Hurricane hopes

[Charlieshafer]

Irene is messing with the entire east coast, but here's a special shout-out of "good luck" to John Monteleone on Islip, Long Island, due for a direct hit, and Mandolin Bros. on Staten Island, also due for major flooding. We'll get I direct hit, too, but being 5 miles inland will help.

[Max Girouard]

We will be having the storm passing right over us as well. While it will be significantly weakening on its way to us, we still have tons of dead standing trees all over the state that will fall, resulting in long term power outages from several days to weeks. What a pain!!!! The last little storm that passed through here left us without power for a week!

[DerTiefster]

I'm hiding with some of the family at -much- higher ground, but I've been monitoring the doings of Irene at water's edge, southern Chesapeake. What I see from the Yorktown Coast Guard Training Facility tidal data online is that the peak tide was less by about half a foot than the November 2009 nor'easter that blew through a couple of years ago and brought us water about a foot lower than Hurricane Isabel of 2003. The storm surge in the York River (north of Norfolk) was only about 4.5 ft, but was maintained through high tide. The 4.5 ft storm addition to the tides in this area is mercifully well below recent peak tides.

This doesn't address the wind damage issues. One of my sons apparently didn't park far enough from trees and had a falling branch hit the hood. Sad. Especially for an Alfa Romeo sedan, with parts availability being what it is. Oh, well. Small potatoes compared to what another 2.5 ft of storm surge would have done. There were estimates of up to 7 ft of storm surge.

My family and pets are safe and dry. And, oh, gee, so are our mandolins. And that's all good. I hope others fare as well.

[Big Rig]

Welcome to what we enjoy in the gulf almost yearly, although we've had some reprieve lately. You need to thank God you didn't experience a Cat 2 or above

<snip> <comment removed. inappropriate and not consistent with our posting guidelines. Please leave your political observations at the door before you enter.>

[frshwtrbob]

Thank You, God.

[JEStanek]

I feel like I really dodged a bullet here. We never lost power and only had a small tree lean over in the front yard. I know lots of folks with wet basements (I know how much of a pain that is). Here's hoping all those who took a harder hit get power back soon and cleaned up.

Jamie

[mandobassman]

I feel very fortunate. We prepared for the worst and thankfully never got it. I does seem weird for me, though, that I spent 10 years in Houston which has a history of natural disasters, and never experienced a hurricane. I moved back to New Jersey and now we got a hurricane and earthquake in less than a week.

[45ACP-GDLF5]

Here in NC we got hit hard. A lot of death and destruction due to falling trees and power lines. Category 2 when it hit the outer banks. I hope Andy Griffith and his wife are ok.

[albeham]

Had Amateur radio all night here near BWI. ALot went down, but not folks just trees, power...Was ready played a lot of mandolin and games with the kids. Glad its over now need to go to work..its a good thing...


AL

[Richard Singleton]

Hopes and prayers that Cafe regular Jake Wildwood and family are OK in Rochester Vermont, which was very hard hit by flooding, and to everyone in Vermont and everywhere else affected by Irene.

http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/a...yssey=nav|head

[Markus]

Laird is also in Vermont, I have been thinking a lot of the people there. Flooding sucks.

[MikeEdgerton]

There are still over a million people without power, it has killed 40 people or so thus far and climbing. It has affected the entire eastern seaboard all the way up into Canada where it killed people as well. It may have "only been a category 1" hurricane but anybody that doesn't see this as a monsterous storm doesn't understand storms or the area it passed through. It's not just about the wind, it's also about the size and the amount of rain it drops and this one was huge and slow moving. The flooding is growing in New Jersey right now (as well as the other states) with more people being evacuated and more people in danger. The sheer number of human beings that were in harms way in this storm is immense. I was without power for a day and a half and luckily was able to control my flooding with a generator and a pump. Many others in my town weren't as lucky as I was.

