it rotted.

We obtained a generator after a few weeks, and by then we had been able with help of the neighbor before he shipped out, broke open the damaged garage door, so after a makeshift roof was tacked onto it, we moved from the screen house to the garage, though it was open air then, and no door to protect us yet.

We took turns pulling guard shifts... that is until the 3rd neighbor really melted down and his wife was more interested in rolling her hair than safety...they almost shot one of us in their frenzy of thinking someone was breaking into a neighboring house... they left for somewhere else after that. But it was tougher with just four of us doing the night shift to stay safe. (Martial law.)

It took a month before the National Guard found us...and all of us having military training soon realized that the Ntl Guard were carrying weapons WITHOUT AMMO!!!! We had more fire power than they... but the good thing was, no questions asked, you tell them where the bodies were, and they threw them into the back of the truck and took them off to the morgue...they'd come through nightly and do this (if needed) once in a while they'd bring ice.

Like I said, it rained everyday for weeks...so you couldn't dry anything out...and clothes that made it through the storm rotted, or rusted on the hangars. The same with the carpet, and furniture. The walls in the house reeked with mold and mildew, so they had to be torn out too...

I used my hunting sling shot, and bb pistol to kill the rats as they ran across the top of the pieces of fence still around... was a terrible problem we'd never had before.

We didn't have communications, even though I am an amateur radio operator. My battery ran down trying to break in to the conversations from ppl north of us talking about how bad they heard it was down south No internet ('92) and no phones. We did buy a cellular phone as soon as we could get out into towns north of us...

The local Elks lodge set up a soup kitchen and free store and we went there to eat lunch after a month or so I think... the Red Cross came through after the National guard found us, but the truck was empty... didn't even have coffee or cheap dog food ... some stupid stuff...guess we were the end of their path but they never NEVER returned to help. One lady brought a bag of plastic bags, so I was able to save some papers and wet photo albums but it was too late for the clothes and stuff. The Miami Herald began throwing papers to us after a while, but no one said to open them and read where the help was, we were too traumatized to realize it on our own and wondered why they thought we had time to read their paper! We were too busy surviving.

I think it took 3 months before we had water turned back on, though pressure was low... power came sooner because we had underground cables and had dried in the garage...

that's enough for now.