Thursday, November 8, 2012

November 8 2012 Hurricane Sandy

Now that we're back on line, here's our up close and personal account of Sandy (the second "storm of the century" in the past two years).

Our storm preparations: clear all objects off windowsills,

move garbage cans, outside plants and lower porch plants inside, get as much as possible off the floors of my studio and the rest of downstairs,



tie down the wood pile, cook a big batch of soup, take down all hanging plants, cover north facing windows with blankets (I had read about that, it was supposed to stop shattered glass from spraying everywhere, which sounded like a great idea; it wasn't until several days later that I realized that perhaps stapling a flimsy blanket to the window framing was not going to stop a tree branch hurled by hurricane force winds once it hit the glass), gas up the generator and fill both 5 gallon backup containers.

What to have on hand: water, food, flashlights, blankets, chocolate. What to do first when the power blows: eat all ice cream in any freezer. Then wait an hour or two and start the generator.

It was pretty scary here, especially that first night that Sandy was literally on top of us and whipping the trees around like grass blades. The wind was even worse that I had feared, but luckily for us the rain was less so. We had a few minutes here and there of heavy downpours but mostly nothing or light rain, so no water in the house. And oddly enough, Sadie, who quakes with fear at even the smallest thunderboomer, was completely unmoved by the hurricane. She did roll her eyes towards the windows a few times when the wind REALLY howled, but other than that didn’t much seem to notice. The last news item I saw on t.v. before shutting the generator down Monday night was, sadly, about someone in Queens who’d been killed by a tree coming right through his house. I thought, okay, that’s enough of that, I’ll just get out my library book and read by candlelight. Of course the book I started began with – a man just widowed because a tree came down on his house and killed his wife. So I spent Monday night lying awake in bed wondering how many seconds we had if I heard that unmistakable “craaack” that meant one of the big oaks was moving our way …

Our power blew out Monday about 3:30 p.m., and didn’t get back on until Sunday night about 6 p.m. Thankfully we had our loyal generator (my new best friend); I got quite adept at powering up and down, which used to be so intimidating to me. Now it’s just second nature.

Alas, poor Brian still is the only one able to wrestle the generator out of its house to refuel, and also the only one who can lift five gallons of fuel to pour. I hold the funnel (hey, it helps!). We’ve been talking about rigging something that would avoid the dragging since Hurricane Irene, but so far it’s just talk. Maybe this year…

The monastery folks were wonderful, as always, and invited us over for any lunches or dinners we wanted to join them, and also loaned us a propane unit about 5 days in as my microwave ideas had pretty much run out. I sent Brian over for meals and to cook up some pasta (they have gas for heat and cooking so could do this) and he brought home really delicious meals for me – so large that one lunch lasted for two. And as they are all Buddhist vegans, no problem for me with the meat issue. We never did use the propane but it was nice to know we could have…

When the storm passed we were able to see what had happened, and again were very lucky compared to so very many. Our chimney cap blew off, a piece of fascia on the north side of the house as well, and our fences were blown down or sideways; otherwise, except for my sanity, all else survived.




It was infuriating to know that six miles down the road power was restored in 24 hours; but again, given what we could see when we had the generator on and could watch t.v., we knew how lucky we were. Also infuriating were the robocalls stacked up for us at our off-site voice mail about the election; I kept swearing at them as I erased them, fuming that there was time and money to do that, but not one official, local or otherwise, had time to come out here in seven days. Seemed like the very definition of “adding insult to injury”. I was deeply insulted and certainly felt injured by the lack of information.

Yesterday some local workmen came out ahead of today’s storm (yes, another one is coming to us as I type) and thankfully got everything put back in place. I went on line to file a FEMA claim, and while I filled out everything I could, the site informed me that our county (Sullivan) has not yet been declared a disaster area. Tried to make some calls to state officials but not only were they absent for the election, most didn’t have phone machines on to take messages. Much like our electric provider, these folks really don’t want to deal with ranters like me. So they just make themselves inaccessible. Today I was able to reach a human (I assume) and was told the paperwork had been filed and to check on the web to see when the declaration finally is public.

And just now the snow has begun, so I’ll end with just a shot of our newly upgraded furnace (this small local disaster, ours alone, hit a week before the storm; all’s fixed now but the thousands it cost made me feel like you should all admire our shiny new parts that we got instead of anything else in the foreseeable future. But we have heat! Yay!).

P.S. This morning (Thursday) we have power (no outage last night) and the snow is mostly melting. Again, yay!