Our School House vs. Mother Nature

With “monster storm” Hurricane Sandy whistling outside the windows, I wanted to take a look back and see how this old house of ours has weathered (ha - pun intended) storms of school house past.

I’m currently writing this with the power ON, but I know others are dealing with MUCH, MUCH worse conditions. I’m praying for you all out there battling this “Frankenstorm.”

Sandy will be our fourth epic storm in under a year and the fourth epic storm we’ve had to battle while in this house. The first two years were so easy! Let’s see how our nearly 140-year old house dealt with the first three storms, shall we?

**Hurricane Irene: **

-We lost power for 5 days. This meant no screens for my screen-loving husband, a personality trait of his you may remember learning about from our anniversary post.

-No trees down = no tears from yours truly.

-No concern for staying warm - it was August! The one bright spot!

-No basement flooding. We couldn’t comprehend it at the time and still can’t. We were SO lucky. Okay, there were two bright spots!

-We had to deal with some pretty major yard flooding as seen below. Yes, Matt’s in his bathing suit.

Hurricane Irene’s Wrath

The unnamed, underrated rain storm that hit us <10 days after we had power restored from Irene:

-We lost power for a day or two. It was still warm, so that wasn’t a major hurdle EXCEPT (proceed to next bullet)

-For this storm, which had NO coverage or warning compared to Irene, we contended wish MAJOR basement flooding. The water came right up to the bottom of the washer and dryer (which are situated on raised pallets) and threatened to engulf the furnace. It was VERY scary. Our neighbor had a generator and was gracious enough to let us plug our sump pump in for a few minutes to let the sump pump do it’s thing. We knew the water would creep back in, and borrowing the neighbor’s generator for a few minutes each day wouldn’t cut it, so we rented a gas powered commercial pumper that cost us about $90 and cleared most of the water out. Once we had power restored, the sump pump ran for days.

-The town works department brought sandbags to the house, because the water was flowing so fiercely down our road (which is a hill) that it careened right over our driveway lip, down our driveway and into our front gardens. This was the scene on our street.

This backhoe was in front of the house for an hour.

Finally, we had sandbags!

The October Snowstorm (also known as the Halloween Massacre around here):

-We lost power for a week.

-It was cold. We had no heat. We had no warmth. Out pet’s heads were falling off. (Totally had to throw that Dumb & Dumber reference in there.) We could literally see our breath in the middle of the day, while we were sitting in our living room. It was miserable. Even the pumpkins I had out for Halloween were cold.

-We lost hundreds of branches and a huge willow branch came down and decimated my prized magnolia tree. I need a moment of silence.

That storm was the worst for me, because although we’ve always found a way to clear our basement of water, I can’t re-grow a gorgeous magnolia that was nearly 25 feet tall and 25 feet wide. Sigh. That storm was a bitch.

Now we deal with Sandy, topping trees and flooding communities with impressive but daunting range around the Eastern seaboard and beyond. We’re with power for now, but this doesn’t look promising…

A screen shot of the Connecticut Light & Power outage map as of 7:30pm:

And just 17 minutes later…

12% of our town lost power in 17 minutes. It’s 9:05 now, and our town is 70% out. You can see from the map that other towns have it worse than us and some are in better shape. The towns in black are 90%-100% in the dark. Here’s hoping everyone is prepared for whatever Sandy throws down.

I’ll let you know what we wake up to. Hopefully nothing too damaging. Wishing the same for you and yours.

#Weather