I think this may be the first post of the thread from someone who was there. I realize that you outsiders can only speculate, but I gotta say that the whole "Should there even be a New Orleans?" discussion is a little disappointing.
Short version: stayed, sustained roof damage, suffered 3 August days without power, escaped to Jackson, Mississippi this evening. Glad to be gone. I'll fill in the details tomorrow.
Checking in from NJ. What a mess. Nearly every house in town is flooded, it seems.
“The climate is fine, they say. Don’t worry, they say. No biggie, they say.”
One of the wettest days on record here. Rivers and creeks set lots of records and local schools canceled today. Quite a night babysitting the sump. Local totals 6-8 inches.
Looks like the Bronx got hammered.
The local creek set a new gauge record. Old record during Floyd was 17.9 feet; Ida caused 21 feet. Flood level is 9 feet. Historic flooding for my little corner of PA.
Insane video of water pouring through the NYC subway system. I cannot stress how crazy this is.
Another striking image, a submerged minor league baseball stadium in New Jersey.
Meanwhile, my son and I drove round trip (14 hours) from Atlanta to New Orleans yesterday. He is in law school at Tulane and had fled the storm last weekend but, when he found out he would be away for a few weeks (Tulane is not returning to in-person classes until mid-October) there were a number of things he needed to tend to in Nawlins.
The damage we saw was pretty extensive but not quite at catastrophic as we feared. We only went into the garden district around Tulane so I cannot comment on what it looks like elsewhere. We probably observed at least 50 downed trees. The major streets were all clear, but side streets are still full of tree limbs that make them impassable. Power is still a long way from being restored. There are probably as many downed power lines as there are lines that are still up. We saw many roofs with shingles torn off and a few roof mounted AC units had been pulled down too. One striking thing as we approached the city was how most of the billboards along the interstate had been ripped apart. There were pieces of billboards all over the streets to.
Oh, and we saw 2 open gas stations in the city. Both had lines of well over 100 people waiting with gas cans to get a couple gallons. I am guessing the stations were not taking any cars and were limiting folks to filling up just those 2-gallon jugs. It was nice to note that the gas stations were only charging like $2.95 for gas. If they had wanted to charge $29 per gallon, I am sure they could have gotten it but the businesses did not gouge their customers in a time of crisis. Maybe mankind isn't hopelessly lost.
Why are you wasting time here when you could be wasting it by listening to the latest episode of the DBR Podcast?
Is there an anti-gouging law? They are common.
Just uploaded a video to twitter: https://twitter.com/JasonDukeEvans/s...91232156704772
This is from the drive home when we encountered a nasty rain and lightning storm in Alabama. It was unlike anything I have ever seen. More electricity than any storm I have ever been in. I did not get it on video but at one point a bolt of lightning hit a tree right next to our car. We saw the tree immediately glow and catch on fire. You could feel the electricity ripple through the air from the bolt. I've never been anywhere close to a lightning strike and I never want to be again. It sent my pulse racing for a good five-ten minutes. Terrifying!!!
Why are you wasting time here when you could be wasting it by listening to the latest episode of the DBR Podcast?
TG, personally, we came out ok. Little water in the basement but no damage. Neighbors only a few blocks way had indoor swimming pools where their basements were. The local Home Depot was sold out/rented out of wetvacs, drying fans, etc by 7:15 AM.
The saddest may be those in basement apts that were drowned. A horrible end.
PS, we own two cars. No damage or flooding out. Whew
Thanks. We are fortunately on vacation - we also got hit by a lot of rain, but not nearly as bad. In NYC I live on fairly high ground (we are near the Hudson River but have to walk down two hills to get there) and we are a few floors up. I texted a neighbor and he said our building is fine - I have a basement storage bin but I think it is OK. We have things stacked up in it so when I get home I might re-prioritize what is on the bottom vs. the top.
Two of my colleagues got hit pretty hard - one lives in Stamford, CT and the other lives in NJ. Both have basement office setups for remote work and those got hit. The one in CT was badly flooded by a storm about a month ago and was just starting to deal with that, and now he is starting over.
I "return" to work in two weeks (I started a new job last April so have not actually been to work yet) and the subway station in the video Jason posted is on my route to work - it is just south of MSG. I don't know if there is a lot of rhyme or reason as to what areas got hit harder than others. When Sandy hit I was working at the very bottom of Manhattan and was out of my office for over a month.
I saw an unrelated article earlier this week suggesting that if we can have pipelines to carry oil thousands of miles, why can't we have similar pipelines to carry water from the water-logged east to the dry west?
Thank you.
