ResQgeek

Hurricane Irene blew past our area overnight Saturday, causing relatively minor damage in our immediate area, unlike other places that were more directly in the path of the storm. I spent much of Sunday afternoon cleaning up the little sticks and small branches that littered our yard and cleaning leaves and debris out of the swimming pool. Somehow, I never quite managed to find the motivation to get my iPod and listen to my backlog of podcasts, so I spent the afternoon listening to the sounds of the neighborhood. The neighborhood was filled with sounds that afternoon…the whine of leaf blowers being used by neighbors to clean up their yards was common, as was the rhythmic humming of the cicadas in the trees and the rustle of the lingering wind in the leaves. There were other sounds, too. At least one neighbor ran a lawn mower, and in the distance, I thought I heard the sounds of a chainsaw or two, cutting up some of the larger debris left in the wake of the storm.

It was all a big contrast to the sounds during the night. I woke up about 2am, which was apparently when the storm was at its strongest in our area. The power was flickering, causing various electronics to make noises as they cut on and off with the power fluctuations. After a few minutes, the power went out completely (it would remain off until about 11am), and the house fell silent (funny how you don’t notice how much noise our appliances make until the power goes off and they stop running). I lay in bed and listened to the sounds of the storm outside. It was strange not to hear any sounds of traffic (even at that time, there is usually at least some traffic on the Capital Beltway, the interstate highway that circles DC, which is just over a block from my house), but it was anything but silent outside. There was the steady roar of the wind through the trees of the neighborhood, punctuated by the occasional howl of a stronger gust. The rain rattled on the rooftop and pelted the windows as the wind whipped it against the house. Outside our bedroom, the bamboo that grows along the property line scratched along the windows and walls of the house.

Because the storm passed by in the middle of the night, it was not a visual experience for me. Instead, my personal impressions of this storm are all about the sounds it made, together with those sounds that disappeared because of it. I’m glad that it resulted in so little damage in our area, but this was still a devastating storm in so many other places, and my thoughts go out to those who are still coping with the aftermath. Hopefully, they will be able to pick up the pieces soon, and get back to their lives.

It started with Snowmaggedon the weekend before Christmas. It continued last weekend with the Snowpocalypse, and culminated with the Snowverkill yesterday. Unless you're living in a complete media vacuum, you've probably heard that Washington, DC has been buried in more snow than ever recorded for an entire winter season. I grew up with snow of this magnitude...the Great Lakes can generate snowfalls of truly epic proportions. But the regions around the Great Lakes also have the equipment and skills to cope with such snow. Here in the South, they struggle to plow residential streets with pickup trucks, and I'd be surprised if any of the plow operators has ever even heard of a wing plow.

The federal government closed early on Friday, and has yet to officially reopen. After spending the bulk of four days shoveling snow (I actually was able to take a break on Tuesday!), I decided to go to the Office today anyway. I have work that needs to be completed this week (though I'm now in a holding pattern, waiting for a response from an attorney in Seattle). Besides, it was nice to get out of the house for a while. I might come in again tomorrow, at least for a while, even if the government makes a full week of it.

The good news is that all the shoveling has been good for me. Yes, my arms, shoulders and back ache. But I've noticed that my pants have become increasingly loose around the waist. I pulled out the scale to confirm it...I've lost almost 15 pounds since I last weighed myself before we left for Steamboat Springs, CO! Now, if I can just manage to keep it off...

I've long told people that I miss having a "real" winter here in the DC area. I missed having real snow and real cold. I always thought that I'd really like to have a week or two of it every year, just to get my fix. Well, I've got my fix for this year. Unfortunately, the forecasts seem to indicate that we are going to continue in our current pattern for a while. In fact, I'm hearing that there may be more snow coming early next week. At some point, it will warm up, and the snow will melt. The question then will be how fast will the melt off be? If it warms up quickly, and especially if it rains at the same time, we may well have some serious flooding problems...

Meanwhile, the Winter Olympics begin tomorrow in Vancouver, and they don't have enough snow, and the temperatures are above freezing so they haven't been able to make any. I wonder if we could load up a train with some of our snow and ship it west...

The week after the Inauguration, President Obama made a bit of a splash in the DC area news by making some critical remarks about the inability of this region to cope with winter weather. As someone who grew up in Western New York, I can sympathize with what the President was saying, but I've lived here long enough now to recognize that that it simply is unreasonable to expect this area to cope as well as areas that deal with this weather on a more frequent basis. The local governments cannot afford to invest the same kind of money into snow removal that local governments further north do, when it might be used only three or four times a year. That simply isn't money well spent. So I try not to be critical.

However, I still find the responses to snow events in this area amusing. We have something like six inches of snow on the ground now, which has accumulated since yesterday evening. Pretty much all the area schools are closed, and the Federal Gov't is excusing up to two hours of late arrivals and allowing people to stay home without having prior approval for leave. But I made it to the Office at my usual time, walking through the snow to my bus stop, where my bus was pretty much right on time. No real hardship involved. Listening to others, you'd think that my arrival that early was some sort of amazing feat. Hmmph.

