It has begun to rain where I live. This shows how large this storm is. It won’t make landfall at the Jersey shore until Monday night and it is still 400 miles away and it is already raining here. I did my normal 7:00 am Sunday trek to Wal-Mart and Giant for our normal weekly needs. There is usually no one shopping at this time. Today, there were hundreds of people milling about. Situations like this give me a glimpse into the future. The flashlight, battery and bread aisles were bare. I would guess that 98% of Americans don’t have enough supplies to survive for one week before riots start. What will 60 million East Coast morons do when the charge on their iPhones and IPads runs out? How will they tweet? How will they know if their BFF Melissa is sad on Facebook. I think a few people are going to get a slap in the face over the next few days and get a dose of reality about the future.
In the meantime, I will blog on this thread during the course of the storm. I will have power because I bought a generator over a year ago. It feels good not being panicked like the masses. Philadelphia has already declared a state of emergency, so I expect to have a day off tomorrow. If not, I’ll work from home. I wouldn’t want to run into the rats that will be coming out of the sewer drains in West Philly.
Awaiting Sandy
The effects of Sandy have arrived as the outer bands of rain are affecting parts of the region. There is a band of moderate rain stretching from eastern PA southward to Delaware as of 7:30am. The rain will increase in coverage throughout the day. It will mainly be light to moderate, as the heavier rainfall won’t arrive until later tonight and during the overnight hours.
Winds will be on the increase throughout the day from the Northeast. They will range from 10-15 mph, but there will be occasional gusts over 20 mph. The winds will be stronger at the beaches, gusting over 30 mph. With the rain, the winds will continue to increase as we head into the evening hours.
Hurricane Sandy continues to move Northeast off the east coast. Throughout the day, she will begin to turn north and eventually make that turn west towards the mid-Atlantic coast. Landfall continues to be in NJ late tomorrow night somewhere along the NJ coast between Ocean City and Seaside Heights.
While the weather will be going downhill, there is still time to make final preparations for Hurricane Sandy before the brunt of the storm arrives tomorrow. I can’t stress enough how dangerous of a situation this is and the effects it will have for everyone in the region over the next few days. Make sure you have several days worth of food, water and other essentials in the event you lose power for an extended period. This is going to be a truly unprecedented event and one that many people have never experienced.
Admin it’s good to hear you made it, call your insurance man immediately and report the grill cover, he might busy going forward.
Jeez, not even flooding. You’re a lucky man. Your condo is now beach-front, however.
Bad hair day,
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Easy to ridicule those without power when you have it! I was spitting mad when my cable went out yesterday. I would go postal if I had no power for a week. Yeah, I’ve got a little honda generator but it won’t run my air conditioning and its a pain in the ass to use a generator. Besides I live in a condo and my neighbors would complain about the noise if I didn’t let them hook an extension cord to it .
Those crews can’t work until the winds die down and that could be another day or two and its getting cold enough at night now to be dangerous to be without heat. Looks like almost all of New Jersey is without power. Can’t imagine the underclass will stay calm for long in the dark with nothing on their giant TV sets so every day without power risks a breakdown in civil order.
“Chris Christie is giving a press conference and he essentially called the Democratic African American Mayor of Atlantic City Lorenzo Langford a fucking dumbass. ”
He sure looks to be a snappy dresser though! :^P
AWD sending pictures from his cruise
Boomers dancing on AWD’s Cruise
Great News!!!!
Part of my wood fence fell down, but my two RON PAUL lawn signs stayed upright.
Long live Ron Paul!!!!
Stuckys silent he must have lost power.
“… and mentally retarded giants who chase balls in stadiums like dogs.”
hahahaha
i <3 Ann Barnhardt
@admin: Glad to hear your family and home escaped without too much damage! Hope your condo survived, you have such great stories of your time there. I would rather read those than a tale of woe of a hurricane clean up, heh.
While you still have your generator out, go ahead and do a dry run with all your stuff that you think you want to hook up to it. Then turn it all on. You will find that you don’t have as much generating power as you think you do.
I don’t think a lot of people realize that electric motors require almost TWICE the power to start up as they need for their steady-state running. You will find that turning on your toaster and your hairdryer at the same time can cause your generator to sound like the Death Star right before it fires, heh.
It is also a good time to sort out where to place your generator so you aren’t 1) deafened by the sound, or 2) asphyxiated by the emissions, or 3) totally pissing off your neighbors.
Sorting out where the fucking extension cords are gonna go is also worthwhile. You guys might already know this, but for every 50 feet of cord, you need to go up one wire gauge (bigger gauge, lower number). Stepping on/over them for days on end gets really old.
This kind of emergency is also a good time to sort out just what electrical devices you just gotta have, and what their wattage requirements are. Then you can buy electrical cords with enough gauge to handle the load safely.