Long version: I had certain responsibilities that required me to stay rather than try to leave on Thursday or Friday. Once I was free to leave, it was Saturday afternoon and evacuating traffic was crazy. I had the choice of sheltering in place or run out of gas by taking the interstate in either direction. I moved to Louisiana years after Hurricane Katrina, but I've sheltered in place for several previous storms that were not debilitating to New Orleans because they either diminished upon landfall or (unfortunately) hit other areas harder. Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
The power went out Sunday at 1pm, when there was some wind but no rain and certainly no landfall. I get text alerts from Entergy (the region's electricity provider) and have reported outages, storm-related or otherwise, by texting "Out" to them. Historically I get an automated reply that says something about how widespread the outage is by the number of people affected. This time the automated reply said, "You have opted out of all Entergy text alerts." Took me a while to figure out how to log in to their website on my phone and opt back in.
The house has a gas stove that requires electricity to ignite, but operating on the loose theory that a burner that is already on would stay on during a power outage, we decided to keep three burners running shortly before the electricity went out. They stayed on, retaining a hot food and water option that might not have been available otherwise. The early power outage was the impetus to prioritize filling up various random containers with water, which of course went out later that afternoon.
After years of Verizon I'd switched to AT&T about three weeks ago. The good news is that I'd upgraded to a phone with a much better battery (a proper doubling, from iPhone 6 to iPhone 12). The bad news is that I got rid of the landline, which may have come in handy when the AT&T network went down from 8pm Sunday to 3pm Monday. No idea if Verizon had the same problem.
A life without power is kind of like a farmer's life, still ruled by sunrise and sunset. Sunday dinner and cleaning before dark, candles lit and distributed to the bathrooms, flashlights at the ready. I had a fully charged laptop with the sole purpose of movie playback, but I rested upstairs while others watched. I nodded off but soon awoke around 9pm to notice the closest bathroom candle had flamed out, so I reluctantly got up and walked around the upstairs. I started hearing a dripping that was louder than the rain, and I followed the sound into the empty-at-the-time bedroom of the house's youngest occupant. A quarter of the room's ceiling had split open and there were 3 or 4 bullet-sized holes shooting out water onto the floor. The bed was already a loss. I looked around and noticed about 100 stuffed animals primed for destruction, along with countless other belongings. I got an old baby basin and a few trash cans to start collecting water, and then went downstairs to request an additional person's assistance. I think they could tell from my calmness that the situation was bad. Two people were enough for the job, as we saved or salvaged the plush menagerie, school books, and whatever else we could before the plaster started to fall on me.
It was a dark and stormy night. I woke up about once an hour, grabbed a flashlight, and looked for further damage, especially in the room directly below the damaged upstairs room. Moderate water damage in the ceiling corners, some water on the ground from a dripping seam above the window. The good news is that the rain ceased around 3am. The following morning I saw a lot of roof shingles on the lawn, but then noticed that most of them came off a neighbor's house. A very small part of my roof above that bedroom lost shingles, and the rain must have been a direct hit to cause that kind of localized damage. I listened to the car radio to make sure that the storm had passed, because at the time I had no other source of information.
The youngest occupant's spirit was broken upon seeing that room the next day. We finished retrieving items and cleared the room enough to keep an open floor, which we cleaned and lined with large plastic trash bags. Two of our number lasted a day longer, leaving on Tuesday to stay with relatives of relatives in Jackson, Mississippi. The rest of us, me and two elderly parents, left Wednesday in a classic personal conflict between "I can't take you anywhere" and "We really need to leave".
A well-connected neighbor helped me find someone willing to place a tarp on the roof, and loosely ran point while the job was done Thursday. Having rejoined a connected world, I have looked into FEMA assistance but can't complete the application for some technical reason at their end. Entergy has assessed less than half of its overall problem and hasn't even sent an update in over 24 hours. It's not even talking about restoration yet.
The circumstances, to me, were both fortunate and unfortunate. The storm was bad, but it could have lingered, or been followed by subsequent rainstorms. I was stuck in powerless heat but had enough resources to get by. I could have evacuated everyone and avoided the daily turmoil, but might have come back to a house in far worse shape than it is right now.
So I guess that's it. I'm now among the displaced. Mentally, I'm caught in a place between feeling lucky for what I left behind and feeling dread for the tasks that lay ahead.
So sorry to hear this. As a resident of a town (New Bern in Florence, we got lucky and only had water in our foundation) that watched countless neighbors and friends walk in your shoes before you, I can only offer you the bright side that they all came through it ok. Getting there sucked, it took literally over a year, and for some more, but the experience made all of us stronger, for what little that's worth right now.
There is ALWAYS a bright side. You'll find yours, and may even be a spark of a neighbor's.
Q "Why do you like Duke, you didn't even go there." A "Because my art school didn't have a basketball team."