...and Tammy is staying warm with three blankets.
She is as snug as a bug in a rug :-)
We had a dusting of snow in the past two days but nothing significant. My friends and family in North Carolina got enough to cover the ground and cancel school. I doubt those of us in the Upstate are going to get any more at this point in the season. But I've been wrong before.
The past few days will go down in history. The comparison I keep hearing is that "this is our Katrina" and that's not inaccurate at all.
If God saw fit to humble us, He certainly did with Hurricane Helene.
As I write this it's almost 7:30 pm EST on October 1st, 2024. I was away from the house for much of the day so I don't know when exactly the juice came back on but when I returned an hour ago the power was restored. It had been out since a little before 8 on Friday morning, four and a half days ago. So that's about a hundred hours that we were without electricity.
I drove around the area on Friday night. Didn't get too far. There were big trees fallen all over the place, across the roadways. I've never seen so many power lines down.
I had to conserve battery power on the various devices, like my phone and iPad. Yesterday morning I ventured out and got to the library in downtown Spartanburg, found a spot on the floor next to a wall outlet and recharged the phone. I've been limiting its use, employing it only when absolutely necessary. Because there was no telling when power would come back to our homes.
My dog and I are in upstate South Carolina. And it could have been much worse.
Asheville, North Carolina is a little less than an hour to our north. As of this evening I-40 going east out of the city is open but nothing else. The town is pretty much unreachable except by helicopter (Asheville Regional Airport is starting to get supply flights coming in but that's a bit far from the city limits). At last count more than 60 people are dead from the storm in Buncombe County.
Half an hour to our west, we have friends in Greenville. They have been without power since Friday.
The town of Chimney Rock has been wiped off the map.
Sections of highways in the western part of North Carolina have been destroyed.
Local schools are out until Monday next week. Remote learning via Internet is also out.
The power crews are working around the clock to restore electricity. They have come in from all up and down the country and some have arrived from Canada. They can't possibly be appreciated enough.
As for my own account...
Restricting the use of devices meant that it would be unwise to write, no matter how creative I was feeling. And the only flashlight I have is on my iPhone. So I spent the daylight hours doing lots of reading. I try to read George Orwell's 1984 every few years and I was behind on that so Sunday afternoon I was engorged in that novel. And yesterday, for whatever reason, I started re-reading Helter Skelter. I did write a bit for my book, the old-fashioned way: with a pen and notebook. So I guess it can be said that my attempt to contribute to the world's literature is sort of a multimedia effort.
It's been a wild past few days. And I was expecting the power to be restored sometime late Friday. So I'm very thankful that it's back.
I've been through hurricanes a number of times in my life. Helene topped them all. For it to come this far inland and still packing a punch is almost a freak occurrence. It's being called a one-in-a-thousand-year catastrophe.
And that's pretty much my report. Going to spend the rest of the evening getting my bearings back, take a LONG hot shower, give my dog Tammy some love and treats, maybe watch a movie.
Helene has certainly made me thankful for things that we too often take for granted. And like I said, it could have been worse here.
Thoughts and prayers going up and out for everyone who's been affected by this storm.
It was this day, March the 12th, thirty years ago.
I was eighteen, taking first year classes at the local community college. I worked part time at Subway, but I didn’t have to go in that night. About 4 that Friday afternoon Dad asked if I wanted to ride with him to Ridgeway, across the state line in Virginia. There was this little convenience store there that EVERYONE in Rockingham County seemed to go to when they played the lottery. I said sure, I’d come along. It was a cold and cloudy day for mid March.
Looking back, I now recall the sound of the air around us before we hopped into the truck. It had a very muffled characteristic. I hadn’t heard air like that in a long time. That should have been the first clue, about what had already begun to transpire.
We got back home a little over an hour later. And as I got out of Dad’s truck I saw it: the first flakes of snow. Something we had not seen fall in three years.
Well, two nights earlier at Boy Scout leadership training, the scoutmaster of my troop made a halfway-joking reference to the weather for the next few days. How there may be snow. I didn’t really take him seriously.
