The Questions Posed by Floods and Fire

It's been an unsettling holiday in many ways.  But let me preface what I'm about to say with a moment of gratitude:  I've spent much of December seeing friends and family with time to sit and talk and reconnect.  In some ways, it's been a perfect holiday.

I continue to be unsettled about the pre-Christmas flood that we had.  We left town on Saturday afternoon.  There had been no talk of weather systems coming our way, no warnings, no alerts.  Our friends who stayed in town said that an alert came around 1 a.m. on the morning of Monday, Dec. 23.  My brother-in-law had heard something about coastal flooding and wondered if we would be affected. 

We had the kind of flooding that I've only seen during Hurricane Irma.  We had these flooding rains without any sort of tropical system nearby; in fact, we had this flood during the time of year that we usually think of as the dry season.

The insurance adjuster came out on Dec. 31.  She said that she could tell that the water came up to the dashboard of the car that was parked on the street.  She declared the car a total loss, and we didn't disagree.  She said that to salvage the car, we'd have to replace the seats, which were still wet when she sat on them (a week after the flood, still wet).  We'd have to replace the hybrid battery, and we'd likely have to replace all of the electric systems.  We were happy that she declared it totaled.

We had the title in the fireproof safe, so she was able to write our check before she left.  We got half of what we paid for the car when we bought it in 2014, which is more than we've ever gotten for a car that we tried to sell or trade in. My spouse has a different way of looking at it:  it's as if we paid $100 a month to rent the car. I like that perspective.

So now, we look for another car.  We are looking for something that's a bit more floodproof or at least sits higher off the road.  I'd like something that's designed to go offroad, as the undercarriage might be more protected.  I don't know if I want to afford something like that.

That's one of the questions we've been asking ourselves.  How much do we want to afford?  This question addresses the price of the car, but also the gas mileage, the hybrid possibility, the new-vs.-used question.

And then there are the larger questions.  We had a group of neighborhood friends come over on New Year's Eve, and the talk turned, as it often does, to the question of how long we can stay:  in our neighborhood and in South Florida in general.  We don't have answers.

In this week when it seems that all of Australia is on fire, it seems clear that we should make plans for moving to higher ground.

But first, we need to figure out a car replacement.