Don't apologize- I've never met someone who had my first name I liked. We're all... *thinks about what mods will allow* rude jerks. My hurricane would probably make Katrina look like a squirt gun.

Irene will go down in the history books regardless of whether it was a hurricane or a tropical storm when it swept into any given region. Although many folks may feel like Irene was a dud because so much attention and anticipation was put on NYC and then not a whole lot happened in the major metro areas, it was quite devastating to many other regions, like upstate New York, western Massachusetts, Conneticut, and Vermont. The devastation is still unfolding or being tallied even now. Watching the video from Vermont, it's humbling to see what damage can be done by a tropical storm. Of course, let's not forget about all the folks who have lost their lives.

There seem to be more than the usual number of articles wondering if things had been overhyped this time. I think this AP article is a well balanced piece that looks at many facets of the issue.

This seems like a useful article about the "hype" around Irene:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/arti...a5193b1252af0c5

It makes the crucial observation that much of the storm reporting was focused on New York City. When it turned out that Irene did not destroy the city, people were in a sense let down. The extensive damage Irene caused in other areas got relatively little attention.

There is always a degree of gambling involved in emergency preparation. Alas, "better safe than sorry" isn't always popular.

Da Bing

I don't recall normally seeing mention of so many communities cut off by floodwaters as I have in the aftermath of Irene, like in Vermont and the Catskills. Anyone else notice that? I'm curious if Irene really did isolate more communities than is typical, or if it's just a popular news topic this time around?

It looks like Irene's financial cost is living up to its billing, probably ranking in the top ten disasters in US history when all the costs are tallied. In Irene's case, the vast area that it affected contributes greatly to the final bill. Unfortunately, much of Irene's damage comes from flooding rather than wind damage, and many of the communities struck with historic floods typically do not have flood insurance, which is going to make recovery more difficult for these people. You can read a New York Times article about it here.

Flood insurance is cheap. Get it whether your mortgage company requires it or not or whether you are technically in a flood zone or not. Then step back after an event and let the windstorm insurance company and the flood insurer (feds?) fight about who pays for it instead of having each of them hammer you with exclusionary clauses.

Seriously, insurance is complicated. If the water damage is "wind blown" then the windstorm coverage kicks in. If the water damage is "percolating", then its excluded from the windstorm coverage and you have to look to a flood policy. If you have both, then you let them fight it out as to how the water damage occured. One of them is responsible.

Have you had the mains electricity power supply restored yet? It seems the numbers affected by power outages was on a huge scale. With perhaps up to 15 Million people being affected through out the tropical storm affected area. According to Business Week there were 8 million homes and businesses initially effected and as of Monday approximately 4+ Million homes and businesses still without power.

Makes me wonder what a Cat 3 or 4 would have done on a similar track.

http://newsblogged.com/tropical-stormhurricane-katia-projected-path

Another one to keep an eye on!!

Out local power company had an extended outage because they were not keeping up on tree trimming then a major ice store caused a lot of overhanging tree branches to knock down lines so everyone complained, they were in the news, etc.
So in the spring they came out and butchered everyones trees, cut out about 2/3 of the big tree that shaded our house, made a huge lopsided tree that looked terrible.
So its a catch 22, complain too much to the electric company and loose all your shade trees.

We lost our power 5:20 pm on Saturday. At that time, local winds were no more than about 35-40 mph, and then only in gusts. We got our power back about 7:30 pm last night. We also had sporadic outages of POTS and DSL which were out for the first 24 hours or so continually. I found out the the small substation serving our community was out of power, so the telephone company dragged in a portable generator and tried to keep it going (most of the time). As they didn't have anyone to tend it full time, a couple of times it ran out of gas, and service was out until someone could refill and start it again. But at least we had some service.

Cable TV was out until about 3 hours ago. If you had your internet through the cable, it was out also.

Cell phone service was out also. The local tower doesn't have any back-up power.

There are three roads that get you away from where we live; north, west and south. (To the east is the bay, and you need a boat.) At one point, all three roads were cut off by downed trees and/or wires. One road (northbound) was opened in a few hours. The other two were closed until about 1 pm yesterday. The difference was that if it is only a downed tree, the county could handle it by themselves, which they did. The others had downed trees wrapped in downed power & telcom cables. The police told me that if it were just telcom cables, the county would have cut away those without hesitation. But they cannot touch the tree when there are downed power cables, and they had to wait until the power company came to deal with their cables. Thus the long wait time for those 2 roads to open. The County police had to station an office full time at one intersection to keep traffic out. One LEO full time for almost 3 full days because the power company couldn't deal with a tree blocking one of the main roads into/out of Annapolis.

My automatic stand-by generator ran fine the whole time, keeping the critical circuits going, so, really, the lack of power was just an annoyance. The only scary part was when the POTS and cell phone was down, we lost access to 911; I had never considered that possibility and am now thinking what I can do. . .signal flares? flags? running down the street screaming "HELP" madly?

Walking around our community, about half of my neighbors had generators running, and some of those had cables strung to their neighbor.

And its early in the season and another one is brewing. Oh boy.

Hurricane Irene's winds were 70 miles per hour, enough to cause tree damage. The downed trees created broken power lines, electrified puddles, crushed automobiles, damaged homes, and a lot of flooding. Local news claims New Jersey and Vermont were the hardest hit eastern states. Many roads are now flooded so travel is a real pain. We had gone without power for four days some years ago, in July (a substation problem), so we lost all our food. This was an important lesson learned the hard way. This time, for Hurricane Irene, we were ready with our water making machine and our battery backup which can be recharged with a 90 watt solar panel. We also tied down anything that could become airborn and anchored our small metal tool shed. Many homes near rivers are now flooded, with people in shelters. The news reports about Paterson NJ, looters raided flooded homes while occupants are in shelters. We survived Hurricane Irene OK. The sump pump ran almost constantly, and we had many downed tree branches but fortunately no damage. Our preparations gave us much piece of mind.

I was going to saw WRT differentiating electric from phone lines, they usually share the same poles so if one is down the other probably is too and you never know if one is touching the other and even if you know the difference could still be touching a phone line thats been electrified by a power line, I wouldn't touch either.