And if in an evacuation zone, do. Please. It’s not the wind. It’s the water. You can’t argue with a flood. Collect the cats and get to high ground.
All of you in the path of Irene—take care.
by CJ | Aug 27, 2011 | Journal | 24 comments
24 Comments
Submit a Comment Cancel reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
We’re all prepared here, dogs are battened down, rain and wind is starting up. Real fun will start by late afternoon. Thankfully, we’re up high (60 feet AMSL LOL), and our forecast isn’t too bad (40-50 mph winds, 6+ inches of rain). Should all be over by sunrise tomorrow.
Good luck to everyone else that’s in the way !
High is the best thing. Good for you.
Remember the land can degrade the hurricane a class or two, but the storm surge it piled up across the ocean didn’t get the message: it’ll be coming like a loose trailer on the freeway.
Whoever hasn’t evacuated that should—go, go, go.
Our rain is beginning now, very heavily. We are not supposed to get the wind until tonight. We are high enough not to worry about flooding here at Malguri, but down near the coast we may have sump pump basement problems that we wont find out about until we get back there several days from now. We have hurricane lamps, flashlights, batteries, water, ice, lots of noodle bowls and parmalat and peanut butter and a generator that will power, alternatively, the computers/kindles and the fridge. We are pretty sure that in one place or another or both we’ll lose power for several days but we aren’t terribly worried about the wind (knocking on wood all the time). Although, so as not to tempt fate, we put all the yard furniture in the barn along with the car.
The cats are a little freaked. They do know this is peculiar. The children have asked, repeatedly, if we are all going to die. They are a little freaked also, but nevertheless seem able to concentrate on their reading well enough.
Look at Google’s interactive map while you still have power:
http://crisislanding.appspot.com/
Hugs to the Short Ones and kitties, Kokipy. And to you and KokiGuy also.
We are just about done with prep. It was raining hard, but is pausing right now. We are the highest point around so no worries about flooding. The wind should not be as bad as expected so hopefully we will not lose many trees.Take care everyone!
P.S. Aloysius is highly insulted because I have put plants all over his shelves. Found him in the middle of one pot. The cuteness factor saved him!
Rain started in the Boston area about an hour ago (~2:30 local time) with a huge downpour, but now it is fairly light (well, a sudden swell as I typed “fairly”) and no wind yet. There will be, though. We’re pretty well set for a few days. Will do some baking this afternoon/evening because it’s my spouse’s birthday and baked goods are always nice. Tomorrow, Sunday afternoon, is supposed to be the worst.
We had a lovely week vacationing with the kids and their SOs in Cape May for the week. Lost a day when we were told to evacuate by 8 AM Friday – about 48 hrs ahead of the storm. They’re going to get hit pretty hard, at high tide in a new moon. Hope no one is left on the Cape, and everyone in NJ hunkers in. Kudos to Cape May county and NJ government for an orderly and timely evac order.
Russ — who lives in Bay Shore on Long Island — had a mandatory evacuation today. He’s moved north and inland a bit to Fishkill and is in a hotel. He’ll still get hit, but it was the storm surge they worried about on Long Island. So he’s settled in and hoping for the best now.
(Ummm… Russ is my husband. He took a job in New York when he couldn’t find anything here and has been working at getting us back out of debt and finding a closer job for four years now. Sigh. I’m still in Nebraska. We only see each other two or three times a year.)
I expect he’ll loose power, but at least I know he’s not in the really more dangerous area now.
Thinking good thoughts for all of you!
Here in the Philadephia northern suburbs, rain and winds are picking up. Irene’s eye will hug the coastline as it heads north. The real concern is that August rainfall is already at a record and the ground is completely saturation. This means trees are more vulnerable to the wind, bringing down power lines, etc. A tornado watch has been declared for the coastal New Jersey counties.
We’re just hunkered down to endure Irene’s slobbery kiss.
You are all in my thoughts and prayers – stay safe.
It’s just after 10:00am local time in Boston and, while the wind has been rising the past few hours, it’s nothing extraordinary and the rain itself has been relatively light (thank goodness, since my basement sits on bedrock and likes to leak around the edges). Looking at the storm tracker on the NYT (what OSGirl also posted), the hurricane has swung inland as we hoped and so is loosing its ability to pick up nice, warm ocean water and “steam.” Here in the Massachusetts seacoast area, look’s like we’re outside of the major track of the storm which is fine by me. Also therefore looks like my family up on the NH seacoast and the family camp on a bay off the ocean won’t be hit too hard (which is doubly fine by me). The storm is pulling by SmartCat in Rhode Island right now, by the NYT map but they should be out of the track too.
