The Power of Love

Business-wise, nineteen ninety-two was a year of mixed fortunes for the Moody family. The winter season was real busy, with the many “ Snowbird “ friends they had made the previous year returning from up north, and they in turn were bringing in their friends, hence the customer base was increasing on a daily basis.  The weather was drier and hotter than usual for the winter months which also made a considerable difference, the few days the temperature dipped into the sixties or, it rained all day, sales dropped dramatically. Celebrity wise new names were being added to the list, with Yogurt birthday cakes being ordered for Greg Norman’s young children and visits from Bobby Ore, (of ice hockey fame), and other golfers Jack Nicklaus and Lee Trevino made appearances. Therefore sales for the year until the third week in August were healthily higher than those of the previous year. That situation however was to be dramatically reversed by what was to take place on the weekend of August 22nd.1992.

The first two summers the Moody family had been in Florida, they were surprised at how the media would put everyone in a state of fear if a hurricane were to develop out in the Atlantic. They would encourage them to visit the Home Depot stores to stock up with plywood, for boarding up their homes and the grocery stores, to purchase gallons of water, tinned foods, flashlights and batteries ready for when the power failed and the water supply was cut off. The summer of ninety-two however was to dramatically change their skepticism of the media hype. The first twelve weeks of the hurricane season had been hotter and drier than normal, for what was supposedly the rainy season, and there had been no tropical storms. In fact that had been the most number of days to go by in any hurricane season without having a named tropical storm develop. Then on Monday August 17^th the weathermen on the local T.V. channels began getting excited about a system which had come off the African coastline and quickly developed into a tropical storm called “Andrew.” By Wednesday the system had grown dramatically into a category “1” hurricane, was forecast to rapidly increase to a major hurricane, and was heading on a direct path to Southern Florida with no other weather systems close by to divert its course. “Andrew” by now was the only topic of conversation, business slowed dramatically because the women were busy getting their grocery supplies from Publix and the men were lining up at Home Depot getting supplies of plywood and nails etc. On Friday morning a slight turn to the north had the fast moving storm forecast to come ashore around the Jupiter area late on Sunday night. It was now a major category “4” hurricane and still increasing in strength.

Early Saturday morning Paul switched on the T.V., tuned into the weather channel and, for the first time, saw the dramatic color enhanced satellite picture of “Andrew” just five hundred miles off the coast of Florida. He suddenly felt sick to the stomach as he considered the implications of a direct hit from Andrew. He did not have flood insurance for Ocean Dunes or the store. Whilst he was confident that the store, being forty feet above sea level was safe from a tidal surge, he realized  that 217 Ocean Dunes was at a much lower altitude and therefore very vulnerable.