Northwest Wind Storm

[Highbeam]

It seems that a lot of the trouble people are having comes from the lack of preparedness. Not just lack of a first aid kit or a 5 gallon jug of water but just overall preparedness and knowledge.

A woodstove and a stack of wood for example. The new homes being built do not have wood burning stoves and the gas fireplaces such as mine are even labeled as "decorative". Loddy freakin dah... we need a backup source of heat.

Many new homes have septic systems which require electric pumps to run otherwise they back up into the home. Gee thanks. Outhouses are outlawed.

Our roofs are now being built with composition shingles that blow away when the wind howls. Nice.

Also the lack of knowing how to rough it. Some folks have no water, dry toilet, and they need to poo so rather than just grabbing a shovel and taking a walk they crap in the toilet over and over and over making an increasingly large sanitation problem.

The other problem is not knowing how long the outage will be. People burning up their supplies in a few days and then realize that they need to make it for 10. I don't know how to address this one, the same problem exists in all emergencies.

I thought about the folks in LA while sitting around with the kids during the outage. If this was a long term issue then my family would not have been able to weather it, a sad reality. The cold was the biggest problem, I would have had to flee for warmth just as many neighbors did early on.

We Northwesterners don't get this kind of thing very often so while the weather conditions and length of outage seem small by Canadian or gulf coast standards it is not a small deal to us softies that are not properly conditioned or adapted to such things.

 

[PBinWA]

These SW storms actually played out not too bad for us Gorge dwellers. I think the Eastern Winter winds from the Gorge help to slow down any Western winds. The worse the storm got for us was 35 MPH and it was actually nice and warm compared to our typical 40 MPH freezing Eastern winds.

People that usually don't get the Eastern Winds seemed to fair much worse.

Don't forget that if you have a well and you are without power then you have no water either. I think a Generator and Transfer Switch should be on everyone's preparedness list. I can live with the cold (layers) but no water really sucks.

 

[Bird]

I have a nephew in Washington state who was among the lucky ones, I guess. With the power off and after being told it might be off a few days, he went and got a generator. Then he was on the telephone with his dad (my brother) who was telling him how to hook it up when the power came back on.

 

[Kubotasrking]

I feel sorry for all those in the Northwest who are going through such violent weather conditions and through the clean-up afterwards. You can start to imagine what the people in the New Orleans area went through with Katrina. After 16 months, 1/4 of the town still has no electricity and many other utilities are still out and 1/3 of the red lights are not yet working. Repairs have not yet begun on 100,000 homes, many of whom are waiting on their checks for repairs from the Road Home Program. The Virginia company the federal gov't hired to pass out the checks to the 100,000 homeowners has passed out only 97 checks so far. That company gets $70,000,000 just to pass out the checks and now they are getting $17,000,000 more to send their poor distressed workers home to Virginia on leave because this work (handing out checks) is so stressful to them. I guess the population of New Orleans will have to live in tents and FEMA trailers for another year while these workers recover from their stress. While the citizens of the USA have been very willing to help out in this disaster, and people in the New Orleans really appreciate all that Americans are trying to do for them, the gov't seems to be doing everything it can to slow down the progress and see that the recovery money ends up in the pockets of bureaucrats instead.

My wife talked about what it must have been like in New Orleans after Katrina. We were thankful we had it better. I spoke w/ a co-worker in Chicago who is a NO native, and he was talking about how his city resembles what he imagines Iraq to look like.

We were lucky, we did the extension cord routine on our generator. It took the chill off, kept our food from spoiling, and gave us some lights. Many of our neighbors aren't as fortunate as us, they didn't have a generator...

I sure hope the Saints win the Super Bowl (lifelong Cowboys fan saying that...), and continue to bring the short-attention-spanned consumer's $$ into your fair city.

All in all, my wife and I have a great life in a great place...the weather has just been a little different this year. Additionally, we've had weird circumstances that have resulted in national TV coverage due to the tourist who got lost and the lost mountain climbers...(I hope they find the other 2 alive...)

 

[Kubotasrking]

I have a nephew in Washington state who was among the lucky ones, I guess. With the power off and after being told it might be off a few days, he went and got a generator. Then he was on the telephone with his dad (my brother) who was telling him how to hook it up when the power came back on.