[bones12]

Here in Vermont we were hit hard with 4-10 inches of rain in 24 hours and pounding winds. The resulting floods have been devastating and surpass the 1927 flood damage. The enormous power of that much rain in mountain communities with creeks turned to rivers has been astounding. Many towns remain cut off from travel, electricity and water. The utter power of that storm was impressive and hard to believe; the flash floods came in just a matter of minutes. Many mandolin players all over this state/ great musicians all over the state-- I hope we are all OK. This state is so small it is one big community and the cooperation and help among neighbors has been just grand. It is what makes living here so special. Play a tune for all of us hit by Irene. Doug in Vermont

[Laird]

Laird is also in Vermont, I have been thinking a lot of the people there. Flooding sucks.

Thanks for the kind thoughts. We got off easy in this corner of the state (the little elbow on the western edge, where the Poultney River curves into the southern tip of Lake Champlain): plenty of flooding but not that much damage. The water did climb up to the 100-year-flood mark on our property before subsiding, and we lost a chunk of river bank and a small island, but we even kept our power on. Lots of roads out, though, and Vermont was never an easy state to cross from east to west in the first place.

Up where Jake's at, they got hit harder. In general, folks on the east side of the Green Mountains bore the brunt. One problem is the topography: most of us live in river valleys surrounded by mountains, so when the waters start to gather, there's no place to go but up. And I've been hearing figures of between 7-10" of rain in some places. Yikes!

Best wishes to all the others out there who took a hit.

[Elliot Luber]

I live near Mr. Monteleone, and we didn't get it so bad here where it was expected, but there's still a lot of folks without electricity across the Northeast. The eye of the storm hit further East, near Andy Statman in Brooklyn, but winds were high in Suffolk County too.

[Jake Wildwood]

Thanks for the support guys...!

Just got back online tonight... we've been out since Sunday. What looked like "not much of a flood" turned pretty evil by the time Mon morn rolled around. We escaped by the skin of our teeth... 6 more inches and our first floor would probably be soaked. Thank goodness for our dirt basement, though, as the 8' of water that was in it seeped right out by Mon afternoon.

It looks like a war zone over here... the river rose up 20+ feet where we are and spread out over the whole valley. It's wild. In town the graves popped open and caskets were floating down main street... there are a couple smashed houses that fell in a creek (turned river) on the far side of town, and one (amazingly, still in one piece) house that's floating out halfway in midair where one can see into the basement like a cutaway view.

The cavalry from all over the place rolled in Wed morning and have been busy ever since patching everything up. I'm totally amazed right now that there are actually TWO ways out into the wide world right now (albeit rough ones) and I'm actually on the internet. I wasn't expecting power back until next week... there's serious line and bridge damage all over up here.

ANYHOW!!! good to be back. Hope everyone else is ok, too. The hard part has just begun, though... there's gonna be some serious logjam with all of the big bridges hit so heavy... not to mention entire yards, buildings, etc. gone. We watched our neighbors' barn go sailing down the river and smack into the big bridge down the street. Not pleasant!!!

[Richard Singleton]

Glad to hear you all came through relatively ok, Jake. I had been watching the reports from Rochester on the web. My daughter Michaela and I safely weathered the storm in an old fishing cabin on the shore of Lake Iroquois in Hinesburg, VT. We had been on vacation there for 3 days when Irene hit. We went back home to the mid Hudson valley region of NY state on monday. (with a couple storm related detours on the NY side of Lake Champlain to get to the North Way. I had actually spoken to my daughter before we left of trip plans and I had told her that on the way home I had wanted to do slight detour to Rochester to visit Antebellum instruments and the Wildwood Flower!

[Randi Gormley]

We were in Burlington for Irene and got out of town without a problem Monday morning, but my word! the flooding around the state was incredible. We kept seeing what looked like lakes on either side of the interstate then realized they were parking lots (with buried cars) and farms. We didn't run into weather-related detours until we hit Massachusetts; once we got home, we found that our neighborhood was ok, but some of the houses on the Sound had washed away and we still have tens of thousands of homes without power, but we weren't hit anything like Vermont.

