I won't say we are in the clear yet, but the power has been on for a couple of hours now. There are power crews from all over the country here and the provincial government has requested aid from the military to help with the cleanup, so things are clearing up faster than anticipated. Much faster than the last large hurricane we had 15 years ago, when power wasn't restored to the city for almost a week.
We actually had another storm a week ago, but it was a post-tropical storm, which is almost as bad as a hurricane. During that I ended up with a pretty bad leak in one of my basement windows, much to the upset of the people that live there, for obvious reasons. They reported it to me about midnight and I was outside digging a twenty foot trench in the howling wind and rain, so I was interested to see how that would hold up to the hurricane. Pretty darned good as it turns out.
Also, there is a decent sized maple tree on my property, but between the street and the sidewalk, which is technically the city's responsibility. There is allegedly some kind of disease going around that is affecting these trees, although I think it's current state of poor health is more attributable to the sidewalk plow that tore out a chunk of it's root over the winter. Either way, it is not in great shape, and it was my other big worry for this storm- and rightly so as it was the one that dropped the limb that could have hit me and/or one of the dogs.
But enough of the yammering- I promised you all photos, and here they are.
This is the photo I took showing that there were only twigs down:
The photos are time stamped 1450hrs and 1459hrs.
I started by checking on my roof to see if there were any missing shingles, but fortunately not. I just replaced the roof about 5 years ago, and it should be covered under warranty if I had. Fortunately I was okay, but I started looking around the neighborhood, and the first thing I noticed were these newfangled 45 degree trees in the park across the road.
That's when I decided to take a short walk around my loop and see what was what.
We have a lot of trees on our street, and, while they may be very nice most of the time, they can be very detrimental in bad weather.
I'm sure most of these branches were pulled off the street, and not all of them just happened to conveniently fall on the sidewalk, but either way, I was glad I didn't have to spend any significant time outside!
At this point I was starting to get optimistic that it looked like most of my neighbors had made out okay... until Megan pointed this one out.
I have no idea what kind of damage there is to the house because it's not my property, I don't know the people that live there, and I am pretty sure going back there is probably not the safest thing to do. What amazes me is that the tree didn't go rought through the house.
This is the more sheltered part of the loop, not as much carnage or damage pron to show up here, although just before I finished the loop I noted a large limb hanging down from a tree, and my first instinct was to pull it the rest of the way down before it fell on someone.
That is, until I noted that the limb wasn't hanging from the tree....
Yup, it's hooked on TWO levels of service wires running from the street to my neighbors' house. Not gonna pull on that one!
Upon returning home we spotted this, looking across the back yards:
I missed it initially because I was busy paying attention to my broken tree, but this is what the back yard two houses over looked like and I felt pretty darned lucky!
There were worse spots in the city than where I am, but I think we got hit hard enough. While it seems selfish, I am glad that I got off as easily as I did, and, even more importantly, I am glad to hear that there were no reported deaths this time.
We were really lucky, as it could have been a lot worse.
This was my second major hurricane, and, with
last year's tornado experience, I believe I am uniquely qualified to discuss urban survival and prepping in severe weather incidents. Someone call the History Channel and give them my number!
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