PDA

View Full Version : Bad Weather Ahead The Creek May Flood



Keith Outten
10-27-2012, 10:44 AM
Most of you know that we are expecting some bad weather in our area from Hurricane Sandy. Its a big storm and although the winds probably won't be a big issue the rains and the storm surge can cause widespread power outages when the trees start falling on power lines.

We have a generator but that doesn't help us to keep The Creek online when we lose our Internet connection. The trees don't discriminate, they bring down the Internet service lines with the power lines :(

Here on the East Coast we have trees everywhere. The early rains ahead of a big storm weaken the tree roots and when the winds finally start blowing the trees fall so we are expecting power outages. This afternoon we expect the rain to start, tomorrow will be more rain and some gusty winds. Monday will most likely be the worst of it with the storm passing us by late in the evening. Tuesday.....well we don't know what to expect. I predict a sore back from picking up tree limbs and cleaning up the mess the storm leaves behind.

We live just above sea level so flooding is always a major concern. Our little piece of land hasn't flooded in the last 50 years but we were close to having water in my shop during a hurricane several years ago.

Should be go offline don't be concerned, we will do everything possible to bring our server back up ASAP.

We are going to have a bit of an adventure over the next few days......wish you were here :)
Oh Yeah, pictures of our upcoming event will be delayed by Mother Nature.
.

Mike Henderson
10-27-2012, 11:53 AM
Good luck on the weather, Keith. I'll be watching the weather news and thinking of you. As soon as you're able, let us know how things are going.

Stay dry!

Mike

Steve Schlumpf
10-27-2012, 12:03 PM
Good luck Keith! Hope it is not as bad as predicted!

Ken Fitzgerald
10-27-2012, 12:29 PM
Here's wishing you an uneventful experience! Be safe!

ray hampton
10-27-2012, 12:31 PM
good luck Keith

Fred Voorhees
10-27-2012, 2:26 PM
I'll be riding it out right alongside of you Keith! I am along the western side of Jersey along the Delaware River, but we are expected to get somewhat pummeled by the winds and rain. My real concern is for my Moms home which is just outside of Cape May and one of the possible direct landfall paths. Low lying area and the entire town of Villas could be underwater. My younger brother who used to live in Villas tells me that it has never in history flooded. I hope history continues in this fashion, but I will be worrying throughout this one. My mom has evacuated to just a few miles from me and is staying at my brothers home.

Bruce Page
10-27-2012, 3:28 PM
I hope this thing confounds all of the talking heads and makes a sudden right turn out to sea! I grew up in California not far from the coast and I miss the green landscape but it’s times like these that I love living in New Mexico.

Stay safe!

Jim Koepke
10-27-2012, 4:27 PM
Good luck to all of our east coast friends.

I think I prefer earthquakes to the weather you all experience.

jtk

Lee Schierer
10-27-2012, 4:50 PM
Make sure you boat is all gassed up and ready to go. The storm coming from the northwest has dumped a lot of rain on us last night and today. It was 81 on Thursday and hasn't been above 45 today. Good luck Keith.

Jim Matthews
10-27-2012, 4:53 PM
I'm in South Coastal Massachusetts, due East of Newport, RI.

It's like the last plane leaving Saigon at the grocery stores.
I spent the day covering ground level windows.

Tomorrow - everything comes off the floor in my basement.
I might even start the snow-blower.

Anyone that remembers Irene and the October shut down of Connecticut is antsy...

Tom Fischer
10-27-2012, 6:19 PM
Today I bought 27 gallons of gasoline for my 17.5Kw generator, on the assumption that if I go to all that trouble and expense, the power will not go out.

Here's hoping.

tom in northwestern NJ

Paul McGaha
10-27-2012, 6:26 PM
It has been a tough few months here in Virginia.

Record setting high temperatures in the summer, like a lot of the country had.

A really bad storm last summer, like a little hurricane. They called it a microburst. I'd never heard the term before.

Now this.

Raymond Fries
10-27-2012, 6:47 PM
Good Luck weathering the storm. Hope it is not too bad.

Mike Henderson
10-27-2012, 7:40 PM
If the storm hits north of you, the wind my blow the water out, rather than in, because a hurricane circulates counter clockwise in the northern hemisphere. The people north of where the storm strikes will get the greatest flooding.

Good luck!

Mike

Kevin Bourque
10-27-2012, 8:19 PM
I'm still clearing trees that fell in a storm 2-1/2 years ago. At least 20-30 so far. I'm not looking forward to Wednesday morning at all.:mad:

Kevin W Johnson
10-27-2012, 11:30 PM
So far I have 25 gallons of gas for the generator, and all the vehicles gased up. Tomorrow will be filling water containers for drinking water. Thankfully, with a swimming pool currently holding about 18,000 gallons of water in the back yard, we have plenty of water to flush toilets should the county water experience problems. During the summer outage we didn't lose water, but the county has to run generators to fill the water tower. I'd rather not count on their generator to supply water.

