SUNBURY – A former Valley resident turned Floridian is doing okay as Hurricane and now Tropical Storm Irma ripped through Florida. Chris Boone is originally from Bloomsburg and now lives in Cape Coral, Florida.
He joined WKOK’s On The Mark to provide an update on the conditions at his location, “We’re in the middle of cleanup now. We’ve got lots of downed trees, downed power lines, and still some local flooding. The city’s getting back together. The emergency management system is very well organized. They know what they’re doing.”
Boone says evacuations in his area weren’t mandatory, only discretionary. He says he and his five-year-old daughter were comfortable staying put, “My whole neighborhood is very well tight. We know each other, we’re good friends, and we look out for each other. Everybody in my neighborhood decided to stay and stick it out. A few of us have generators and they’re up and running because nobody really has power on our block. So we’re just going to take care of each other.”
Boone says the roof is still intact on his home. He says emergency crews have asked residents to stay home. Boone also says he measured about seven and half inches of rain and guesses about 50 miles-per-hour winds passed through.
Boone is a store manager at Toys ‘R’ Us in Fort Myers, “I’m assume by tomorrow morning I’ll be able to get over there and check it out and make sure the roof’s intact, because that actually went through more of the center of the eye or part of the eye wall than we did.”
Boone says he thinks power in his immediate area should be restored by Wednesday, but it could take a while to restore power in the rest of his community. (Matt Catrillo)
