It’s Saturday morning. Irene is coming ashore in North Carolina. That’s a good thing (except for the Outer Banks). When a hurricane crosses land, it loses energy and its energy source, and the eye wall disintegrates.
I’m in Derby, Connecticut, 6 miles in from the ocean and 90 feet above sea level. Route 15 (the Merritt/Cross Parkway) is something of a dividing line – when you keep going North of it, there is a steep hill. In Winter, that’s about the dividing line of where the warmth of Long Island Sound no longer protects the land from precipitation. We get ice, they get rain. We get snow, they get ice.
There is little doubt I’m living right where this thing is headed. The Weather.gov maps gives my town a 90% chance of getting Tropical storm winds (40+ mph), a 50% chance of 58+ mph gusts and a slim (10%) of hurricane strength winds.
Even before it hit land in North Carolina, Irene was downgraded to a Category 1.
So my assessment at this point is that trying to move somewhere – especially with 250,000 New Yorkers looking for somewhere to go – is more of a risk than staying put. Some trees will surely blow over, that means power might be out for days (although power outages are rare here). Some shingles might fly off, but catastrophic damage is not likely. There is a “brook” that runs through the condo complex – it doesn’t have enough land feeding it to be a significant flood risk, but if enough water falls in one spot in a short period of time, any place can flood.
The server is back in Chicago. If you lose access to the server, try rebooting your computer, or if you’re a wannabee geek….
Start a DOS command prompt (Start / Run / type “cmd”
When the DOS window opens, type:
ipconfig /flushDNS
That will make your computer “forget” that the server used to be in Connecticut. If your ISP’s server still thinks it is, that won’t help
should still get you there no matter what DNS thinks
Stay Safe Art ! we have been listening to WNIS Norfolk and they have had live calls from NC and Hampton call in and say whats going on. The eye is near there now. they have big winds now.
Granby street bridge in Norfolk has collapsed.
so be careful Art when the Irene gets there. Power is out for 300k people in Norfolk/Virginia Beach.
be good God Bless you !
Parrott
I listened to the same report at the same time. Remember John Batchelor’s rule – the first 3 reports are always wrong. I also saw video on the TV web site.
It was a large water main break (30+ inches) – probably caused by the failure of a number of the other pumping stations, and one water line trying to take up the slack and bursting.
Probably what happened is someone heard ” Gramby Road has collapsed, near the bridge”… which is entirely likely when a major major water main springs a leak…. and they extrapolated that to “The Bridge has collapsed”.. I can’t come up with a scenario where a water main break would cause the pilings holding up a bridge to collapse.
Time will tell.
Sure enough, nothing happened to the bridge. Northbound is open. The problem is the street caved in at the water line break
http://hamptonroads.com/2011/08/granby-bridge-south-closed-water-main-break