Category: Hurricane Diaries

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Hurricane Diaries, part 3: Searching for Satellites

The day started off with bad news, but took a turn for the goofy.

This morning, after I got the kettle going for our coffee (have I told you about my Emergency Coffee Management System yet? If not, I’ll do so tomorrow), I checked out the outage map for our electric company on my iPad. Since the power first went down, all the “hot-spots” had a status of “Assessing damage,” along with a little take on what was causing the outage: wire problem, pole down, etc.

This morning, we finally had an estimated time for restoring power (yay!): Nov. 11 at 11:30 p.m. (boooo…)

I closed the browser window and got back to making our coffee. I brought it downstairs and gave my wife the bad news. I was mentally juggling the amount of firewood remaining, the gas in my Subaru, and other factors that would have to hold up for the next 9 days, including my fraying sanity.

Half an hour later, I thought to check out the status for other zones on the map. All of them had the same estimated time for repair, so I felt less hopeless and more reassured that Rockland Electric was merely trying to cover its ass and make sure that all repairs were “in less than 2 weeks”.

But I had other things on my mind.

Last night, I got news that my company found some satellite space for us in the town of Glen Rock, so those of us who had issues of our magazines to put out had to come in and get pages going. At that point, I went into crazy triage mode, trying to figure out which features were closest to finished, what writing I still had to do, how I was going to accommodate a Q&A that came in 500 words longer than anticipated, and a million other factors. On top of that, my associate editor’s pages were still on her iMac in our office, making them essentially inaccessible for today’s work session.

Most important, I was trying to figure out how I was going to get to the satellite office. See, there’s one main road in and out of our town: Skyline Drive, colloquially known as “the mountain.” Because of fallen trees and power lines, it was closed after the storm came in on Monday afternoon. When Amy & I wanted to drive out to civilization on Wednesday, we had to take the secondary road out, Ringwood Ave., and that was a bumper-to-bumper mess. I was considering whether it would use less gas to take that route or to go all the way up to New York state via Sloatsburg Rd., which would likely have no traffic, but would be a bunch longer.

Gas is still more valuable than gold right now, and I want to keep consumption to a minimum.

I decided I’d try to go via Skyline Dr., and if it was still closed, I’d decide on a dime which of the other routes to try. I cruised up the lower parts of the road, heading toward the last turn-off, Cannonball Rd., where the sawhorses would be situated if the road was closed. Skyline curves slightly on that approach, so I couldn’t see whether the mountain was blocked or not as I closed in. But there was a car a bit ahead of me, so I kept looking to see if it was braking or turning off for Cannonball. When I saw it cruise ahead without the slightest flash of its taillights, I let out a cheer and was more enthused than I’ve been by anything else this week. I zoomed over Skyline with 3 or 4 other cars, probably the lightest rush hour traffic the mountain has ever seen.

From there, it was a quick trip to the satellite office. I got lots done on the issue in the next few hours, ironing out page after page with my art director. They were hoping to get our mag out today, but there was no chance of that happening, as I still needed to write a shortish article that would need at least a few phone calls and some online research. I promised we’d have the last pages done by Monday at noon.

While we worked, we traded stories from the past few days. Most of the coworkers at the office hadn’t lost power during the storm, or had it restored within a day. They all had awful tales about the behavior at the gas stations near their homes or on the highways. I’m still glad we went without a generator.

And during the morning, Amy texted me to let me know that our neighbors’ Tree of Damocles was being cut down!

I guarded against the excessive hope that they’d also replace the split power line and get our neighborhood back on the grid. I figure this is a matter of baby steps. First, get the tree down. Then, replace the transformer that blew out. (Rumor has it one of our neighbors who still had power on Tuesday decided to “test” his whole-house generator. In so doing, he fed too much power into the line and knocked out his part of the street.) Then replace that split line and hook us up!

So I persevered on the issue, and was just finishing my editorial, “Operation Blackout,” when the power died in our satellite office.

No, seriously. It just shut off. The building — and, we assume, the neighborhood — lost power.

We were all working on laptops, so no files were lost, but we couldn’t move anything to the servers and thus our day was done. I gave my art director a few files on a thumb drive, and we all helped move the servers and other equipment back down to the IT director’s car.

We figured out a place to convene on Monday morning, and all headed our separate ways. On the trip home, I marveled at more tree-on-house violence, and remained thankful that we got off easy, all things considered.

And now, back to The Manticore (and that article I have to write over the weekend)!

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Hurricane Diaries, part 2: Don’t Drink the Water

Almost 72 hours since the Tree of Damocles fell against the overhead wires, cutting off our power. There was a little progress today; a van from an electrical contractor drove in, coiled up the two lengths of wire that had split on Tuesday, hung them from their respective poles, and put red “caution” tape around them. I stopped the van on its way out, but the two employees within couldn’t tell me anything about when they expect the tree itself to be cut down, which I assume is a prerequisite to restoring our power.

It’s a bit fraught, looking out one’s window and seeing a tree hanging at a 45-degree angle to the ground, supported by the cables and wires that bring this fair city light. (Okay, it’s a “town” not a “city”, and “blah” not “fair”.) At some point, the wires have to give, right?

Still, today was much better than yesterday. After suffering bouts of nausea and blinding headaches on Wednesday, we concluded the tap water has gone bad (or that the CO detector had crapped out and that we were gonna die soon), so we moved over to the bottled stuff, as well as the water we bottled before the storm hit. No symptoms today, so yay.