[DerTiefster]

As a child, I'd seen small-scale damage before: tornadoes in parts of Arkansas/Missouri. The first whiff I had of the Big Stuff was while we were in the SF Bay, CA. when Mt. St. Helens blew up. It was eerie with the cloudy weather that wasn't white clouds of water. We didn't see the up close effects "right there in front of you," but got it by proxy, all sort of unreal. I was still there when the World Series Quake upset things, and I saw the downed bridge structures, etc. It's a little closer to home when people get squashed on roads you formerly traveled with no concern.

We moved to coastal Virginia. Friends had a house flooded out following Floyd's romp through NC in '99, a house only close to a small stream and not in a flood zone, but that still got water up to its eaves. They recovered w/o benefit of the flood insurance they tried to buy and were told it was unavailable because they weren't in a flood area. We got wind and rain that time, but not enough to be debilitating, less than 100 miles away. I've been through Hurricane Isabel's flooding and wind damage in VA, after hearing of Fla and other places having -very- severe wind damage.

What I see is that it is easy to forget what you aren't seeing in front of you. But it's no less real. Irene weakened sufficiently to push less water here than we had in the '09 nor'easter storm (not even sufficient to have a name, although it brought storm surge waters second only to Isabel in the last 70 yrs). But Irene did a Floyd job on a lot of the East Coast. I'm trying not to simply let the suffering of others be "out of sight, out of mind." I'd encourage everyone to try that.

But it's -so- easy to be complacent.

[MikeEdgerton]

I went through the noreaster as well as Floyd and Mt. St. Helens (I lived in Portland at the time). Honestly, this one has the noreaster beat in my book. This one just won't stop giving. It affected us personally more (I live near the NJ shore) than the noreaster and it sure as heck is affecting north Jersey still. Irene's reach was a heck of a lot further than the noreaster that's for sure. This one isn't done yet.

[Mike Bromley]

Owing to it's anomalously huge size, Irene soaked a huge swathe. An oddball for sure, for such a low-category storm. Hope everyone dries out OK.

[Laird]

I went through the noreaster as well as Floyd and Mt. St. Helens (I lived in Portland at the time).

Me, too. Man, that was something--though aside from the novelty of ash everywhere, once the direction of the eruption became clear, nobody in the populated areas was at risk. (The evacuatons were pretty effective, though I do recall being able to get into what would become the red zone with a forged pass, supposedly to remove possessions from a cabin. Great fun for a nineteen-year-old kid!) When the mountain actually blew, I was sleeping just off the trail at Eagle Creek and awakened by the explosion. My memories of that disaster have more to do with excitement than fear. Quite different from being a father and home-owner in my fifties, and living on a incredibly fast-flooding river!

[DerTiefster]

IF (and I hope it remains unfulfilled) Katia heads toward US shores, it will be very interesting to watch the media coverage and compare it against my own assessment of info from bona fide meteorologists. But I hope not to have to bid "good day" to Irene's younger sister after bidding her a "good night."

[Willie Poole]

Here in Md. we got through it pretty good, my house didn`t even have the lights flicker but some friends were out of power for 2 days....The thing about these storms is that I read where there are disasters in certain places and the people still build again and stay in the same place, I wonder why? In Calif. they have mud slides and the people build their house back up in the same place and it all happens again the next year....I never even think about buying or building a house on a river or even a lake.....Our house in Florida IS on a lake but it is 200 yds from the shore line and about 30 ft higher than the water level....It has withstood four hurricanes so far with some roof damage in one of them....GET AWAY FROM THE LOW LYING AREAS....

Willie

[fatt-dad]

late to the party. . . .

We still don't have power at the house (thankfully Home Depot had generators for sale Sunday after the hurricane hit Richmond). Cable is out, phones are out, internet too.

Work was also hit hard. Same story, no power, phone or internet. Work went 2/3rds live yesterday (three phase power operating on two phases).

The image of the storm looking from my side porch is burned into my mind. Heavy rain, bent trees and a dog that wouldn't leave the house.

We just lost one 7-in diameter hickory limb, which fell on our clothsline. That was an easy recovery.

All I know is the delivery rooms will be busy in May. Question is will the girls be named Irene?

f-d