After the flood
Oh, what a mess. Trees down everywhere. Lots of people still without power. Water in basements. Branches in places no branch should be. My more venerable neighbors say that they haven’t seen damage like this since a storm in 1986.
Last night my wife and I spent most of the evening with a neighbor’s Shop-Vac getting about twenty gallons of mud, water and debris out of our basement. As it was, we were lucky. One of our neighbors had nearly a foot of water in theirs.
Our power went out at about midnight last night and stayed out until about 8:30 this morning. It was a long, cold night, listening to the wind howl outside and wondering if we were going to wake up to another flood this morning. (We didn’t.)
My neighbors and I spent most of the morning loading wheelbarrows full of debris and mud that had washed into the street and our yards. Quite a bit of what used to be my neighbor’s driveway is now sitting in my back yard.
And I live near downtown. We’re not supposed to get hammered by the heavy weather.
Any good storm stories out there?
ALSO: We’re soliciting suggestions for a name for this storm. Somebody on LJ suggested Blowjob 2006, but since this is the Society Matron blog, let’s think a bit more genteel here. Besides, blowjobs are supposed to be fun, and this, well, wasn’t.
Related posts:
Sorry to hear about your basement; I’m glad you got your power back. The power just about never goes out in my neighborhood (the only time I remember it being out in the 11 years I’ve lived in my building is the time a construction crew accidentally damaged some underground lines and even then it was only out for a few hours), but my lights flickered enough times last night that I wouldn’t have been surprised if we did lose power.
My boss came in this morning with her husband and her kid in tow so they could get warm.
We got a call from our tenants in a house we rent in Wallingford that at 8 am, long after the wind stopped blowing, a huge tree on the property fell over. It took out a section of our fence and magically landed beside and not on some parked cars in the Washington Mutual parking lot. There are photos of it and what’s left of the giant tree that fell on the power lines in front of Wallingford Center on my blog.
What exactly is wrong with Windpocalyse?
At 130th and Evanston there’s a 40-50 foot tree lying across the road. Lights are randomly out in the far north.
Wind /= flooding. Rain = flooding. Wind = tree stuff in places no tree stuff should be.
You could call it Rainwindpocalypse, but somehow it doesn’t roll off the tongue.
At one of the local TV stations it was internally being called, “Breaking Wind!!!”