I talked to a couple of folks at work who went looking for generators, and they were all sold!!! Your nephew was lucky indeed.

 

[40Kchicks]

In the Willamette Valley of western Oregon I was really lucky. We lost power about 10 times during the storm but the power always came back on. I felt especially lucky because I was in bed with the worst flu that I have had in years and my wife was out of town. Our new 150KW generator is working really well but I was concerned because I only had about 80 gallons of fuel left in the tank and generator is rated to use up to 11 gal/hr. I didn’t want to be more than 20’ from the restroom let alone down shuttling diesel from another source. The big generator backs up power to the 6 poultry barns and all of the wells so we always have water. Running water makes a big difference. I have a Miller bobcat welder/generator that I could use for the house if I needed to.

I do however some friends that just got power yesterday after 4 days without. They are very thankful to be powered again.

In a way I think it’s good to have little emergencies. They always good give us good life lessons and make us a little stronger or teach us how to be better prepared next time.

Eric

 

[tallyho8]

The Virginia company the federal gov't hired to pass out the checks to the 100,000 homeowners has passed out only 97 checks so far. That company gets $70,000,000 just to pass out the checks and now they are getting $17,000,000 more to send their poor distressed workers home to Virginia on leave because this work (handing out checks) is so stressful to them.

Sorry, I made a mistake. The Virginia company is being paid $758,000,000.00 to write the checks to the Katrina victims. So when you hear the gov't gave New Orleans 1 billion dollars in relief, you know where $758,000,000.00 of it went.

 

[Pilot]

This kind of storm really makes you appreciate utility line power!

We are on a ridge, 1,200 ft. elevation near the Cascades SE of Portalnd. Trees SW of our house blocked some wind, so our wind meter only registered 35 tops but we probably had some stronger gusts. If you get a weather station, get one that updates frequently or you'll miss peak gusts; ours only updates about once every couple minutes.

Our power was out only for about 18 hours.

We have a 6KW generator (like a certain male organ, you always want a bigger one!) and it works thru a transfer switch to power: Refrigerator, well, furnace (burns propane, so we only need electricity to light it and run the fan), freezer, some lights and the microwave. After using the microwave, we plugged an extension cord into the MW's socket & lit up the TV.

The generator is supposed to be protected from rain. We ran it in the garage for awhile with the door open, but the wind blew the funes into the house. Moved it outside, backed the PU to it & let the tailgate down for shelter. Folks in Washington got killed from CO poisoning & some in Oregon went to the hospital because they ran their generator in their garage.

I'm going to be taking out 80 ft. Doug firs SW of the house that could do some damage if they came down. Then as I need firewood, I'll start working on the smaller trees. If it works out right, I'll take them down just when they get big enough to do damage.

Except for shelter for the generator and trees that could hit the house, we were prepared for this storm. There was plenty of warning in the weather forecasts. I had asked a logger friend to take down those big DF's a month ago, but he hadn't gotten around to it yet. Too close to the house for me to want to try it. I still need to rig some sort of cover for the generator, but the storm has passed, I have plenty of other stuff to do...

 

[smitesmash]

I lost a old 80' oak tree from my backyard (seattles' eastside) which crushed my shed. The tree missed the house by mere inches. but nothing in the shed seems damaged.
Although a neighbor of mine had 6 (six) trees fall into his house. With in two blocks of my house, I can think of 7/8 houses that had direct tree hits.

We got power back after 48 hours, but some of my neighbors are still without power.

I went up to whidbey island to get my chainsaw and generator. the only place on the whole island that had power that I saw was a self storage place. (I beleve that was because they were directly behind the local substation, and not on generator)

On my property there, I could not see any new damage. the last snow storm had broken or torn down a lot of trees, but I did not see any new damage.

 

[mjarrels]

I got lucky once when I lived in Coupeville WA. I was off to the Gulf in late Dec and the wife and son were off to the Phillippines in early Jan. Had all the water turned off to the house, lines drained and heat turned back to 50. About a week later, a nasty northern blew in and knocked power out for 10 days, temp at about 0 and many lived in homes were damaged. I came out without any damage due to the few precautions taken before we left.

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