It has been a few days since we felt the wrath of Irene here in the Northeast. It was a hectic few days leading up to her arrival, a horrible day on Saturday waiting for her to rear her ugly face and then Sunday dealing with the flooding, downed trees and power outages.
I have lived through a few hurricanes in my day, a number of tropical storms and since the 80's dozens of Nor'easter. Over a year ago we had a surprise storm on March 13. We were upstate celebrating my mother-in-law's birthday on the water in Croton On Hudson and braved the traffic to get home. We drove through some of the worst weather I have ever seen in my life. Very similar to what Irene brought to us, only without notice. There were no days and days of prep, it just hit. Amazingly we were back to normal within 24 hours.
I try not to be a complainer, but it seems that we had better "cleanup" after that surprise storm than the bitch that just rattled us this past weekend. Irene was talked about for a week and I am not sure why we (and I mean the local power authority) were not better prepared. I heard that about 400,000 people were without power after the storm. Seems that a number of those are still without. Why is this? I understand that there is a priority of work. I understand that there are only so many people to fix the problem, but with this being a natural disaster where is the out of state help?
We stayed closer to the main road at a friends house who is directly on a river. She luckily didn't have interior damage, we kept lights during the entire storm. It wasn't until 11:00am that a tree fell and took the power out. They responded immediately, took the tree away, but there was no LIPA to fix the power, and still hasn't shown up! My friend's next-door neighbor is on Oxygen. Shouldn't this be a priority?
For the past two nights, I have driven around my neighborhood as a silent vigilante making sure all was secure on the completely dark streets of my neighborhood. Not one truck fixing anything. No sign of promise that my neighbors will be with light anytime soon. It makes me wonder why we still have overhead wires...the amount of money we pay to live here you would think that would actually be something they could do to make life a little easier here as the taxes have us in a choke hold on Long Island.
I hope that everyone gets power soon, know my door is always open to you and fingers crossed for an uneventful weather pattern for the upcoming fall/winter seasons. STAY SAFE!!
I'm with you Boyle.
ReplyDeleteWe were also traveling during the March 13th storm. That storm sure seemed worse to me than what Irene brought. And like you said it appeared everything was back to normal rather quickly, unlike this one.
I've seen LIPA trucks everywhere & friends I have who work there have been putting in mega hours, but I agree with you.... it does appear that LIPA was not prepared.
I need to point out to you that as a former lineman who used to put in poles & hang cable that while I do think underground cables are the way to go, that is more expensive to maintain. And you know the crooks who run Nassau & Suffolk will make US pay for those expenses even though we already pay plenty.
They're still saying almost everyone should be back on by Friday. Hoping that's still the case.
Nice post Boyle!!