Disaster Preparedness

Hopefully I will resume posting in the next week.

Monday night Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast.  Because it was such a big storm, its outer circle came over Cleveland.  What made matters worse for Clevelanders was we were already dealing with another storm at the time.  So Sandy and our storm overlapped in sort of a venn diagram to create a bigger storm that hit Cleveland.  I am not trying to minimize the destruction that hit New Jersey, New York or the rest of the East Coast.  I am just explainning that the combination of the other storm and Sandy made for a stronger storm that you normally don’t see as far inland as Ohio. 

As a result Monday night was interesting.  We had sustained 40 mph winds with frequent gusts at 70 mph (hurricane strength) which snapped trees in half, uprooted trees from saturated ground, ripped off siding, bent flag poles flat, etc.  We lost power at 10pm Monday night.  After seeing a neighbor’s tree split in half and fall across the road we worried about the two large trees in front of our house and moved everyone to the first floor family room to sleep.  Thankfully our trees stayed up.

It is Wednesday and we still don’t have power.  Cross your fingers we get it soon because I don’t know how many more nights I can go waking up every 3 hours to run the little camping generator to power our sump pump to keep our basement dry. 

I have learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t for personal disaster planning.  After some time, power, and rest I might post about the things I learned so that others can benefit.

2 thoughts on “Disaster Preparedness”

  1. Glad you are safe and had no major damage. What would be the best way to funnel news to you? I still don’t have power and they predict I won’t get it until Monday. Additionally I’m not in New Jersey so I wouldn’t have the local info you’d need. But I thought that others who are local and have power can see this and forward you the information.

  2. I’m in NJ, it’s Friday early am, and my whole town and a few around it still don’t have power. I’m not complaining – no one was hurt, and no major damage. But we’re so hungry for news of what’s going on here, and how to get gas, etc., that I had absolutely zero idea that things were this bad outside the tri-state area. What little news we’ve been able to catch up on is completely local-centric.

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