Yesterday, we had a severe weather event, with a reported funnel cloud. My home was directly in the path of the storm.

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/breaking/...lost_power.html

Being "prepared" paid off.

Good News.
The storm came up QUICK. I was already in the basement with my son just puttering around. I didn't notice the storm coming up. My wife - quickly- shuttled the other kids to the basement, to our designated safe spot. The storm raged for a while, then, suddenly, it was sunny and hailing and lighting was coming down. The power dimmed, flickered, dimmed and then went out.

So the flashlights - which were fully operational - came out.
After the storm passed, the damage in the area was extensive - the power lines were destroyed, and it was clear that they would not be fixed soon. After a walk around the house to do a damage check - amazingly nothing damaged, but big branches all over and trees down on all the roads.

We set our 96 hour plan into action. Water got hauled up to the kitchen from the read-to-go 7 gallon dispenser while I pulled out and connected the generator to the pre-connected wiring I've get set up.

Well the generator cranked right up - fresh gas and oil in there - and the house came back on-line to a degree (the generator runs the whole house except for the electric hot water heater, oven, stove or dryer). As an aside - Compact Floros, which make up most of my home lighting, are a fantastic way to save on generator fuel. We had plenty of lights on in the house and the total load on the generator was normally under 750 watts. The largest load is our well pump, which draws 2400 watts@240 volts, and when starting it gives the generator a little "thump", but all the rest - no problems at all.

The Fire Company was overwhelmed with wires calls, so since I'm still technically sworn Fire Police, I was able to close off the road ahead of the huge trees that were down - had plenty of flares in a case, set a line in the road to keep cars out.

The Chain Saw was ready to go, didn't need it, but it's in "ready to run" condition.

Also didn't need the whole-house tarp I have for roof damage (thank goodness) but that was also ready to go.

Bad News
As of right now, there's no rational way for an ambulance to get to my house, and local roads to and from hospitals are blocked.
We got internet access via DSL back this AM, but my Verizon Wireless card did NOT WORK last night or this AM, that's unfortunate, as the cell sites did stay online, but I think that their data backhaul lines were knocked out. I had high hopes for that to work.
The power outage is much more extensive than I expected - while we can get gas, I'm very pleased that I already had enough gas for 3 days on hand. We don't run the generator 24/7, it's running 2 hours on, 8 hours off. That's also in our plan for fuel conservation.

Will keep you updated. Power restoration looks like a hell of a miserable job. We'll make the linesmen some ice tea and snacks.

First, it is great to see and hear that both your family and your property was not harmed!

Second, it is always great to see a good solid plan making apotentaly anoying and disasterous situaion go smootly and sucessfuly.

Congrats on having a great plan and being able to utilize it so sucessfully.

+1. Glad to hear that you, your loved ones and your home came through unscathed and that almost everything went as planned.

It is so great to read that this worked out for you.

Wow. Good reminder how fast things can happen.

Glad you guys were prepared and it worked out so well!

Glad to hear everyone is safe and your place is intact. Glad the plan is in place for you too.

Suddenly all the survival stuff and knowledge are priceless.

And the community benefited, too.

Nice work.

Martin,

You got hit harder than we did, but it sounds like you were better prepared as well. (see my post for more info)

Glad everything seems to have worked out, but still the question must be asked:

What's up with tornados in the Northeast?

Martin,

Very relieved that y'all made it through with no damage or injuries. Very impressed with your preps. It's one thing to have the right stuff at hand, quite another to have it ready to go and reliably functioning when tshtf. Kudos amigo.

How are your neighbors handling this event?

-Blast

UPDATES:

OK, just got off the phone with my wife. More reports.

- Power is still out. Generator and fuels doing fine.

- Phone and cell service nominal. (as an aside - we have both corded "old fashioned" phones and cordless phones in the house. I keep 2 extra "old style" phones in our communications box.

- Damage is localized and linear - looks like it came straight through my area, didn't seem to do nearly as much damage just 2 miles north or south.

- One of my neighbor's houses took a large tree square on. The house is severely damaged/destroyed. Don't have a firm report yet.

- Another neighbor's STONE barn blew down. Yes, a stone barn. They are taking it in stride, my kids are over in their pool right now!

- Tree clearing on the south end of my road is moving well, but still no sense of if the road will re-open today. (hope to get a LOT of free wood chips!)

- Lots and lots of damage of many kinds from falling/flying debris to other homes. Apparently, we were very, very lucky.

- A few more trees down on my property, far away from the house. One of my trees into my neighbor's power lines, just leaning, didn't take them down.

- Still plenty of damage to the power grid, no clear eta on restoration.


ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

- The speed that this hit with was incredible. If I was out in my back yard at the furthest corner, I don't know if I could have made it back to the house in the time it took for this to go from a "a bit rainy" to "get into the basement NOW". Given the size of the branches that are down I don't like this thought at all.

- The loss of data services while voice continued was VERY frustrating.

- My kids were great. No panic, a little whimpering from my five-year-old, but they did EXACTLY what they were told INSTANTLY.

- In the past NOAA has issued SO MANY alerts and "Warnings" that, although I had heard the familiar BZRRAPPP-BZRAPP-BZRAPP of the NOAA warnings on the radio not long before this event, I tuned it out. They are the agency that constantly cries wolf with useless stuff like: "Warning: It's going to be hot in July" - over and over and I think that they do a disservice abusing their alerting system the way they do. I don't even HAVE a weather alert radio anymore because I got sick of all the BS watch and warning alerts for ordinary weather.

It's good to hear that your preparations paid of and that you and your family are well.

Martin,

I urge you to get a new weather radio. The one that I rely on allows the user to disable the warnings that aren't desired. This feature was added to address the problem that you stated... too many needless warnings. I have mine set to alert only for high wind and tornados since everything else in my area is usually predicted with enough advance warning to get prepared.

Here's the Amazon link to the model that I have: http://www.amazon.com/Midland-WR-300-MID...3432&sr=8-1

Bah-da-duh...bwah-dah-dah-dudu-duh...

Sorry. A-Team theme song ran through my head.

Does this make you Hannibal?

Martin, that was a little close. Glad to hear it missed you, and that your plan executed without a serious hitch.

So, did it sound like a freight train?

Excellent job by the whole family!

I keep going back and forth between getting a portable generator and a Kohler that runs on the natural gas line. If the gas line is disrupted, then you're sol. But you don't have to store fuel.

Do you have diesel or gas?

Glad you and your family are ok Martin. Take care.

Looks interesting...does it allow me to TOTALLY DISABLE anything that is not a WARNING for Tornado or Radiological event? I know it snows in winter. I know thunderstorms are dangerous. I know it gets hot in the summer.

I don't need alerts on these. I want ONLY alerts for ACTIVE and actually DANGEROUS events.

Gasoline. Which is a major PITA - if I had it to do again, I'd go with a diesel and power it off my fuel oil tank. I always have about 300 gallons of fuel on-site in the basement, it won't gel and I don't have to worry about maintaining it.

My experience indicates that any type of alert can be totally disabled. In your case, you would probably want to enable only warnings for the events that you wish to monitor. Warnings are issued for confirmed active events or those which have been indicated by radar. Watches and advisories are more about what "could" happen because conditions are ripe.

Like I said, I have enabled only high wind and tornado warnings. The radio also uses SAME technology, which means that one can set it to monitor specific geographic areas (usually broken down by county). I set mine to monitor my home county and the neighboring counties to the west since our severe weather generally comes from the west. This allows a bit more advance notice that something bad might be headed our way.

One other nice feature is that the radio can be configured to sound a siren type alert and then turn on the radio speaker so that the actual NWS broadcast can be heard. In this mode, the broadcast is heard for five minutes and then the radio goes back to silent/monitor mode. There are indicator lights on the radio that stay lit while warnings/watches are active, allowing one to know that they missed an alert if they were away when it was issued.

On a final note, the radio will even alert on AMBER alerts and stuff like that, all of which can be disabled.

I sound like a salesman but I am not. I am just convinced that this is the best type of weather radio available. I bought one for each household in my family. If you have questions, we can take this to email if you like.

FWIW the NWS by me on Long Island (OKX) seems to have made a decision to reduce some of the alerts this season. I think I saw a newspaper article on it, but in any case, they seem to be only alerting for "dangerous" storms this year vs. almost any thunderstorm last year. I recall many more alerts last season with actually more storms this season, and so far they've been right on alerting when you should hit the deck and not when you may "get your hair wet".

This, combined with judicious programming really makes this a very useful tool for me. It has yet to wake my up unless I should be up and monitoring the situation. I use the Midland WR-300 and like it a lot.

As an aside, I have a 30 HP 3-cylinder John Deere diesel with a 15 KW Leroy-Somers alternator. Runs everything and fuel economy is terrific! Ran for 21 hours during the August '03 blackout, everything was on in the house and I gave 20A each to the adjacent neighbors, used less than 5 gallons of fuel.

About 2-3 years ago, some of the staff at OKX changed, and they started to alert for a fly sneazing in wyoming. Seems they got the word that it was getting a tad overboard

I'm one of their spotters BTW