Hurricane Irene

Well, we survived Hurricane Irene with zero damage – either at our house in Old Lyme, my mother’s house across the river in Old Saybrook, or our family beachfront house.  Power went out Sunday about 6 am, and came back here Tuesday evening about 7 (we are in a priority zone because we live very close to the Library, Town Hall, Fire Station and School. Internet (cable) came back this morning). Phone service stayed on the whole time, although we had to haul out old phones that do not require a power supply (long live land lines!!).The beach house still does not have power. So overall, we were lucky.

The forecasters were amping up the danger reports in order to increase their listener base. In fact, it got so bad that the AccuWeather people started denouncing other meteorologists for panic mongering (“no way is the surge going to be that bad...”). More generally, however, the warnings reminded me of the warnings on pill bottles and various other things, all of which say basically the same thing: “Don’t do anything incredibly stupid that no rational person would do.”  So if you go kayaking in the middle of the hurricane on flooded rivers and the kayak tips over and you drown, whose fault is that?  The governor of Connecticut pointed out that if people don’t adhere to warnings and get in trouble, the state will not be able to help them.

New Englanders tend to be a bit crusty on this sort of subject. The Old Lyme Director of Emergency Management said “Living in New England you should know how to respond to any severe weather activity that could occur in our area.”  The First Selectman said that the hurricane was likely to be “like strong spring tides.”

Now in fact, there was a lot of damage, mostly from falling trees.  But I think the lesson is that you do what you can and don’t get hysterical about things you can’t control. As an example of the ridiculous, I saw a neighbor had “reinforced” their mailbox with masking tape. On the other hand, our beach house, built by my architect grandfather in 1955 has 2x4's stacked the thick way through for the first floor and every single joist is hurricane-strapped.  Pretty unusual in the 1950's. We lost 2 shingles on the front wall, and that’s it.

But what about your office?  The key here is to figure out the source of possible danger. Are you on a river bank?  Do you have large trees that could fall on your roof?  If you are on a hill, there is no sense in protecting against flood, but you might have to worry about mud slides, and so on.  A lot of this is simple common sense and spending some time actually thinking about it.

Obviously you want a current backup stored outside the office.  If there are people who live in areas less likely to lose power (or get it restored faster), they are the ones who should take the backup with them.  You want to shut down all systems including the battery powered surge protector. Otherwise, your APC will simply run down the battery when the power goes out. But if you turn it off, you can always power up for 10-15 minutes (or whatever time you have) and retrieve key information. You want to make sure you have phone chargers that work off your car’s cigarette lighter. You may want to invest in converters that will let you run a laptop from your car.

Disaster preparation is not rocket science. But you do have to think about it a little bit.

Comments

[David Thompson]

Common sense is unfortunately far too uncommon.

[markustoday]

Good to hear your okay.