"Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish."
-- Euripides --
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Continuing the Sandy saga:
Tues, 10/30
8:00 am - I walked down to the sea wall to see what had happened.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrGCUtSgDYQ]
The space between the sidewalk and the access road had been sandy, with lots of plants, with little paths here and there through the plants so you could get from the road to the walkway. You couldn't see the rocks except in a few places. Plants and sand are now all gone. The sidewalk, which is just two years old, has been badly undermined, and many of the slabs are cracked.
In the distance, coming in from the right, you can faintly see a spit of land sticking out into the bay. I think that saves us from the worst of the waves.
The air would be still for about 20 minutes, and then there'd be wind gusts and rain for maybe 5 minutes, then stillness again, through most of the morning. Hercules said it was probably the last of the outer spiral arms passing. I got soaked on my walk back from the seawall.
I'm going to do something here that isn't nice. I'm going to copy photos from another person's blog. Usually when I do something like that, I send you to the other blog, or at the minimum I post the photo and then link to the source. I would like to do that here, except that he/she is very specific about the location - and I prefer to be a little more mysterious about where I live. Deter stalkers, dontcha know.
So, I'm at least being clear that the following are not my own photos.
This is the sea wall after the storm, and gives a better picture of the height difference from the water to the walkway on top of the wall, up to the access road, and on up the bank. The waves were well over the bank. The clear area between the walk and the road had been full of plants.
This is at the end of the sea wall (that's the "mesa" in the middle) and where the beach starts. You may have seen the video from this past summer of Nugget playing in the sand. There's now no sand left. There had been large dunes between the beach and the street that runs along here. The dunes are gone.
To the right, what's left of the beach. On the left, what's left of a park. Between the posts (that used to be guard rails, but the rails washed away) is a street, now covered in sand. All the electric/telephone poles have completely disappeared.
A closer view of the street. In the distance is a bridge. See that white house through the trees (under the leaning pole)? Flooded out.
Please note that there are only three routes out of our neighborhood, and the above street and bridge is one of them.
Here's a video of the town next door. You'll see a bridge with boats on it. Yeah, ON it. There is a huge marina there, and boats were washed up all over the place, huge million-dollar boats stacked on top of each other, all over the roads, yards, jammed into houses, some a quarter mile away. That bridge? With the boats on it? And the leaking gas and propane tanks under it? That's the second of the three ways out of our neighborhood. (Warning - annoying loud music. Cut the sound.)
These were our "early reports", places we could walk or bike to. We had next to no idea what had happened elsewhere.
It's frustrating to have no TV, no radio, no internet. You don't know what's happening out there. But we saw enough nearby to be very grateful for that miserable little sea wall that bravely protected us from the water. Our street had one tree down on a roof, and one tree down on the road at the very end of the street near the sea wall. Streets to the south, east, and west of ours didn't fare so well, but still better than neighborhoods north and south of us. Multiple trees and lines down here, but almost no damage to property. Just messy. All our telephone poles survived. This gave us hope that we could get power back soon.
Yeah, sure.
1:30 pm - getting trickles of news, like looting hither and yon, don't know what to believe. We can't get out of the immediate neighborhood. Two routes to the highway involving bridges are blocked, the third way is open, but it isn't much help to get to the highway, because southbound and northbound are both blocked by trees, boats, and BUILDINGS! on the road.
It's 68 degrees F in the house, and I already feel cold.
1:55 pm - I am confirmed as an idiot. I just discovered I have hot water. I didn't know my gas water heater has some kind of non-electric non-pilot-light thingamabob starter.
People are starting up generators. The big box hardware store has them coming in by the truckload and if you wait in line for enough hours you might be able to get one. Unfortunately, propane and gasoline is almost impossible to find. Daughter and Hercules have a very small propane generator which they plan to run only a few hours a day.
I have candles and the gas stove, hot water, some non-perishable food, and lots of books. I figure I'll be ok for up to maybe four days.
The fates laugh. It gets worse.
To be continued.
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4 comments:
Like you, I had no way of accessing any info on what was going on, other than the nearly useless radio. A few people called me from the hinterlands to ask what was going on out here. I said they had more of an idea than I did.
From all that I've heard, I had no idea that Keyport was hit so hard. Makes me wonder then what the places that have been reported on look like.
I have a feeling the Shore isn't going to look much like the Shore anytime soon. If ever.
Becs - in the Keyport video, there's a glimpse of a large brown building with a blue sign across the top and two marooned boats on the veranda. That's the Blue Rock Cafe, where we had lunch one day.
I heard yesterday that the B&B in Ocean Grove that I had recommended to you is being used to house something like 30 visiting utility workers, sleeping in shifts. I'm surprised it's still habitable - it's right across the street from the beach.
I wondered about the hotel because I'd checked out the location earlier. I'm so glad it survived but sad about the wreckage of Keyport. I wonder if the bakery survived. It was a little higher up.
The bakery is probably ok. The damage in that section of town was mostly trees and wires down.
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