Heavy winds. Headed for the coast of Virginia/North Carolina. Hurricane with massive size. Strong storm surge. Any forecast of this nature puts everyone on heightened alert. Especially in a waterfront neighborhood. Even more especially those who lived through Hurricane Isabel back in September of 2003.
Isabel Lesson Learned: Better to Overhype Than to Underprepare
After learning the hard way from Isabel, my parents' neighborhood went into "storm" mode for days before Irene even approached Virginia's coast. This involves taking all boats & jetskis out the water, securing outdoor furniture or anything else that might float, emptying garages, taking cars to higher ground, and getting the generators fueled and ready.
I think my Dad literally spent the entire week prior to Irene's arrival moving/hauling/preparing things around the house. He made multiple trips to move all his tools to a storage unit he rented, the boats were put on their trailers, one car was stored in a friend's garage across town, all the other cars and trailers were moved to our neighborhood playground (up on a hill), and...
...he put the garage fridge up on jacks,
he put a fence around all his firewood in the backyard,
(Most of his nicely stacked firewood ended up in our neighbor's pool during Isabel. The rest ended up dispersed all over the neighborhood. Believe it or not, my parents and friends were out in the peak of that storm trying to rescue the wood by throwing it in the dog pen. Crazy, I know. Yes, it's precious wood that keeps us warm all winter.)
and he tied his homemade picnic table to a tree (hard to see but there is a rope around bottom of the tree).
(This same table floated almost all the way out of the neighborhood during Isabel and ended up in the marsh. The only reason we found it was because firewood was piled high on top and we spotted the wood. :) )
The pictures below explain why someone like my Dad who is extra particular about all his tools/toys/vehicles being put away and protected actually takes them OUT during a storm. This line on the wall of the detached garage indicates the high water mark during Isabel...about 3 feet high!
Okay - back to the storm at hand. Because Dad had done most everything the week before, by the time I arrived home to ride out the storm there, there wasn't much left to do. We spent most of that Saturday pacing around the house waiting to see how high the water would come.
I'm standing on the back deck here around midday at low tide (and the water was already a couple feet in the yard)!
It rained all day but the worse wasn't supposed to hit until after dark. There was extra concern surrounding the fact that it seemed as if the peak of the storm surge was lining up perfectly with high tide. The news forecasters kept predicting through the day that this one could be worse than Isabel, which certainly didn't help either. Isabel flooded multiple homes in our neighborhood and the water came within inches of coming into my parents' (water surrounded the house on all sides).
Because the peak of storm was after sunset, I was not able to get any good pictures. The ones below were the last I was able to snap.
What do you do during a hurricane with no power? Read and play solitaire on the computer. (until the battery dies...) This wasn't exactly how my parents had planned to spend their 34th anniversary!
The water did eventually get up close to the foundation of the house, but this storm was nothing like they predicted. We were very fortunate and thankful. The water did not even come close to entering the garages. As soon as the water was creeping up close, the winds changed and it sucked the water right back out of the canal. It really is amazing how powerful the combination of the winds and tides can be during these storms.
Check out the extremely low tide the very next day...the disparity in tides over the course of 12 hours was hard to believe! At this point, we had already cleaned up all the debris left behind in the yard from the high water. From the looks of the picture below, it's hard to tell a powerful storm even came through.
If you took a short drive out of our neighborhood, though, you quickly discovered that the high winds wreaked havoc on so much of Williamsburg. Trees were down all over the place (many of them landing on homes), streets were blocked, and power was lost for days. We felt very fortunate to have fared so well and to have been protected. My parents had a generator so their 4 days without power weren't but so bad. Let's hope that the rest of the 2011 hurricane season is not as exciting!
