Hurricane Irene

[JaoSming]

Did anyone else get hit by it?


Here in VT we got a LOT of rain (9" according to our gauge) and it had been a very wet month already. We only lost power in the wee hours of the night, but we didn't have internet at all for some reason...

...anyway

this is(was?) the only store in town



this is the only road that gets you to the closest "cities" and Montpelier


and this was maybe a quarter mile up the road from our house



So nothing hit the house directly, but we had to make a two hour trip for a prenatal exam today which took an extra couple hours because of detours. Off the highway I saw full parking lots with 3-4 feet of water surrounding the cars, the flood waters up to the asphalt of the highway, and entire exits blocked off since they just went into water.


Still, the weirdest part for me was watching all the coverage of the damage in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. We honeymoon'd down there and recognized all the piers, houses, and flooded streets they were showing on the news. Crazy stuff.

[Andrew]

Glad to hear you're OK, Jon. Looks pretty bad, looks like not everyone was so lucky as to only lose power and Internet temporarily...not that those aren't inconveniences, of course.

[rise]

I remember one of the forecasts for the storm (quite early on) had it ripping straight through the Carolinas, including Columbia and Charlotte. We ended up not getting a drop of rain in either city, but it was windy as fuck the day it hit the Outer Banks. Instead, we got flash floods in a (normal?) evening storm today. I couldn't see out of my window because of it. Anyway, back to Irene: apparently at least 40 are dead (mainly drownings and falling trees), 8 million homes were left without power, nearly a $1B in damage to crops in NC alone, and Vermont had its worst flooding in decades. It's just left a trail of destruction 13 states long, plus whatever has happened to the Caribbean.

Holy shit.

[fumanchu]

that's scary....glad you and your family's ok...

[Ryi]

Woo man thats sick how the heck can that happen! Anyways glad your family are safe Jao.

[JaoSming]

thanks guys

the effects are still ongoing....my online classes' servers didnt get online until and today, and of course, an hour later, we lost internet again (just like the weekend, power, cable, but no 'net. I'm at a library right now to get homework done)

[Axel The Great]

Nice to hear nothing bad happened to you, Jao. Having been through a hurricane back in '08 (Hurricane Ike, which was mostly wind rather than water), I know how much it sucks not to have electricity, air-conditioning, etc. Went a week and a half without any of that, and on top of that, we were one of the last people in my neighborhood to get it back.

[Stress Fracture]

Glad you're safe. How's life now out there?

[JaoSming]

internet still comes and goes (they are repairing the lines that got washed out)

a bunch of roads are out, and will be out for the foreseeable future if a bridge got washed out

there's a creep (a very slow moving landslide) in our backyard that has tilted our above ground swimming pool, like, its obvious that the water line is closer to the top on one side rather than the other.

on my way to work I can still see houses that are still flooded with water, hopefully all this gets fixed before winter hits....