Thanks!
The water rose up in Mom’s yard but didn’t breach the house…whew!
We had minor damage. The wind took down a tree on the neighbor’s property and when it fell, the root cluster levered up the wire fencing between us. We piled up some brush there to keep the dogs away, and will have to repair it this weekend.
Outermost bands of heavy rain should be here in Northern Virginia in a few hours.
The usual answer is no, or at least not immediately. Repairing to restore service is the work of day, weeks, and occasionally months. Hardening infrastructure is the work of years and decades, after the slow-moving government decides who’s going to pay for it.
A bunch of short live videos from Ian.
I live in a city with electric buses. The poles are metal. If you hit one it’s staying put and your car wraps around it. If you hit a wooden electric pole you snap it off. Now I’m not suggesting a state full of steel poles but it should be possible to use wire bracing on 4 sides and a steel sleeve base to keep them intact. Cheap and easy to retrofit.
Lots of the local distribution lines get taken down by trees. Folks love their green leafy suburbia.
When trees fall on wires the wires snap. The poles mostly stay up but the wires are broken every couple of spans. So one run of wire across a given suburb may be severed into 15 segments needing 14 repairs. Better poles don’t solve that. And ordering umpteen hundred poles of a type you’ve not already planned on using is a wait of months, if not a year or more for deliver in quantity.
Nothing in utility outside plant management is quick or easy. Huge scale, specialty parts, government oversight, it all takes its toll to make the supplier about as nimble as a badly diseased elephant.
I’m thinking along the lines of adding support to poles vs special poles. Something that can be done after power is restored.
We don’t get hurricanes in my area but we get a lot of tornadoes and they take down poles.
I’ve been offline for a few days (mostly work, not hurricane related), but wanted to check in agreeing with @LSLGuy’s comments about Broward County. The lake in my backyard was higher than normal, but not nearly as bad as Irma or Eta. I had some very minor branches fall from a tree. One tree in my neighborhood lost a big branch, which thankfully fell on an open lawn area.
I did have a relatively close call with a tornado Tuesday evening. I was out to dinner, believing that we were in the early rain period but that nasty stuff wouldn’t really come until Wednesday. A tornado was on the ground about a mile SW of me (for locals, the one at Nova just south of 595). We waited a little bit before driving home.
My son lives near Gainesville. No damage, but he described the water in the gulf being pulled away from land.
There’s a 1960s suburb development near me with lots of 40+ year old 50 to 75 foot tall trees. Mostly non-native species. It’s not right on the beach, but it ranges from about 1/4mi to about 3/4ths of a mile inland.
Back in 2017 Hurricane Irma damaged a lot of wires and a few wooden power poles in that development. The power company got everything working again then began a 6-year process to replace every pole in the area (about 1/2 mile x 3 miles) with much much taller concrete poles. The new poles put the local distribution wires well above the trees, rather than through the middle of them. The new poles are about 2’ square at the base, and 1’ square at the top. They’re prefab, so I can’t tell whether or not they have a steel girder up the middle. Anyhow, they’re stupid-stout.
And now in 2022 they’re about 2/3rds done with the job in this one neighborhood. Of the thousands of such neighborhoods in greater Miami. I’m told this initiative was begun after hurricane Wilma which was in 2005 and is still slowly spreading across the state 17 years later.
I’m wondering about the shift in channels in the navigable waters around ft Myers and areas. Probably not safe to boat relying on channel markers if those are intact.
Rogue wave in Miami Beach yesterday!
You’re right. Apparently the hurricanes in 2004 and 2005 inspired legislation that required power companies to harden their infrastructure.
Politico 09/30/2022 Energy & Environment
4 things holding back restoration of Florida’s electric grid`
they’ve restored power in over 650,000 houses. Not a bad start.
That is actually impressively fast.
Having lived through some very long outages in the last 12 years.
Lee County. The big impact point. This place has been TRASHED. I work on the 2nd floor of my office so I hope my stuff is OK. The ground floor (like the rest of the downtown) got flooded. I have been and am working at a shelter at a high school but can come home when off. So I have power but am still under boil water notice.
Stay safe! I’m somewhat involved in the State EOC up here in Tallahassee and the imagery has been horrifying.
What’s even more terrifying is that if he had gone into Tampa Bay as originally predicted, it might have been WORSE.
Power outage is down from a start of 2 million to 461 thousand. Making progress
The estimate for my in-laws was the 10th. But Charlotte and Lee counties were hit especially hard, so no surprise.
Back during hurricane Maria there was a stretch in eastern Puerto Rico where a whole bunch of those went down. And when one of those goes down, it goes DOWN, and you have to put up a brand new one from the hole up. Then though as so often happens you had others like a couple hundred feet away perfectly fine.
People sometimes get puzzled at our “too slow recovery” but it does take a while to harden a grid (while it’s still running)… some times long enough that by the time you get to the next part of it codes and standards and even what is being connected to it have changed enough that you have to make a whole new specs and bid process from scratch and rewrite your 5- and 10- year capital plan.
Wouldn’t have been worse for us.
UPDATE: After working 6 days in the shelter, I was released to go home “For a few days.” So I don’t know what my future holds right now. My house is almost undamaged but my trees are GONE. It breaks my heart to look at the stump of my 62-year-old live oak. I don’t miss the avocado, but I wish it hadn’t damaged my soffits and fascia on its way out. I just went over to Publix and after driving around the brown post-storm world, it was like when Dorothy opened her door and looked at Oz for the first time.