Hope all goes well for the rest of those affected by this. Keith, being on the coast, hold on to your hat and best of luck that any damage will be minor.

Tim Morton
10-28-2012, 8:26 AM
Good Luck to all...and we are battening down the hatches up here in Vermont. It looks to be all about the wind up here. We will decide after its over if thats better than the rain we had from Irene last year. Generator is all gassed up, but this may be the first time its ever been used....i bought it 4 or 5 years ago, and have never needed it...lets hope this streak holds.

Hang in there all...and we will see you on the other side!!

Keith Outten
10-28-2012, 9:02 AM
This morning the weather isn't bad at all. We have had some rain but no wind to speak of yet. The flooding has started though, water has already covered the road we live on about three inches deep but it will probably be 2 to 3 feet very soon. We live on a peninsula with Sarah's Creek on one side and the Chesapeake Bay behind us so there is no getting out once the road covers with salt water. The ground is saturated already so the tree roots won't have much to grab onto if the wind blows.

I spent the entire day yesterday putting everything up that was in the yard. I have to go out this morning to fill my 5 gallon gas tanks, other than that task we are ready for whatever happens I think :) Been through this a hundred times since I grew up here, the only exception is the big Cat 3 and larger storms......we load up and run to the west.
.

Peter Kelly
10-28-2012, 11:22 AM
We have a generator but that doesn't help us to keep The Creek online when we lose our Internet connection. The trees don't discriminate, they bring down the Internet service lines with the power lines :(

Out of curiosity, are you hosting this site from your home? Your IP seems to be emanating from Cox.

ray hampton
10-28-2012, 11:27 AM
when you need to empty your 5 gallon tanks, I hope that you use a table to hold them instead of holding the weight yourself

Kevin W Johnson
10-28-2012, 12:41 PM
Out of curiosity, are you hosting this site from your home? Your IP seems to be emanating from Cox.

Yes he does. The server is in the upstairs of his shop actually.

Gordon Eyre
10-28-2012, 12:49 PM
And here we are in Southern Utah wishing we could get a little rain. Keith I hope all goes well for you and yours

Keith Outten
10-29-2012, 8:00 AM
Well, its Monday morning and we still have power. It rained continuously last night so we have some water standing in the yard this morning but there is not any danger of flooding in the house or shop yet. We also had some wind gusts last night, this morning I can see that the black walnut trees have been stripped of their leaves and fruit. A couple other species have also lost leaves but most of the trees are still full. The tide this morning is up 6.1 feet above normal levels. Our total rainfall since yesterday is 5.1" so it hasn't been a big deal yet. Today is supposed to be the most active for our area but it won't be as serious as the weather Virginia Beach has had already.

High tide this morning is at about 9am and the big winds are yet to come so we are apt to start losing some trees. The ground is totally saturated.

Sandy will make landfall on the DelMarVa peninsula soon according to our local weather station so the worst may be ahead of us today. If the rain lets up I will try to get a few pictures today.
.

Jason Roehl
10-29-2012, 8:39 AM
Stay safe, Keith, and there's no need to do the classic reporter-being-blown-about-on-the-boardwalk type of reporting/picture-taking for our sake!

Keith Outten
10-29-2012, 9:12 AM
Jason,

There isn't any wind this morning to speak of so there isn't any risk of flying debris. Light rain right now and our road is covered by about 2 feet of water with the tide still rising. I just noticed that my barn has water leaking under the doors so I will have a little cleanup to do later.
.

Bob Vavricka
10-29-2012, 9:44 AM
I was supposed to fly into Norfolk today and drive to Virginia Beach, but had to reschedule. I rescheduled for tomorrow (Tues) and am waiting to see if that is going to be possible. My DIL and 2 grandchildren are riding Sandy out in Virginia Beach. I wish I could have made it there before Sandy to help them out. My son is in the Navy and deployed on the USS Enterprise which is headed home and I am flying out to be there when he gets back.

Tom Fischer
10-29-2012, 11:03 AM
Seeing reports on CNBC business news this morning that some of the NJ gasoline refineries are shutting down, including the very large one that used to be Exxon (maybe still is, and one of the originals). Also, NY ports are now closed to oil tanker shipping. All in all, probably going to be some lack of fuels in the NYC radius for several days, gasoline and diesel as well.

Buckle up, gonna be a ride.

Rod Sheridan
10-29-2012, 7:26 PM
Some idiot (that would be me) scheduled injector replacement on one of the generators at our tracking station for tomorrow.

Today was spent in the rain connecting and load testing a 1,200Kw rental to be used in case we have a power failure.

Funny, a month ago when I looked at my crystal ball it didn't show Sandy.........LOL.