Mind you, our house sits in a dell so wind is never as bad as in exposed areas. The tops of the trees above the dell are certainly lashing about a fair bit… and the rain is picking up some at the moment (only to die backdown as I proof read this. The rain and gusts are still sporadic rather than constant). We’re a few hours before the storm pulls alongside Boston.
The big adventure of last night was our cat, Froggie (litter mate of Mackie who died two weeks ago) catching, with a great and still unidentified crash, a mouse. He’s good at catching but no idea what to do next. My spouse, who does mouse duty with Frog, spent a fair while persuading him to release it, whereupon a towel was dropped on the mousie, it was scooped up into a paper bag and released out into what was still a fairly calm night with fairly light rain. That adventure ended by 5:00 am and we settled back down to sleep.
Power’s back up after 7 hours. A wild night, but only 3 inches fell where we are. For us personally, no damage; a couple of leaks at known points (gotta get those fixed!). Pity the poor gal at Dunkin’ Donuts, the only place in the area we could get coffee; all the other employees of her shift couldn’t get in because of flooding, and she all by herself with a long Sunday morning line of customers. All things considered, damage was much less than it could have been. Time to give thanks!
Update: rainfall stats can be confusing. I was using weather.com stats. I found a high school weather station: Sat: 3.4 in. Sun (since midnight): 2.1 in. So 5.5 in so far. We may get as much as another couple of inches today.
So far, so good @ 10:53 EDT. No power loss so far and we are just about out of the the tornado watch time. Small branches but no trees down. I started some oatmeal bread. If we do lose power I’ll bake it tomorrow on the grill.
Raesean, at least you know where the mice are. Our guys leave them on the kitchen floor for us to find in the morning! 🙂 I agree that it’s more like a nor’easter than hurricane. It’s been downgraded to a tropical storm.
CapnKirk, how fortunate that you only lost power for 7 hours. I did not even try to go out for the papers this morning.
Wind is picking up again. I’m going to move computer etc. out of the sunroom.
STAY SAFE!
our power just came back after being out for 12 hours. no damage other than a few tree limbs. very thankful that our area came off lightly. rain total was between 55 and 6 inches
The rain stopped several hours ago and the wind has, seemingly, died down quite a bit here now. I should go out in the garden and “bunny farm” for weeds, herbs and other tasty treats for our two indoor buns. I think I will stay out of the back yard, though, as trees from the nearby woods hang over it and a limb could still easily come down.
… no, I take it back: it’s raining a fine drizzle so no garden for me yet and here’s a gust of wind blowing in my office window as I opened it for some cool air. What shall I do with myself instead? I just finished another round on Petfinder.com of looking for a young kitten to join our Froggie Cat and buns, but today is not a day to go drive to nearby shelters on a kitten-inspection tour. I know, I should get working on my novel!
@Aja – haven’t heard about power situation on base. I’ve heard most of the contractor sites are without power. I’ll probably have to work from home anyway since my SO is stuck in the Northeast without transportation.
One thing I’ve never figured out: why, after issuing an evacuation order in an urban environment, do they then suspend public transportation service in the area a whole 24 hours in advance?
At this rate, It will be quicker for me to drive all the way to CT and retrieve them myself.
That did somewhat pose a question to me, too…only thing I could think of is maybe they feared having the subway clogged with panicked last minute people as the storm hit, and then having no way to get them out to get the system shut down and closed.
Russ is fine. Heading back to New York tomorrow because he has to be in the office. I hope everyone is doing okay!
There was a tornado in Virginia Beach on Saturday morning. We tend to forget that hurricanes also spawn tornadoes and they can be sneaky, since you don’t hear anything coming through all of the other roaring from the winds. The path of the tornado was heading for where my ex-wife lives, and I was greatly concerned about her. I haven’t heard anything negative, and did ask a mutual friend, so apparently, she’s all right. No idea what the damage might be to the house, but that’s fixable.
Seeing some of the pictures from people who live not on the Outer Banks, but just off Pamlico Sound, they caught a lot of grief.
I felt the headline in my hometown’s newspaper was a little bit insensitive, but then, maybe it wasn’t. It read, “NYC Survives Irene”, yes, but there were more people in the areas hit by Irene than just NYC. The Navy probably had all of the ships that could get underway head out to sea on Friday, but then, you have the families of those sailors who might not be able to leave in time. Since that area has 2, count ’em, two interstates, and both of them run through tunnels at some point, the traffic situation was probably horrendous. If they shut down the tunnels, that leaves no way to get out. Almost like waiting for the surge in “Deep Impact”.
I hope everyone is all right, though.