Hurricane Irene

If thet find out they are in the path, Darryl and Purple can get outta dodge.

What if the 8 million people(or so) in NYC find out they are in the path, what if even half of them want to leave, what happens next?

Well, waving as it passes by, anyway. I'm in Myrtle Beach tonight. There's some rain, some wind, and that's about it. Expecting clear skies in the morning.

Best of luck to everybody in the path of this one.

the Eastern Seaboard spread before her eye.

Good luck to the Outer Banks.

It's New Brunswick that's going to get a beating from Irene. It's going to be pretty crappy for them too; they've been flooded out a couple times already this year making the ground saturated. I expect a lot of trees will come down and I imagine there will be a lot of flooding. I work for a major construction firm that is building the new Gateway hi-way going through New Brunswick; I expect it will put some of our guys out of work for a few days.

Nova Scotia, on the other hand, isn't going to get much. Looks like some rain and a little bit gusty but that's about it. > http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/city/pages/ns-25_metric_e.html Thank goodness because we've had more than our fair share in the last 8 years. It will be 8 yrs in September since Juan went through. That year it all started with a huge flood in April, Juan in September, and then White Juan in February. Since then, we've had a bunch of little storms, some nasty rains, and a weather bomb this past December (this was an experience to say the least). > http://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/storm_watch_stories3&stormfile=potential_weather_bomb_targe_041210

Over the course of July, I always manage to gather up enough canned goods to last a couple days, freeze three 2 quart jugs in the event that we need blocks of ice, we double check our "camping gear", and make sure that all three propane tanks for the grill are filled and ready to go; if fill up water jugs if I hear that there is going to be "adverse weather".

So...everyone in Irene's path...keep your head down if you haven't "gotten outta Dodge" - which would have been my option - if you still have time, stock up on power outage needs..canned goods, candles, batteries, bottled water. Please stay safe and I hope you all weather the storm well.

what's that all about eh?after our names....anyway...i don't do cheap red wine...the stuff i like cost 20 Can. to buy...i'm not wasting it on marinating one of the kidlets...

back to work for me...i'm on housework duty today...giving the "boss" a break...he cooks most of the time, so i best pick it up 'cause i don't wanna cook :D

So far, just a little light rain and the wind is kicking up. The bad stuff didn't reach Northern NJ yet.

I'm as prepared as I can possibly be. The hub and I cleaned up the yard today. I have most of my plants in the house. We put all the lawn furniture away. Anything that can fly around. We cut down a few branches that looked like they might hit the house.

All we can do is hope for the best. They said we can get up to a foot of rain. I can't wrap my mind around that right now, but my basement will undoubtedly flood. Fortunately, our property is sloped, so the water usually goes downhill. The worst is when we lose power though. We have a well and a septic system, so we will have no water or sewer. I filled up the bathtub with water so we can at least manually flush the toilets.

I even got out my old dialup modem for when our cable goes out. I have an old dialup account for just-in-case moments like this one. Hope I can remember how to set up the modem. :p

AV

edit: fixed paragraph

I'm going to have to go soon.

AV

Irene made landfall in NJ at Little Egg Inlet, right near the nuclear power plant. Its a good thing that Gov. Christie had ordered it to be shut down prior to the storm.

We got about 6 to 8 inches of rain overnight and our basement is flooded, but all in all, we fared pretty well through the storm. Lots of tree limbs down. The wind was pretty scary last night and we lost our power, but it was restored early this morning.

We still have another band of rain coming and its very windy here. I definitely will not venture outside until the storm is completely gone. Many roads are closed with down trees and flooding, even on the major highways.

I can't wait till Irene moves on.

AV

I was in a house at Townsville when a cyclone hit. No biggy it's normal here and we expect these things. If you don't open the windows away from the oncoming winds the roof will blow off. Been there done that.

But to be fair if the wall facing the wind gets breached like the idiots in the house directly downwind do not take in the rubbish bin and it blows into a car port then the roofing iron of the car port demolishes the wall and you have 8 foot sheets of Corrugated Iron embedded in internal walls.