But here it was. Snow. And more flakes were starting to come down.
It didn’t stop. It was only falling harder. By 6:30 the ground was almost completely covered. We drove to Short Sugar’s in Reidsville a little while later to pick up my sister, who was working there. She drove cautiously behind our car. By that point it was undeniably the harshest snowfall that we had seen in quite some time. I don’t know how Mom drove through that as she did. We could barely see the highway at all. But we got back home, a little after 9.
The snow was still falling when I looked out the kitchen door about midnight.
It hadn’t stopped falling when we woke up. And it continued on and on throughout the day. No one was driving on our road. There was nowhere to go. I had to call my manager and tell her I couldn’t get to Subway tonight. Saturday afternoon brought the wind. It sounded like a hurricane. And it blew the flakes hard against the side of the house. There was zero visibility if anyone was so daring as to try to get out in that mess.
The power stayed on at our house. The same could not be said for several hundred thousands of others throughout the area, including one television station in Greensboro that went off the air. The ABC station was hardly functioning, which I remember because there was something coming on that night that I had been looking forward to catching and the signal barely penetrated the storm.
It was weather on an almost apocalyptic scale. I finally fell asleep probably around 2 a.m., the wind still howling and barraging the house with frozen precipitation.
Finally, Sunday morning dawned. The wind had ceased. The first real sunlight in two days revealed our
home, the fields around it, our cars, the trees… everything covered by a pure
unspoiled brilliant
blinding white sheet of snow nearly two feet deep. I got out of the house for a little while to
get some fresh air and behold it all.
Our cocker spaniel puppy, Bridget, went out also. I don’t know how she kept from sinking into
the snow. She looked like a miniature
polar bear, she was walking across it so easily.
That was how I experienced the Storm of the Century. The 1993 Super Storm. The Great Blizzard of '93. Whatever you want to call it. It was a convergence of several weather systems that produced a meteorological monstrosity. At its height it stretched all the way from Central America to Canada up and across the Eastern Seaboard. Roughly half the population of the United States was impacted one way or another by the event. No storm since then has approached it in size and ferocity.
Things had been brought to a standstill for the next few days. But the weather turned warmer and by Friday all roads were completely passable. There was only the barest vestige of the blizzard to be found in shady spots as I drove back from the Boy Scout camp the following Sunday morning, at the conclusion of leadership training.
The Storm of the Century was thirty years ago. But I still think of it, whenever it snows. I’ve no doubt that many who are reading this will also remember where they were during those several days in March of 1993, when winter showed us that it wasn’t finished yet.
With more bitter cold heading to the Lowcountry this week, Hanahan police officers tried to do their part to stop the encroaching weather by arresting the Snow Queen.
Police Chief Mike Cochran and Officer Flor Reyes made the arrest.
In this case, police could not let her go after spotting her freezing a fountain in Hanahan. However, she was freed after a bond court hearing. Apparently the ice melted before the hearing, taking with it any evidence.The ABC News 4 link has much more about Elsa's arrest, including several other photos among them pics of her getting her bond hearing.
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| El Reno, Oklahoma tornado, May 31st 2013. Photo Credit: WHOTV.com |
And it's confusing Tammy something fierce. I let her out to do her "doggie business", she took one good look at the weather and promptly turned back to the doorsteps.I went to Greensboro yesterday evening. It was much the same, with people wearing shorts, t-shirts etc. at 8 at night. I wore my "Weird Al" Yankovic Alpocalypse Tour shirt and if I didn't know any better could have sworn it was late spring.
But I've already seen snow four times this winter so far, most recently this past weekend (the girlfriend and I found ourselves looking at about 2 inches of the white stuff falling at her house in Roanoke). There's another cold front about to hit us in the worst way (read as: severe storms, high winds and possible tornadoes) this evening and given the way the trends work out we're apt to have snow later next week.
Expect a bunch more posts soon. In the meantime I gotta go unplug the 'spensive stuff. All of y'all getting hit by this storm system (which The Weather Channel has decided to dub "Magnus") and all of you folks in the path of it, batten down and good luck!
