Tropical Cyclone Isaias

[EllisDee]

Not sure if I’m doing this correctly, but I’m trying to quote (most or all of) robby’s post in the other thread so I can reply to it here:

@robby

The thread may have been a squib, but the storm was not, at least here in Connecticut. The center of the storm passed to the west of us, which is very unusual. (Hurricanes and tropical storms usually get pushed to the east by the prevailing winds before they hit us this far north.) Anyway, the storm track for Isaias put us on the windier side of the storm, which was made even worse due to the high speed of the storm itself as it raced north at 15-20 mph.

The bottom line is that well over half the people in Connecticut lost power. This has been one of the worst storms for power outages in state history, worse than Irene in 2011 and Sandy in 2012. Over a million customers lost power here in Connecticut, and as of this writing, six days after the storm, 145,000 customers are still without power.

The day after the storm, our electric utility Eversource was saying that “the impact Isaias had on the electric system is greater than Superstorm Sandy, and customers should plan for multiple days without power as crews work through extensive damage to make repairs.”

I work for a large sewer and water utility, and our facilities were running off of emergency generators for three days after the storm. Some people in the state aren’t expected to get power back until Tuesday or Wednesday (a week after the storm).

No joke. The timestamp says you wrote this post at 6:25pm Sunday evening. My town in Southwestern CT lost power Tuesday the 4th at 2:25pm, and didn’t get power restored until Sunday at 4:25pm, which means we had no power for 5 days and 2 hours. You wrote this quoted post exactly two hours after our power finally came back on. Cablevision finally restored cable/internet/phone about an hour ago, Tuesday at 5:30pm. So a full week (+3 hours) without cable and internet.

The 5 days without power was particularly harsh for my town because pretty much everyone is on well water, meaning without power you have no running water. Not just no hot water, no water at all. So I found myself running around town looking to buy four 1-gallon jugs of water just to flush one toilet once. Exactly four gallons to flush my toilets, so clearly not a modern eco-friendly low-flow toilet. I can report that water is heavy. Specifically, a gallon jug weighs 8 pounds, 9 ounces according to my postal scale. So when I went out on day 3 and bought 30 gallons of water in the hot sun, it sucked that I had no shower to come home to.

Now I’m off to shop for and buy new water storage jugs and possibly some shelving units to store them. I may end up posting a few threads on here about emergency preparedness, because my experience in the past week tells me my current preparedness level is for shit.