And part of the next day too!
I’m talking about Mother Nature and her long winded and overdue storm, of course. We get one of these storms every decade or so here. The last one was call “The Inauguration Day Storm” because Clinton was sworn in that morning in 1993.
I like to think of it as a punishment for WA and OR helping elect the Serial Lecher.
The one before that was 1981. Of the three, the local meterologists say that this one was the strongest. What the local newsfolk do not say is that the piss poor amount of help from state services proves that (Barely) Governor Gregiore hates White People.
Take cover below the fold!
As I posted on Thursday morning, I left work very early Wednesday night due to the early part of the storm knocking out our computer connection to the regional hub. On Thursday I was driving Grimm to work through the leading edge of the storm when I got a phone call from my boss telling me the power was out and to go home. I went to work last night for four hours to get the reports ready to be transmitted to National HQ, and that was the first time they’d had power since Thursday at 1600.
The storm was entertaining to drive in, but probably only because I was driving a 7000lb V8 powered beast. If I had been rolling in my F150, I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it at all. While it is somewhat aerodynamically slippery from the front, because of the canopy, the rest of it takes wind like a barn.
It looked very much like the video you see of hurricanes on the national news. Wire suspended street lights were floating horizontally. Lights bolted on steel H-poles across intersection waved around in the wind so much that you didn’t really want to drive under them. The speed limit signs were only 75 degrees off the sidewalk and/or shaking so badly you couldn’t read them.
I had taken Grimm because he had the available torque to pull aside any trees that might have fallen in my path. I’ve done it with the F150, but he didn’t like the bigger ones. I also had the chainsaw with me, and I almost got to use it.
I was driving home from my aborted attempt to go to work and found myself in a parking lot 3 miles from my house. As I made my way towards the front, I saw a King County Sheriff’s Deputy directing traffic into a detour. I saw him being called over to a car coming from the detour and then he threw his hands in the air in frustration. As I took the lead spot and got my chance to go into the detour, he held his hand up for me to stop, which I did. He walked up to the truck and I rolled the window down.
This is where it goes to show that it is a good thing to be polite to your local constabulary.
He asked me if I had passed a downed tree on the road. I told him that I had not and he rolled his eyes. Apparently, either he had gotten bad info from his dispatcher or he had misunderstood what his dispatcher had told him. Either way, his detour was sending people to where the downed tree was. Sensing his frustration and with a bit of eagerness to put my new chainsaw to good use, I said “I’ve got a chainsaw on the floorboard. It’s only got an 18in bar, but it’ll probably take care of whatever is down up ahead.”
He replied “You do? Hold on just a sec!” He radioed in, apparently to get confirmation as to whether or not there were wires down along with the tree. He then came back and told me there were wires down and thanks, but if I got fried it was his ass. Before he waved me through the REAL detour however, he handed me one of his cards. When I got home I saw that he wrote “Chainsaw” on the back of it. I now have two of these items. I have used them in the past for squeaky things like traffic infractions and they can be quite handy. Being nice has its own rewards.
Shortly after I got home than evening, the power went out. I was lighting candles when our female Rott/Dobie mix walked up as if to observe how use the lighter. I told her that working the lighter took opposable digits and then the wife came into the room with some snacks and said “Sorry girl, you can’t be the bringer of light. That’s Daddy’s job.”
I repeated in a very Charleton Heston as Moses tone “I am the Bringer of Light!” and not two seconds later the power came back on. I’m sure the dog would have been highly impressed had she been able to understand english. Unfortunately, it went back out five minutes later. So much for my godly powers. But hey, I didn’t need to part water, anyway.
I slept for only 2-3 hours at a pop during and after the storm. I was usually woken up by the dogs barking or my stomach telling me to eat. Otherwise, I listened to CDs or talk radio while reading that book I’ve been trying to finish so that I can get Quote of the Day material.