You probably thought this was something "cute", didn't you?
Next year, just drop the whole "names for winter storms" thing, okay? "Gandalf" was pushing it already. But not like this...
"Khaaaaaaan!!"
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| October 29 2012: Hurricane Sandy floods the site of the World Trade Center in New York City |
Here is the list of storm names for Winter 2012-2013:
What the...?!?
"Draco"? "Gandolf"? "Khan"? "Q"? "Rocky"?
"Orko"?!?!
Jason Samenow writes some thoughts about this on the Washington Post's website. And make sure to stock up on plenty of bread and milk before we get slammed by Yogi.
Right now Isaac is still a tropical storm. But we all know how fickle these Atlantic cyclone systems can be. It could still draw enough strength from the warm waters of the Gulf to intensify into a major hurricane. And at the moment most of the computer models have it following the same track that Katrina did seven years ago.
I blogged a lot about Katrina and its aftermath in 2005. Most of it had to do with the failures of government at various levels, from the mayor's office on up. I don't want to do that again in 2012.
So let's be blunt...
Ray Nagin is not mayor of New Orleans anymore.
Kathleen Blanco is not governor of Louisiana anymore.
George W. Bush is not President of the United States anymore.
You folks still have time. My advice is to play it safe, take some initiative, and get the hell out of there right now.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Chris
Okay well, this isn't really something designed as a tribute to those brave souls who have been laboring like mad to replace snapped-apart power poles and fixing transformers, but at least the song itself fits. From 1971 it's the original intro to PBS's hit series The Electric Company!
Bill Cosby, Morgan Freeman and Rita Moreno together on a children's educational TV show. Those were heady days, dear readers...
Seriously though: many, many thanks and thoughts of appreciation to the thousands of electrical workers who have been striving through some of the most brutal heat on record to restore power back to millions of people who got slammed by this thing.
Seems like the only thing that I missed was the ONLY snow my area has had this entire winter!!
Ahhh well, after the past few years' worth of ice and blizzard, a little respite may be a good thing.
...so here comes Irene.
Getting a bad vibe about this one, folks. A lot like the one I had back in '96 when Fran came roaring ashore. Even as far inland as Elon it kicked the slats out of everyone bigtime.
Got to have a healthy respect for a hurricane. Admiration, even. A hurricane really is an amazing mechanism: a heat and thermal dispersal engine of ginormous magnitude. Without hurricanes, the oceans - and the Earth in general - would become much too warm. So in a sense, hurricanes are an asset.
But even so, to be in the path of one truly is like looking down the barrel of God's shotgun.
Longtime readers know how much of a hurricane nut I am, soooo I'll be blogging about it as best I can while also catching up on all this other stuff. In the meantime, especially to our friends at the coast: y'all stay safe!!
"FLASH! AHHH-AAAAAAAHHH...!!"
Well, at least we've been spared the hot hail so far.
I have a confession to make: Flash Gordon is on my short list of all-time favorite "guilty pleasure" movies. It's a film so exorbitantly bad that it's insanely good! But I doubt that Dino De Laurentiis ever intended this to be a "serious" movie anyway. It's just good clean tongue-in-cheek camp, made even more awesome with that classic soundtrack by Queen! I've also read that Max von Sydow considers this to be one of his favorite movies that he's worked on, because of all the outrageous costumes that he got to wear as Emperor Ming the Merciless.
(And c'mon, Sydow's Ming is one of the greatest film villains in the history of anything. You know it's true :-)
Here's hoping that all the stuff going on lately is just bad coincidence. I'd hate to think that Ming really is out there on Planet Mongo, waiting to see if anybody is noticing his handiwork :-P
Sanford, here in my home state of North Carolina, is still recovering from a horrific tornado that went through there this past weekend. And since Tuesday communities from Mississippi and Arkansas all the way east to Virginia have been hit by even worse storms. At this hour the death toll is approaching 300, in what is being called the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes the south has ever seen. We were under tornado watch for most of yesterday and early this morning but, doesn't look like any touched down.
For those who are hurting this day, our thoughts and prayers go out to you.