Hope everyone of my friends on the forum who live southeast ride out the storm without incident...........Regards, Rod.

Paul McGaha
10-30-2012, 8:55 AM
We seemed to get off pretty easy here in Ashburn, VA. Some rain and wind yesterday but no outages and no damage to our house.

We're thankful. Hope others are doing ok. Especially those near Atlantic City.

PHM

Jason Roehl
10-30-2012, 9:36 AM
I couldn't get on early this morning for a couple hours--was that on your end, Keith?

We're supposed to have winds 20-30 MPH and gusts of up to 50 MPH today, with a chance of some showers--all part of the remnants of Sandy. I'm only about 30 miles from the IN-IL border, too, if that gives you an idea of the sheer size of Sandy and the accompanying weather system.

Matt Meiser
10-30-2012, 9:39 AM
We had that overnight. Lost a few pieces of siding off my shop and some small branches. Looks like I should be able to put the siding right back up and its at ground level luckily. Something is banging/flapping at my parents so there's something to deal with over there.

And we have our first snow. Its tiny, but there are some little drifts in corners. :eek:

David Weaver
10-30-2012, 9:49 AM
We had strong winds last night (north of pittsburgh), but they didn't seem to be as high as they were expected to be. Power didn't go out, probably thanks to the leaves being off the trees, high winds are almost obligatory power outages during the summer.

Lots of rain, but overall the situation is less bad than was predicted. I haven't been outside the house in the light yet to see if I lost any shingles or if the neighbors did.

Worst wind we've gotten since I've lived where I am now was when a tropical storm went by several hundred miles to the west. We had winds up to 80 miles an hour and a clear blue sky because of the disturbance not directly from the storm, but from the reaction of atmosphere to a disturbance several hundred miles away. We were out of power for a week with that one, and it was clearly worse than this storm, even that storm was worse for us than it was for the people under the actual storm.

I'm amazed (being in from the coast) how much population along the cost is less than 10 feet above sea level. That would seem to me to be a bad idea unless someone *wanted* to live that close to the water for the sake of being close to it.

Warren Johnson
10-30-2012, 10:10 AM
In Maryland, about 50 miles west of Baltimore. Lots of rain last night and wind was loudest I have ever heard. Didn't get much sleep, as our 12 yr Choc. Lab was scared with all the noise. Cleaned out the street gutter this AM, so water could get to the drain about 100 feet away. Appears some shigles off roof of house and garage, so I guess we were lucky compared to others. Light rain now and very little wind.

Dave Anderson NH
10-30-2012, 11:18 AM
Power went out at 3:30 yesterday afternoon and wasn't on when I left for work this morning. No generator yet (scheduled appointent for 11/15) so we have no heat, water, or power for the freezer and fridge. Last night I fired up the wood stove and cooked my dinner on it by the light of a kerosene lantern. After dinner I opened a bottle of wine and watched the fire in the woodstove while listening to a nice classical concert on the battery powered boom box. This morning I perked a pot of coffee on top of the stove and scrambled up some eggs and bacon. Life has been simple, but good.

Keith Outten
10-30-2012, 1:16 PM
We lost our Internet connection early this morning for a few hours. We never lost power, like Paul said we also got off easy on this one. We still have some local flooded areas but we didn't get any of the high winds that were predicted. Can't find not one tree that fell either. My dad-burn barn has two inches of water in it this morning so I need to get out my pump this afternoon :(
.

Bruce Page
10-30-2012, 2:04 PM
We lost our Internet connection early this morning for a few hours. We never lost power, like Paul said we also got off easy on this one. We still have some local flooded areas but we didn't get any of the high winds that were predicted. Can't find not one tree that fell either. My dad-burn barn has two inches of water in it this morning so I need to get out my pump this afternoon :(
.

Whew! I'm glad it wasn't any worse!

Ken Fitzgerald
10-30-2012, 2:08 PM
Glad to hear the weather and damage was minimal Keith!

Kevin W Johnson
10-30-2012, 2:40 PM
I couldn't get on early this morning for a couple hours--was that on your end, Keith?

We're supposed to have winds 20-30 MPH and gusts of up to 50 MPH today, with a chance of some showers--all part of the remnants of Sandy. I'm only about 30 miles from the IN-IL border, too, if that gives you an idea of the sheer size of Sandy and the accompanying weather system.

Most likely so. I posted at 3:00 am, tried again at 3:15 and it was down.

Mike Cruz
10-30-2012, 5:47 PM
I'm surprised you never went down, Keith...

Keith Outten
10-31-2012, 12:40 PM
Mike,

We never lost power which is a miracle but we did lose our Internet connection for about 3 hours.
We were very lucky...........
.

Peter Kelly
11-01-2012, 3:06 PM
Manhattan didn't fare so well: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mtaphotos/

This whole not having power and only intermittent water thing is getting old I tells ya.