Internet service has been up and down, but that’s better than yesterday’s total outage. Lines at the gas stations are hours long, as people are desperate to fuel their home generators, so we’re not making any more “let’s get out of the house” treks, except for the 2.5-mile round-trip to the public library, where they have charging stations set up.

I’ve gone down there the past two days for an hour or so at a time to charge the iPads, laptops, and an external battery that charges the phones up pretty quickly. I also, of course, sit around and read while I wait.

I knocked off Fifth Business this afternoon, took a break with Gary Panter’s Dal Tokyo collection, then took up The Manticore. At this point, I don’t know how I won’t finish Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy by Monday. Especially if our internet coverage stays spotty.

I cannot begin to explain the allure of these novels, but they’re a blast. Davies’ narrators and his cast of characters are utterly enchanting.

And now, back to stoking the wood-burning stove. (I put a fresh 9-volt battery in the CO detector, btw.)

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Hurricane Diaries, part 1: Blackout Masquerade

Welcome to the Hurricane Party! We’re getting on 48 hours since we lost power during Hurricane Sandy, so, to alleviate my boredom, I thought I’d start rambling and see if it makes for a good post.

Today’s Halloween, 2012. We lost power in my suburban New Jersey home at 9 pm on the 29th, after a neighbor’s tree was uprooted by the wind and fell against the overhead wires. It’s still there, resting comfortably against power lines, cable, phone lines, and whatever else gets strung along those poles.

Last night, one of the power lines snapped. It began arcing all around our next-door neighbor’s mailbox. Some cops arrived, didn’t do much but put up cones to warn cars away, announced by loudspeaker that we should all stay inside because of the live wire, and left.

At some point, the electric company must have turned off the current to that one. It stopped arcing, but the insulation of the wire had caught fire, and began slowly creeping up the line, like a fuse of a bundle of dynamite in an old western. I stood outside with another neighbor and tried to figure out how to put out the flame. He’d called the fire dept. earlier and they told him there was nothing they could do. We’re clearly heading toward Walking Dead territory here.

So my neighbor and I figured that if it was an electrical fire, we’d cause more harm by spraying it with a fire extinguisher or hitting it with sand. And the possibility that it was still live kept us from trying to do anything to smother it.

The fire climbed on, about 10 inches in length, burning its way up the cable. Lucky for us, when it reached the stretch of line that was enmeshed in a tree’s branches, it died out. My neighbor and I waited a full minute before celebrating our reverse pyrokinesis. In truth, it was just that the wire was no longer hanging perpendicular to the ground, so the flame couldn’t feed up into it. Still, it was a big bag of not good.

As is the fact that AT&T’s cell tower in our area went kablooey about 12 hours after power wen down. So we have no phone and no data, except for my wife’s iPad, which uses Verizon to grab data. We go on that to grab e-mail and look for updates on our situation, but try not to stay on too long, to preserve the battery. We’ve got chargers in the car and a Trent battery that’ll work on pads and phones, don’t worry. (Update: woke up at 3:00 a.m. on Nov. 1 and AT&T service seems to be working again, after about 40 hours down.)

Still . . . Walking Dead territory. Several of our neighbors have generators, but the lines at the few remaining gas stations are a mile long, so who knows how long those will hold out? Meanwhile, we’ve got the wood-burning stove going down in the library, and moved down here to sleep. The upstairs of the house reads 59 degrees, according to the thermostat.

But you guys don’t want to hear about all that doom and gloom! You wanna know about books, right?

Well, a few days before the hurricane hit, I finished reading 7 Pleasures, essays about ordinary happiness, by Willard Spiegelman. I’m supposed to have him on the podcast this January, so I gave it an early read and took a bunch of notes. I enjoyed it quite a bit; he reminds me of myself, in terms of finding joy in certain aspects of the day-to-day. I hope we have a good conversation for you guys.

Once the storm hit, I took up The Emigrants, by W.G. Sebald. I may be interviewing a pal of mine about Sebald next week, depending on how this situation works out, so I thought I’d give that one a read to pair it up with this year’s earlier reading of Sebald’s book Austerlitz. He’s a remarkable and weird writer. That first-person but not really first-person style of his, along with the fake documentary stuff like photos and documents, make for a very strange atmosphere.

This one’s like a proto-Austerlitz, with a little too self-conscious artifice, but some amazing and arresting segments about people who were uprooted by the 20th century. I’m sure I’ll get to his other two novels in the next few months.

The thing is, since I finished The Emigrants in one day, I had to decide on something else to read last night. This is no easy task. I didn’t want to start anything huge, because of the uncertainty about when we’ll have power, and where we’ll be staying if things get worse. For a minute, I flipped through my copy of The Recognitions, thinking maybe …

Nah. I’ll reread that someday, but not while I’m ekeing out the few daylight hours and having my brain numbed by the constant thrum of the generators.

I picked up Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler, which I last read around 20 years ago, but couldn’t get into it. I didn’t need that much meta just then.

My wife & I hung out with out neighbors for a little while, and then I came back, walked the dogs, and made a concerted effort to find something on the shelves that would be quick, and easily digestible. I wound up with 800 pages of Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy.

I think I read the first volume, Fifth Business, also around 20 years ago, but don’t recall much of it. I’ve read about half of that one today; if this power outage keeps up, I may knock out the whole shebang by next week. I’ll keep you informed.