New York is all aflutter today about the hurricane. In fairness, it looks like dear ol’ Irene is about to head directly through Queens. In fact, the current track has the eye passing within two or three blocks of my friend Zahid’s house.
As you can probably imagine, I’ve spent the day analyzing the zillion and one things that can go wrong in our fair city’s electric system when a hurricane hits. Been kind of an interesting day in that respect. We’ve been dusting off old contingency plans, going back through old notes and historic flooding maps, and basically trying to figure out what’s the worst that can happen and then what’ll happen after that if worst really comes to worst. Needless to say, I hope it doesn’t come to that.
I talked to Sally today and convinced her to buy some bottled water, some batteries, and various other odds and ends. According to Stratford’s hurricane map, our particular house shouldn’t have a problem—at least not with storm surge flooding—unless we get hit with a Category 4 storm. Frankly, I can’t even imagine how that could happen. Irene is a fairly big storm now, but as she moves north, she’s expected to lose strength because the water will start getting colder. Here’s hoping.
Of course, the flipside of that is that this area tends to get a lot less wind than, say, coastal North Carolina, meaning that we have a lot more old growth trees, which are in turn a lot more susceptible to even much lower force winds. And then, too, with a higher population density, the odds are a lot higher that a falling tree will take out somebody’s power lines… or their house! A tree can’t fall in a vacant lot if there aren’t any vacant lots.
In any event, folks tend to be prepared for the disasters that they’ve seen recently. In New York, we take terrorism very seriously, but until this week, it’d been something like 50 years since we had an earthquake and at least 20 since we’ve seen a hurricane. And even then, that last hurricane wasn’t a particularly big storm. So, I’d say folks are at least a little freaked just because of the sheer novelty of the event. Yes, we have Nor’easters with some regularity, but there is a BIG difference between 40+ mile per hour winds and winds that are fully hurricane force. But, you know, we’re still not quite as far gone as they are in New Jersey where the governor has already declared a State of Emergency and begun talking publicly about mass evacuations. But, you know, time may show that he was right to get a jump start on the madness. Who knows?
Assuming that we don’t have any major problems with the house or our cars or anything, perhaps the biggest impact on our family will be our planned trip to Six Flags this weekend, which we’ve had to postpone a week for the obvious reasons. Of course, the kids still want to go and all, but I doubt the park will be much fun with rain blowing sideways at 40+ miles per hour. Beyond that, Sally and I have also had to move our half-marathon training plans around a little, though in fairness, I’m too worried. Or, rather, I’m still sore enough from the tri last weekend that I’m not ready to start upping my run mileage drastically. I hope to get out for a long run on Saturday morning before the craziness starts, but beyond that, this weekend’s looking like a wasted week in terms of PT.
There’s not a lot else to report. Hopefully you guys are all having a good week.
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