Safe from Hurricane Helene

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I paid zero attention to this storm, as the forecast track consistently modeled the storm impacting Tallahassee directly. Big mistake. What I didn't pay attention to was the immense size of this storm, and the fact that some meteorologists speculated that it would reach Cat-4 status (it did). Shame on me. As a result, I was completely unprepared for this. I volunteered to work the night of the hurricane so that people could get their hurricane supplies at the last minute. Around 6pm, I started glancing at the radar since the impacts were staring to be felt. It looked like the eye wall shifted a little to the right. No big deal, sometimes these massive hurricanes wobble a little bit. But each hour, as I checked the radar, I noticed that the rightward shift continued. This meant the hurricane was coming closer to where I was instead of directly hitting Tallahassee like it was supposed to. At 10pm, I started getting worried. From the projections, it looked like the eye wall would come within about 10 miles of where I was working. Time to get out and get home! With minimal food, water, batteries and other hurricane supplies, I could only hope for the best. When I got home, the power was already out, and the girls (gf and daughter) were hunkered down in the living room. I turned off the main breaker to the house so we wouldn't have any power surges later, and told everyone we were sleeping in the living room. I have a heavy tree canopy in my front and back yard, so there was danger of trees crashing through the house. The living room was the safest place in the middle of the house. I got absolutely no sleep the entire night as I heard branch after branch crashing down on my roof. I lay there just waiting for one or more trees to come crashing down. Thankfully, none did. By 5:30am the next morning, when my alarm went off, the storm was over but we were still without power. I fumbled around in the dark, got dressed, and went to work (it was quite an adventure getting to work with all the downed trees). I am still without power (it's been more than 24 hours now), but I have the generator hooked up and running. We lost everything in the fridge and freezer, but thankfully there wasn't much in there since we had done nothing to prepare for the storm. And a quick inspection of my house and surrounding area in the daylight revealed no major damage. I do have trees down in my yard, but nothing a chainsaw and a little muscle can't handle this weekend. I consider myself lucky on this one. I reacted like a typical native Floridian, thinking it wouldn't be no big deal. But it was. In the photo, you can see the eye wall of the storm about to come ashore, with the small town of Perry just to the top of the eye wall. East of the eye wall is Gainesville, where I live, but directly in between Perry and Gainesville is where I work in the small town of Alachua. It gives a little bit of perspective of just how close I was to the eye wall. My heart goes out to the 30+ people who lost their lives in this ferocious hurricane.