Saturday, August 27, 2011

THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM

Eerily quiet around here this morning. And dark.

The rain hasn't started yet. They don't expect the center of the storm to make it up this way until tomorrow morning, but the outer edge of it should reach us by this evening.

Meanwhile at almost 10AM it looks here like a winter morning around 6AM, dark and brooding and a little bit ominous.

The hurricane has weakened, so that's a good thing, but it hasn't shrunk, and so far the path is still supposed to come pretty close to Manhattan, which is more or less just across the Hudson from this area of Jersey.

I was here for Floyd in '99 I think it was, when the river that runs through our town that's more like a creek raged over its masonry walls and turned into a mini-Mississippi. I stood on the steps of our part of the two family house we rented in and watched giant trees and one garage and other less large debris get swept away in places where the day before I could have stood on dry land and now held water that would be above my head if I were still standing there.

But even so, our town doesn't flood much other than right where I was during Floyd, but nearby towns were inundated with water, some stores had as much as three and a half feet of it. And other not so nearby towns were under even deeper water in their downtown sections.

This time it could be worse because the ground is already so saturated. They expect by this time tomorrow to have a lot of power outages. And they expect them to last for days. So after a few more errands (I couldn't locate anyone who had extra D batteries since two days ago, for when the ones in my flashlight run out) and putting the garbage cans and backyard lawn furniture in the basement (where I already got as much as I could in our storage area off the floor) and do some laundry and get some more food that won't perish if the refrigerator loses power, I plan on settling in with some good books for the evening and hopefully be still able to post in the morning.

[PS: My thirteen-year-old is in Florida with his mother and aunt and a friend of his, ironically, since usually when they go down there this time of year I worry about the hurricanes hitting them! They were supposed to be driving up I95 today, but of course that isn't happening. So for now they're safe in Florida!]

2 comments:

Robert G. Zuckerman said...

Wishing you safety in the arms of Mother Nature and looking forward to the post post.

rz

tpw said...

It's strangely quiet here, too. It's almost 8 p.m. & there's very little wind and a light rain, but they're predicting that Irene will hit us hard in DC around midnight. Our power company, Pepco, the worst in the country, is practically guaranteeing outages. I hate powerlessness!