While I did venture out once before heading down to The Mom’s place for the extended family get-together, it was only to try and get a good phone signal to see if the power was back on at work. It wasn’t and I went home. I utterly and completely regret forgetting to grab the camera so as to take you all some pictures. My only excuse is that we shut all the doors to try and hold some heat in the main section of the house and it was in one of those rooms. Out of sight, out of mind.
As luck would have it though, Joe Huffman was smarter than I and has a few right here. All I can add is that in my locale, nearly every subdivision had left large numbers of very tall conifers in amongst the houses. The tree population in the subdivisions is noticably small now than before the storm. There was even one of the more upscale subdivisions which had each of it’s entrances off the main road blocked by fallen trees. I saw a professional tree topper cutting a path through on the way to The Mom’s place.
I also saw people selling these newly fallen trees along the sidewalks of the main roads. Folks was be-in enterpris-in’! The going rate was $125 for what looked to me to be a half-truckload, according to the signs I could read while driving amongst the branches and debris. And people were a-buyin! I had to laugh. Why have a fireplace if you don’t have firewood?
When these big boys fell over, they left holes on the ground you could almost fit an upturned VW Beetle into and if they hit a structure, said structure was destroyed. There must have been a goodly number of houses hit because even with the power back on, the local motels and hotels are displaying their “No Vacancy” signs.
All in all, we didn’t have too bad a time of it. The lights on the front of the house were wiped out by some dummy up the street leaving his Christmas decorations on his lawn and I lost one of the roof vent covers. Its a rental so the landlord will be fixing all that. I spent one kinda cold night and one pretty cold night in the house, but my employer is paying me for not working whlie the power was out at work and I got to test my SHTF gear.
I’ll call it even.
No one in my neighborhood had a tree land on their house. We all live on postage stamp sized lots where a large pine tree would take up half the yard. A few of the folks in the neighborhhood left after the power went out to go to nearby relatives/friends homes who had power, only to come back after that person lost power too. I’ve counted a half-dozen homes in the neighborhood whose roof shingled were stripped off, some of them lost entire sections. All but one of them have already started on repairs.
I’d like to say that my fellow Western Washingtonians have learned something from their 48-72 hour ordeal, but I know that that would be a lie. Like I said at the beginning, we get one of these every 10-12 years or so. In the past 25 years, no improvements have been made to the electrical and/or communication infrastructure. In three to five years, they’ll start leaving large conifers in new housing developments again and the tall ones they’ve topped this year will be ready to come down in a decade. Only a miniscule number of folks who went through this will think to prepare themselves for another SHTF situation, and half of that miniscule number will let their guard down in three to five years and let their supplies dwindle.
Other than a pellet stove, about the only thing I could have wished for was a live feed of all the CCTV cameras to watch the gas station lines out to the street and the people fighting over the last generator at the hardware stores. But that is just my evil twin talking.
After two government careers, I’m here to tell you that governments do a bad job of preparing for disasters of any sort. Some individuals within government are bright enough, but they seldom rise to the top where they could do any good.
The other thing is that politicians of ALL stripes are very reluctant to put public dollars into disaster preparations, simply because those dollars have to sit there doing nothing until the next disaster, and that doesn’t generate votes. Only the Swiss seem to have gotten beyond this hitch in the logical getalong, and maybe to some degree the Scandinavians.
Preparation for disaster means expensive training, expensive equipment and expensive mods to infrastructure. No votes in that to help the pols get re-elected, so it never gets done.
That leaves you and I, bro. We have to prepare for ourselves.
That’s the message for today.
I has learn in my sistytoo sho’t yars dat de gummint, it ain’t yo’ fren. No way. No how.
So. Much better to go getcherse’f a big ol’ sock and getcher own shit in it.
That’s why I have spare: Water. Fuel. Light. Food. Shelter. Guns and ammo. In quantity, in my house. Me and the Missus and our critters can do quite nicely for several weeks before we need to go out for resupply. We even have enough to be helpful to a few others.