Ooof!

Ooof!  That's about all I can say about the past week or so.  All last week, I was on a business trip to Bangor, Maine.  While I don't mind going up there (or the 6 hour car ride), it just makes for a long week.  We left Schenectady on Tuesday around 11:30am and didn't arrive in Bangor until 6:30pm.  It was a good week of meetings, but a long week.

On Wednesday, I saw the weather reports and was concerned about my parents who were in Florida at the time.  Hurricane Irene was, at that point, thinking of smacking Florida.  Thankfully, my parents got home and didn't have to worry about the hurricane at all on their trip to Florida.

However, by late Thursday, Irene was aiming for North Caroline and the east coast.  We drove back to Schenectady from Maine on Friday and it ended up taking a lot longer as there were a ton of people from the Boston area driving west to get away from the storm.

Saturday was spent putting all the outside stuff away in the garage (garbage cans, flower pots, chairs, etc) and we did some grocery shopping.  I was able to find a few containers to store water in, and thank goodness that I did.

Late Saturday, the first bits of rain started to hit us.  It didn't seem too bad though.  Sunday morning...we had full downpours happening.  The winds weren't too bad, but a lot of rain.  Our power went out around 10am on Sunday morning.  Shortly thereafter, a large tree came down across the road next to us and completely took out the power lines.  So much for this being a "weak" storm.  The winds were really picking up and all we could do is watch branches and trees come down and the roads fill up with water.

As the winds started to die down later in the day, we took a drive over to the new house to see how it had fared.  Thankfully no damage to the house or well....however, we did lose about a dozen very large trees to the wind.  The trees we lost were mainly due to large poplar trees, with very shallow roots, falling and taking out a bunch of other trees with them.  But as I said...at least no permanent damage.

While we were at the lot, we did get cell phone messages that Rich's sister was out of power and they had 3-4" of water in their basement.  We were able to borrow a generator for a few hours and pumped out her basement.  They were lucky with only 3-4" of water...their neighbors had 3 feet of water in their basement. 

Late Sunday evening, we got back home and had some yogurt and cereal for dinner.  We were trying to eat some of the perishable goods in the fridge since we still didn't have power.  Ultimately, our power wasn't restored until about 9pm on Monday evening...36 hours without electricity.  We were definitely glad when it came back on.

The flooding in the area was unbelievable though.  At one point on Monday, all the bridges over the Mohawk river were closed.  There was no way to get from one side to the other.  The police, however, did open up one bridge because it was insane that people couldn't get across the river.  Thankfully, the major bridges on I-87 were reopened (they had closed due to a runaway barge with a 30 foot crane on it) so at least there were 2 bridges on that side of Albany and then one bridge on this side.  What a crazy day!

Things are slowly getting back to normal for us, but for many others, they are still without power and some without homes due to the flooding.  Its going to take some time for the community to rebound after this.