I also found the coverage on The Weather Channel last night annoying, so much so that I changed the channel after only about five minutes. They were hyping this as the "East Coast Mega-Storm" or something similar. Mega-Storm? To me that conjures up images of the Superstorm of March 1993. I was visiting a friend in Syracuse when that storm hit. Syracuse recorded 43 inches of snow in that storm, and it was truly massive in scale. By comparison, today's snow doesn't amount to much. This need to over-hype stories (which is probably driven by the chase for higher ratings and the corresponding increase in advertising revenue) is one of the things that annoys me most about the modern media, especially television news. It causes people to over-react and inspires a level of panic way out of proportion to events.

Okay, so six inches of snow in the Washington area does cause problems. I understand that it will take longer to plow and treat the roads, and that not all our drivers have the necessary experience to drive safely and comfortably in these conditions. But why do we have to act like its the end of the world every time it happens? I mean, really, just deal with it folks.

I came to the office a bit later than usual yesterday, as I wanted to see my parents before they headed back to the snows of upstate NY. As a result, the bus I caught didn't quite get me to the office, but dropped me at the nearest Metro station. As I walked the rest of the way to the office, I had a chance to observe a number of other people as they made their way to and from the Metro station. The sleet/snow mix from Wednesday is now frozen into a solid mass that will support my weight, and it quite slippery, especially where its smooth. This presented some difficulties for many of the pedestrians I was watching.

Here's how I deal with such conditions...I have a pair of waterproof hiking boots with rubber soles and a nice deep tread pattern. If there is any kind of texture on the surface I'm walking on, I can traverse it with relatively little difficulty. I have few problems slipping and falling, and, as an added bonus, my feet stay nice and warm.

What struck me was the number of people (both men and women) trying to negotiate the slippery, frozen terrain in dress shoes. Okay, I understand that many jobs require people to dress better than I have to (my hiking boots don't even get a second glance here), but such dress shoes are perhaps the worst shoes for the current conditions. The smooth leather soles provide zero traction, they have virtually no insulation and the salt and other chemicals used to (hopefully) melt the snow and ice leave ugly stains on the shoes. Wouldn't it make more sense to wear a good pair of boots and carry the shoes in a bag? Then, when you get to work, change shoes. Seems simple enough to me...

I'd love to do a survey of local emergency departments and urgent care facilities to see how many people who come in for treatment of injuries resulting from falling on the ice were wearing business or formal style footwear. I'd almost be willing to bet that the majority of these people weren't wearing weather appropriate boots.

We are wet, wet, wet! The official rainfall total for yesterday at National Airport (about four miles from my house) was 5.19 inches. We've had more than 8 inches of rain since Friday evening, and they're predicting as much as 2 inches more by tomorrow evening.

Last night, the saturated ground gave way and a massive mudslide destabilized a big section of the Beltway not far from my house. I-95 was closed, both ways, all night, as were the nearby surface streets. A low lying neighborhood a couple of miles from my house had to be evacuated last night as an adjacent stream flooded out of its banks. Many of the homes were flooded with chest deep water. Fairfax County Fire & Rescue dispatched every boat in the county to the neighborhood to assist in evacuating the residents.

We lost power about 10pm last night, and it was still out about an hour ago, when I last spoke to my wife. She's making plans to borrow a generator this afternoon if the power doesn't come back on. We've got two big freezers full of food that we can't afford to have thaw out. It appears to be a localized power outage, so I'm hoping the power will be restored soon. Of course, with no electricity, we had no hot water this morning, so I didn't get a shower or a shave before I left, and I'm feeling a bit scruffy today.

My wife worked last night, and the trip to pick her up at the hospital was a bit of an adventure. A number of the streets I normally use were closed, and several others clearly were flooded last night. They were covered in mud, with debris scattered everywhere. There even a couple of spots where people tried to drive through the water, and had to abandon their stalled cars, leaving a bit of an obstacle course for the morning commute.

I hope this weather pattern changes soon, though the forecast calls for it to hold through most of the week, so we are looking at further flooding issues over the next few days...

My daughters got their first taste of snow for this winter over the weekend. When they went to bed Wednesday night, it was snowing, and they could only just contain their excitement. They were so disappointed when they woke up on Thanksgiving morning to find that none of the snow had accumulated.

On Friday, we drove up to New York to my parents' house. They've been getting regular bouts of lake-effect snow, and when we arrived, there was plenty of snow for the girls to play in. Unfortunately, it was late when we arrived, and the girls had to wait until Saturday morning, when they dragged me out to the hill behind my parents house. My parents keep two plastic sleds for the girls to use, and they took full advantage:
( sledding )

After lunch, they convinced my father to go outside with them, and he found himself involved in a snowball fight against the two girls. I'm not sure how much fun he had, but the girls enjoyed themselves.

For my antipodean friends who are enjoying the early days of summer, here's what my parents' house looked like on Saturday:
( house )

Of course, the weather is supposed to warm up this week, and most of that snow is forecast to melt. Its still early winter, and they'll probably have more snow than this by the time we get back up there at Christmas time.