Yes, for South Florida, Cat 5 Hurricane Dorian was quite a Labor Day disruptor Throughout “dangerously threatened” Palm Beach County so visibly vulnerable on the many ominous illustrations accompanying the incessant TV weather reports, Labor Day sales sank to a new low in a just few inches of rising surf.
Flights got cancelled. Airports closed. Hotels, restaurants, stores went dark. Even Publix folded along with my oceanfront condo, The Chalfonte, and my club down beach from where I live, The Boca Resort and Club, became a veritable ghost town.
Everything closed, got locked up, shut down along with the bridges and all else in the path of, or should I say along the ever widening side road, that ominous cone of uncertainty caused by the slow poke Dorian.
Except for the five killed offshore on Abaco Island, Dorian’s bark as she brushed the South Florida coast was a lot louder than her bite.
Nevertheless, there were thousands of silent, perhaps suffocating victims along the imperiled coast of Florida.
No one talks about them, not even the grim, intense TV news crews reporting from the beaches as if trying to stir up the wind and waves to make Dorian appear more impactful and dangerous than she really was. Then the official warnings from the governor on down provoking legions of frightened Floridians to dutifully evacuate en mass amid the gloomy and scary predictions and steely precautionary reporting by visibly concerned local TV newscasters.
I’m talking about creatures who have no access to local news, who are not on any First Responders endangered list, our sea turtles.
Few are as endangerously encamped and dug in deeper within the cone of uncertainty than our brave, undaunted sea turtles.
There they were, all bravely nestling quietly beneath the sand all along our battered coast.
There they lay asleep and awaiting the time they would come alive and race for the ocean, from whence their mother came to bury them months before so they’d hatch and hightail it back to their mother sea.
But where were the sticks and red ribbons that marked their underground nurseries? The warning signs to leave them be or face prosecution and fines? Where are they? Gone with the wind and the surging tide?
Thanks to Dorian, the higher than normal tide had washed many of those markers out to sea, so no longer were the baby turtles’ neonatal plots clearly visibly, plainly marked and protected.
Who knows now what will happen to our poor sleeping sea turtles. Are they all right? Safe?
Why aren’t they in the local news? Why is there no clamor for their rescue? No reporting on them?
Why aren’t we talking about what that darn Dorian did to our beautiful sea turtles?
TM