A couple of days ago the East Coast experienced the biggest earthquake of my lifetime. As for hurricanes, in the Mid-Atlantic region where I have lived most of my life, we don’t get direct hits. We sometimes face tropical storm-strength winds from weakened hurricanes, but the last time we had actual hurricane-force winds was 1985 when Hurricane Gloria passed over Long Island and hit Connecticut. I don’t remember Hurricane Agnes, but it was a small Hurricane that did extensive damage in 1972, even with only tropical force winds in the Mid-Atlantic.
Hurricane Irene is tracking as a beast that will hit somewhere between Philly and Long Island with at least Category 1 strength, and possibly Category 3.
Even before this storm gets here, it looks like our region will see the wettest August on record (following one of the driest Julys). This is very bad because saturated earth means many, many more uprooted trees. And, you know, we live in a log cabin in the woods. Whenever we have strong wind gusts, we lose power, sometimes for days at a time. I think it was in the spring of 2010 that we had a bunch of trees come down, including three that blocked our driveway. Fortunately, they were small enough that a few humans could drag them out of the way. In any case, you can only imagine how screwed we’ll be if we get sustained gusts of 70 mph or greater. We could easily be marooned without power for days.
So, here’s to Hurricane Gloria taking a path to the east of the models, because this will be no way for CabinGirl to start her vacation.
