Surviving Irene

This is where I normally park my car. Luckily, I moved my car up by the garage.

Well, we survived Irene. In all honesty, I think it’s blowing harder now at 11:00 in the morning than it did for a good chunk of last night.

By the way, that branch was the largest limb that fell in our yard. That’s important because normally I park my car there! Luckily, I had decided to move it right up by the garage to keep it out of the wind – and away from the row of pine trees.

It seems to me that this hurricane was very unusual insofar as I would expect hurricanes to be. I was expecting conditions to deteriorate as the eye drew closer, but it seems like the worst time of it was yesterday afternoon and early evening, several hours before the center of the storm came by. On the back side, the wind is howling outside at about the same amount of time after the eye of the hurricane passed. Granted, the closest experience I had to a storm before this was Ernesto a few years back. Aside from the duration of the event, Irene’s effects seemed comparable to me.

Yet the sizzle didn’t match the steak. I’ve been glued to the Weather Channel for a couple days trying to see what would happen, but all they seemed to talk about was North Carolina (naturally, since the hurricane was supposed to make landfall there) and New Jersey/New York City. Okay, that’s a major center of population. But they didn’t send anyone to Ocean City and didn’t make much of an effort to pinpoint when Irene would affect us. I got more information from our local news than the channel which is supposed to be “the hurricane experts.”

Hopefully everyone within the reach of my words had a similar story to mine – other than a little water in the basement, the few branches down, and a bit of a flashing failure on my chimney (we had water running down the front of our fireplace, which faces east into the wind) we got through this just fine. My significant other even went to a wedding yesterday afternoon and we never lost our power.

So now I guess I can dump the pot of water we left on the stove, drain the bathtub we filled in case we needed to flush the toilet, and place the dozen or so plastic ice bags we made into the garage freezer. Oh, and eventually move my car back now that I dragged that branch out of the driveway and take the basement furniture off the blocks. So it’s another busy day about these parts.

Author: Michael

It's me from my laptop computer.