Thursday, September 09, 2004

Ivan puts Bonaire on the Map

Well, regular watchers of CNN and the Weather Channel now know where Bonaire is. We had to laugh at the announcers stumbling over Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao, as if they were places on some other planet. One time late Wed. we were reduced to "those islands there."

I was going to post Ivan updates all yesterday, but the blogspot website that I use to post these messages wasn't working. Bummer. I hope it is back up now, I'll find out when I go to post this.

For a while on Tuesday evening it looked like Ivan was headed right for us. By 5 am on Wednesday the NOAA was offering a glimmer of hope that it would go north a teeny bit. We are very thankful that it did indeed pass about a degree north of Bonaire. That was enough.

We had backwards winds and a medium amount of rain. The weather data from the Bonaire Webcams site is archived. The graphs for this week tell the story. No wind at all early Wed, and then a shift to the north and north west and rising wind speeds. The weather channel said the wind was 40 mph. The webcams reported less than that but may have been sheltered from that angle. The wind and rain certainly wasn't anything unusual for windy Bonaire, except for the fact that it was coming from the "wrong" direction.

We are very thankful that Ivan passed us to the North. Judging from what the storm did to Grenada, where they are accustomed to hurricanes, it would have been mind bogglingly devastating if Ivan had hit Bonaire directly.

So Bonaire's record of no hurricanes since the 1880s is intact. This was a close call though.

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