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What A Day!

I didn't have my Spanish lesson today at 8:15 AM as my tutor couldn't make it. The hangar was very quiet this morning when I arrived. The pilots were at their annual tech meeting. All nine pilots met throughout the day over in the Nate Saint house. I wish I had taken a picture of them, and I had hoped to do it at the end of the day. But, before I could, three of them hurried over to the hangar about 3 PM and jumped in planes to go home. Mike and Brian flew to Quito, and Chad flew to Sucua. And of course nobody else thought to get that photo. It's not very usual to get them all together at the same time.

As for me, I got quite a bit done with the new server, and am getting to know it better. It's quite different from the existing e-mail server, yet the same. It runs the http://www.thehoffmanfamily.com/ operating system, but this new server is running a GUI called Gnome. That means there are icons and windows and a mouse pointer instead of me needing to type in cryptic commands every time I want to do something. Towards the end of the afternoon I was fighting with the HP Laserjet printer. It keeps jamming, and I haven't quite figured out why.

At lunchtime the boys had been interested to see that Maximo and Panchito (MAF hangar employees) were building three large piles of wood for fires. I told them that the hangar employees were going to have a lesson on the fire extinguishers and then practice putting out fires. I didn't think they'd get to see it, but the schedule ran late for the day, and by 4 PM they were ready to light the fires. Both boys were there, and both boys were excited to actually get to use the fire extinguisher on the fires. The downside to that was that all the smoke blew right towards out house, and right into our house. We don't have glass in four windows on that side of the house, just screens, so Ellyn got smoked out while the fire extinguisher practice was going on. It wasn't long after that, about 5 PM, that it all broke loose.

Bruce had just walked into the office where I have my desk, and the rain started. And it was really loud as it pounded on the tin roof. So loud that people out on the hangar floor were holding their hands over their ears. I stepped out of the office, and knew right away I should grab my camera. The rain was pouring down so hard, the visibility was about 50 yards. You can see in this picture. In the very center of the picture is the fuel storage shed, and you can't see it at all. That white stuff is rain, not fog or snow! Also, from where I was standing to take the picture, I was getting spray blown onto me. With that much water blowing into the hangar, I knew we needed to close the doors at each end. I also knew that it would be very difficult to do in such high wind. The doors are metal frames with sheets of tin covering the frame, and they are like big sails--they catch a lot of wind as the come down into the closed position. Oscar and Mateo closed the door at the west end, but the rain and wind still poured into the east end, drenching everything within twenty feet of the door. And then, the door at the west end starting going up again, as the force of the wind broke the door loose from it's locks, and started to tear away three sheets of tin. Bruce and Fred ran to close the east door, and I wasn't too sure it was going to work. Right then Wilma told me Ellyn was on line three. Ellyn yelled into the phone for me to come home--something about a tree falling down, and water pouring into the house. I raced out the door and charged across the street in the driving rain, quickly getting soaked as I made the 100-yard dash to our house. Sure enough, when I got to the back yard, there was a tree from the edge of the jungle, uprooted and leaning towards our house, pressing on the five foot high chain link fence. Ellyn saw me out the window and told me that water wasn't really 'pouring' into the house. That had been Dustin's assessment, but really it wasn't as bad as all that. However, with the rain blowing sideways, and those four glass-less windows I told you about, things were getting wet inside. By this time the rain was slowing down. The amazing thing is that the storm blew in so quickly, dumped so much water, and was gone in twenty-five minutes. Within forty-five minutes I could see patches of blue sky again. I can't be sure, but I'll bet it rained more than an inch in twenty-five minutes. Ellyn mopped up around the house while Dustin, Taylor, and I cut up the tree limbs with our machetes. Meanwhile, MAF base families stopped by to see the tree and find out what else had happened on the base. A couple other trees had blown over, but other than that things were good. The worst damage is the hangar door, and a sheet of fiber glass skylight on the roof which was blown off. So tonight there's a 4'x6' hole in the hangar roof. We'll start the clean-up and repair in the morning.

Through the whole thing, Lucy the Macaw sat out in her favorite tree and hung on. She was soaked afterwards, but even when I tried to get her down she wanted to stay put. Normally she jumps on my hand every chance she gets. Later on she showed up at the front door for her dinner and a bit of attention.