We had a real Chinese circus after Ike trying to do all this in the dark without electrocuting ourselves so I’m just passing on my experience.
We actually bought a hard copy book, Audel something, to have on hand for our next emergency, but there is plenty of great stuff on the web you can just print out.
Oh, and your generator is like anyother machine – it needs some maintenance and love if you want it to work when you need it!
Avalon just ventured out with my son to get a hoagie at Wawa. No luck. Power is still out everywhere. No stores are open. Traffic lights are out. Trees are down everywhere. The only places open were McDonalds and Applebees. Both were overwhelmed with cars as the obese hoards need their daily fat intake.
Get your tinfoil hats on!!
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What will the impacts of all this water on the North American Plate have on the New Madrid Fault Line????
I wonder if this Navy Map of Future America will come to fruition???
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As RE mentioned above….There are still several days of continual rain left to drop…it seems the news is downplaying some of the issues related to this storm? Does that show a bias towards Obama?
There is no downplaying of the storm. It is over. The sun is peaking through the clouds. There was a lot of damage along the shore. It could have been worse. The storm was not created by the goverment. Don’t embarass yourself trying to create some goofball conspiracy theories. It was a bad storm and now it is time to clean up.
@plato
Thats a lot of dead freeshitters.
HZK-good advice for the Admin. I have taxed small gensets to the ragged edge. The key to running multiple devices at the same time is to turn them on/plug them in sequentially, after genset is warmed up and running smooth, letting it adjust to each load before adding another.
Admin-If you don’t start your generator, I wouldn’t worry about draining the oil. If you do start it, you might want to do HZK’s “dry run”, then complete the break-in period with a moderate load. Don’t run it too long with no load-they don’t like that. Then change oil and run just a few minutes to circulate fresh oil-better to store with fresh oil than no oil, and better no oil than sour oil (but honestly, a few hours, even during break-in, shouldn’t really hurt).
Re gas-I leave my tanks full, but put in Stabil, and run long enough to get through the carb-have left small engines for years this way, mostly without a problem. I suppose the alternative is to drain the gas tank, then run the motor dry. Don’t leave the carb full & the tank empty-that is a bad combination. If it is EFI, you’ll need advice from someone else-not my thing.
It was definitely a storm for the record books and people will talk about it for years.
The real toll is yet unknown. We can count the lives and homes lost, estimate the cost of the damage, and the economic impact, but the realimpact of storms like this comes in the societal change they wreak.
Will the clean up force already-strapped municipalities to reconsider rebuilding some areas, like the Atlantic City boardwalk (even if there’s enough land left to build it on)? Will people again buy vacation homes and boats? Will insurers be able to compensate people enough for damages that they can afford to repair their homes, replace their cars and return their lives to normal, or will those people move on to new lives elsewhere, just as they did after Katrina?
We’re already five years into a 4T, and this is the type of event that can change the mindset of a society — how it will react to future crises, what society is willing to accept, what society collectively decides needs to change. Only time will tell the real impact of this storm.
Admin
Use sta-bill and dont leave fuel in the carb. There should be a drain screw on the bottom of the carb. Fuel today is becoming less and less gasoline and more ethanol and that shit is horrible sitting in small engines, especially if it is carb’ed. My pops left fuel in our generator for a year without running, i had to take off carb and clean it saturday afternoon to get it ungunked and turn over, not fun.
@ Thinker
Interesting thought about the insurance impact of Irene and Sandy. Ask people who live along the Gulf Coast or Florida about the cost of wind and flood insurance and you will hear horror stories. Now that the the mid Atlantic has had two hurricanes in consecutive years figure the cost of such insurance will be going up sharply. Florida has not had a hurricane strike it since 2005 but you’d never know it from the insurance premiums and annual rate hikes. This impacts housing values too. Obviously an insurance payment that is almost equal in size to the mortgage payment puts a limit on the asking price for a property.
Re fuel in carb-we don’t blend alcohol into our gas here in AK (actually, I occasionally add in some isopropyl, but that is a different animal and not for storage anyway), so Harry’s advice may be more appropriate than mine.
Some foreign website picked this post up yesterday and made it the 2nd most viewed post of the day.
It was truly an epic funny thread from October 2012 as Sandy approached and hit the eastern U.S.
It is interesting to read now, well after the fact. Remember the two children swept out of their mother’s arms on Long Island, when a homeowner wouldn’t let them shelter in his house? Remember the water flooding subway tunnels and shutting down parts of NYC for almost a week? The woman screaming for food and water to be provided to her just hours after the storm ended?
Remember whole villages along the shoreline washed away? Of people still living in tent cities because of slow assistance and financial aid?
It was definitely an historic event, even though it didn’t affect the election or having any long-lasting effects on society. Not that are obvious, anyway… maybe it did teach people the value of prepping for a few days.