[SOC] QRv, sorta

[Bill Cunningham]

Howdee,

Power restored last night, fully a week before expected. Phone service and
cell service on and off, now stable, cable internet access with full stack
of  incoming, no apparent loss of qsl.net.

As for severity of storm, on a grand scale it was more disruptive than
destructive.    Severity depends on whether your house was destroyed.  A
huge area and  population was affected.  Winds stayed below just hurricane
strength here, but brought down many old growth trees because soil
saturated.  My local estimate is that 1% of the houses in this area have a
major tree through the roof, but that equates to 100 houses in the immediate
area.   A few houses are totalled this way.  My next door neighbor has three
monsters through  his roof and may have to rebuild rather than restore.  We
have had two 90 ft monsters crash onto our property.  One was stopped by
another tree before it struck corner of house.  The other kissed our back
door 5 minutes after the neighbors from trashed house finished moving
through the door.  There is a third tree leaning our way and big/tall enough
to do serious damage, but the downed tree is holding down its roots.  Hope
it hangs in there until it is taken down.


US players may have seen TV coverage of Poquoson, VA where all the politicos
visited.  Even though storm passed 70 miles to the west, tidal flooding was
"at least equal to the 1933 benchmark."  We lived there for 22 years and
moved 4 miles west and 9 feet higher in elevation in 1999.  Our old street
was waist deep and up within 8 inches of finished floor of former house,
wetting the insulation underneath.  Other side of street had water in
finished floor.  Everything east of that point, certainly 40% of the
population is thoroughly trashed.  At one point, emergency services to 75%
of population were cut off.

As I said, severity depends on where you sit or swim.  We're sitting here as
one of a small minority with power to boil the available water, etc and
feeling lucky as hell.  Our losses are trivial.  The population at large has
no power and the impact on infrastructure is a lesson in humility.   One
wonders what a direct hit from a Category III or worse storm would do.

Bill C