Three Weeks Later, Look What’s Happening in Key West

     The biggest event of the week was the arrival of the Empress of the Sea Cruise Ship.  This is the first indicator that things are returning to “normal” Key West style. Today we had a Carnival Cruise Ship.  More and more of the hotels, restaurants, bars, tourist attractions and souvenir shops are re-opening every day.

     The streets are slowly losing the debris, downed trees ground to sawdust and hauled away.  Most everyone in Key West and Stock Island have electricity, Internet and cable TV.    All of the grocery stores are open along with Sears, Kmart, Home Depot and the drugstores.  The lines at the gas stations have disappeared, the only line seems to be at McDonald’s on the boulevard.   FEMA has closed the food and water distribution centers that were so essential for our survival in the first weeks after Irma struck.

     It is fair to say that we are operating very well and the comfort level for those of us living in Key West is good overall.  There are still those in the middle and upper keys that suffered the total loss, who are not progressing quiet so well.  Those of us that live at the end of the road are feeling very blessed to be returning to a kind of normalcy.  It will take a year of more to get everything back just like it did after Wilma struck in 2005.