HARLEM HEIGHTS, Fla. — Sandy Frabel couldn’t leave her family behind to wait out the storm.
” I’m not gonna leave my dad in a house by himself where I don’t know whether or not he’ll be able to get out,” she said. “My dogs are like my kids so I’m not gonna leave them behind either.”
They stayed and waited to see what Hurricane Ian would bring.
“I didn’t fathom the amount of water that we got,” Frabel said, “and how quickly we got it.”
They didn’t know what they got until Wednesday night at 6:36 on the dot.
“The water was coming inside of the house. We didn’t know because we were laying down, we hadn’t slept since the night before.”
Frabel says they realized their generator had floated away and they needed to get to safety. They busted out a back window in their house to get outside. By that point, the water was already waist-high.
She says her husband acted quickly to get Sandy, her father, and their four dogs onto their pontoon boat.
“He went and detached it from the trailer and it floated right up,” she said. “By the time we made it onto the pontoon boat we were level with the back patio roof.”
The boat ended up being their salvation. That’s where they stayed, floating and hoping, from seven at night to eight in the morning.
“Still until this morning, I still felt like I was rocking on that boat,” Frabel said on Saturday. “I can still hear the emergency sirens, because they were going off all night long. And I just keep hearing those, hearing them, hearing them.”
The Frabels used kayaks to get to safety the next day. The boat still sits on the side of their home as a sign of their survival.
“I got clothes on, it’s dry and it doesn’t smell like sewage. I got shoes on my feet, they’re not mine they don’t fit me but they’re on my feet,” Frabel said, “And we have a roof over our head. I’m blessed. I don’t need anything else.”
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