Hurricane Sandy

[lloyd_cdb]

Any other US east coast residents?  Hope all is well.  I'm a NYer, a couple neighbors have had their houses split in half by 100ft oak trees.  Thankfully both of them had evacuated and no one is hurt.

[49410enrique]

it looks bad. i'm sure it is worse than it looks. it could also have been MUCH MUCH worse (based on historical climatology data that whole region is way overdue -by probability and past trends and future models-to get hit by a big big one, like hurricane Andrew big....so freakin glad that did not happen this time around. let's hope not at all in any of our lifetimes...).


that's heavy. let's lighten things up

[lloyd_cdb]

that's heavy. let's lighten things up

Lol.

But, yeah, it wasn't as bad as it could have been.  Still a 200 year storm for NY which at least makes me feel safer considering it wasn't TOO bad for me.  Still 55 deaths confirmed, and a couple neighborhoods had electrical fires that wiped out the entire area.  Thankfully, those were in mandatory evacuation zones.  On the positive side, I can't get to work, and am still claiming I don't have internet 

[scherzo123]

I live in New Jersey, and I was pretty unaffected, just a lot of wind and short time of power outage. I heard some of Atlantic City's boardwalk got washed away and that New York City is  underwater before the hurricane even landed...

[1piano4joe]

I am a US east coast resident, a Long Islander. All is not well.

The foundation in my crawl space now has cracks and the house tried to float away. It was pretty much unweighted by buoyancy and settled back down. I guess I'll need an engineer to assess structural damage. I do have flood insurance but not homeowners.

There is a home heating oil smell permeating the house which is weird since I have gas heat.

 I lost three cars in the flood. There not lost, there sitting in the driveway. They just don't run anymore. Two of them uninsured (mine) and my girlfriend's insured car. 

Oh, I don't know maybe $200,000.00 worth of damage.

Lots of fuzzy, smelly stuff growing everywhere. Masks, gloves, bleach have been a daily ritual for clean up. Washed all the clothes, curtains, bed spreads, pillow cases, wash cloths and towels. Even the lamp shades smell. So do I probably. So do my piano scores.

I have been living at my girlfriends since 10/29/12 dealing with the aftermath day by day.

On the upside, the house is much less cluttered. I threw away carpets, furniture, books, stereos, etc.

I am dehumidifying the severely flooded room which probably has black mold spreading in the sheet rock. The floor tiles crack when you walk on them.

No heat, no electricity, no food, no TV, no internet, no phone, no car at my house for 2 weeks.

But my beloved Schulze-Pollman piano is alive and well. Unfortunately, I now live at my girlfriends (until she kicks me out anyway) and my piano is 5 miles away at my former residence.

So, basically I have quit  playing piano or was I fired? I brought a guitar to my girlfriend's house but haven't played it. It sort of sits there as a reminder.

Need a laugh? Fema sent me a check for $5700.00 explaining that $3500 is for repairs and $2200 is for renting a place to live.

3 weeks later, still no car.  Mostly, bumming rides and using buses and railroad which are not particularly convenient to a Long Island resident.

The house is coming back little by little, day by day. The odors are better. Febrese, air fresheners, carpet cleaners help.

Well, I could go on and on but don't feel like it.

I wish the best for all others who suffered from this storm, Joe.

[cmg]

Joe, sorry, really, truly sorry about the damages out there.  I live in NYC's West Village and in the zone just above flooding from the Hudson River and the Harbor that hit Battery Park.  We were without power, heat, phone, internet from Monday night until the following weekend.  Stores were stripped of everything or shut down because of power loss across the entire southern tip of the island.  Trees downed everywhere, blocking streets.  I had to walk daily three miles north and back to find ice.  We did have water and I had stocked up on canned goods.

It was surreal.  The heart of downtown Manhattan!  Even with surge protectors, all of our electronic stuff went nuts when the two, huge tranformers blew up just four miles away.  Flood waters from the East River rushed in and set off the explosions.  It was the height of the hurricane with 100 mph wind gusts at 8:30 pm Monday night.  When the transformers blew, the sky filled with an eerie, dazzling blue light, then, boom -- the power was out for nearly a week.

We were lucky.  Broken windows, no power, no transport, dwindling food supplies, cold, dark.  Very 19th century.  But no flooding like you experienced.  No homelessness.  Being cut off without news was strange, but we experienced a similar situation on 9/11.  Cordoned off from the rest of the city.  No supplies trucked in, no one without a photo ID proving they lived down here, allowed in.  

We're normalizing, since flood waters just missed us by a block.  My office has power and I'm back at work.

Hang in there.  You're in our  thoughts.


Michael

[dcstudio]

I live in Biloxi, MS

I feel for all of you when I say -- I have been there!  Down here in the Gulf Coast region,  hurricanes are a part of life and we understand well how to prepare for them--but that means little when your house has been flooded.

If I can say anything good about them--and I have sat through so many--it's that people truly come together and help eachother afterwards--at least down here.  Neighbors that you barely know will come through for you.

 They are also a stark reminder of just how insignificant we are and just how powerful nature can be. People tend to view life a little differently after witnessing that level of destruction.

GOD BLESS YOU ALL!!!!    know that eventually life WILL return to "normal"