If the windows behind the house are open the roof stays on. If they are shut you loose the roof and then the majority of the house. ;)

OK maybe not what Myth Busters tried but it is certainly what happens. Also you need to remember that once one house/building goes it starts a chain of destruction downwind. Bits of roofing Iron floating around in the breeze are not my idea of fun though to be honest bits of Brick floating about in the same breeze are something to be avoided as well. :0

It was interesting looking at the aftermath. The place I was in had the wall facing the ocean mostly demolished and a couple of sheets of Corrugated Iron sticking out of internal walls but otherwise fairly intact. The next house downwind was destroyed when bits of the same car port hit it. It was empty and locked up tight and was no more. Then every house downwind was simply gone. OH it was Brick where as the house I was in was weather board.

So we had the Ocean then the first house in only loosing a rubbish bin and the car port, the second house from the ocean had the wall facing the ocean gone but otherwise intact and then everything behind that was gone/demolished. No one died but I'm not sure how they didn't in that area. :0

Col

The wind is blowing hard and there is no sign of JCPL, our power company. Oh, geez. I'm SOL. My battery is low, so thats it.

AV

It was some time during the middle of the night. What a joy! The things you take for granted. I have to say, my low tech landline phone and modem saved the day. If it wasn't for them, I would have been completely cut off. I think I'll keep my landline. Its worth the money.

I made it to work today, one of the few people that did. The highway was good, but all of the backroads are an absolute disaster. Many roads are flooded or impassable because of downed trees. Its going to take days to recover from this storm. Many people that live in more Northern NJ where I work will not be seeing any power until next week.

My network at work weathered the storm very well. Only 1 server was shut down by the UPS. All in all, I feel very lucky after hearing what some people went through.

AV

The governor of New Jersey during a press conference talking about people walking around on the beach during the storm... "GET THE HELL OFF THE BEACH!"

If only more would do that!

56k was the ultimate. But, back then, web pages were simpler and easier to load. I forgot how painful it is to load graphics - verrry slowly, frame by frame. I forgot what it was like to listen to the modem dialing in and the screechy sound of the modem when it connects.

I can't believe how far we've come since those days and how important the internet now is to everyone's life. I never could have imagined how fast technology has moved since those days and what we have today.

AV

I'm not having a good week. We lost our power at work for about an hour today and had to down all of the servers because we had no way of knowing how long the power would be out. There is still so much flooding, tree damage and power line issues in the area I work, I believe this is going to be the new normal for a while.

Our Exchange server is still a physical server and unfortunately, there wasn't enough battery left to down it gracefully, so it crashed. Our UPS's are pretty spent because of all power problems over the weekend.

The Exchange server wouldn't boot up all the way when the power came back on. That's my worst nightmare! I was fearing the worst. It took three tries and finally it was able to boot. I was soooo relieved! Having no email is the worst case scenario for any company.

There is nothing like experience to give you a real handle on what disaster recovery at a company should look like. We're a mid-sized company. We should have a generator and emergency lights in the computer room. Its kind of surreal downing all of the servers by flashlight. The company should spend the money because their most precious aspect, their data, is really at risk.

We have a physical and virtual environment, about 25 servers, so it takes a while to shut everything down. Even though we have UPS's on the virtual hosts, they will not do an orderly shutdown on any of the VM's that they host. We have to manually shut all of the VMs down. Its a bummer. Especially doing it at the console on the server rack with a flashlight.

Everything is thankfully okay for the moment. Thank you for listening to my boo-hoo moment. You guys are the greatest.

AV

Thanks for mentioning placement! I will make sure that the lights have the best placement possible in the computer room. We don't have too many options because we have the punchboards for the phone system on the walls. If the light maybe was behind and above the network racks, that would work.

AV

Just a very windy night & about half an inch of rain....a couple places around town lost power but ours didn't even flicker enough to reset the clocks :)
It seemed to hit the Quebec/New Brunswick border area kinda bad....we just got lots of big waves along the coast.