Sandy by CaveTroll

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Sandy

POSTED BY: CAVETROLL
UPDATED: Wednesday, October 31, 2012 10:47
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Tuesday, October 30, 2012 7:15 PM

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...

Yes, I'm impressed by Christie. He's been right there, right out front, and totally a-political. I wish the same could be said of Romney...but that's for later.

The death toll just went up to 50. New York and New Jersey were hardest hit without a doubt. I'm glad you're okay, kiddo...hang in there!

Tit for tat got us where we are today. If we want to be grownups, we need to resist the ugliness. If we each did, this would be a better reflection on Firefly and a more welcome place. I will try.

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Tuesday, October 30, 2012 8:09 PM

FREMDFIRMA

Quote:
Originally posted by Magonsdaughter:
Any one heard from Frem. He's in the vicinity of the storm.

And there's a tale to tell about it, but it's gonna hafta wait about an hour or so cause I got one round left to do - we did lose power for a bit, and there were... complications, but I'll get to explaining that after I do this next patrol here.

Oh, and more it punched ME in the face, one 60mph gust did a kinda-sorta wind tunnel thing down by the docks and knocked me flat on my ass, twas a little embarassing, that.

-F

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Tuesday, October 30, 2012 10:31 PM

FREMDFIRMA

Okay... this'll wander a bit, cause the weather was just the first domino.

May you live in interesting times... what a horrible, horrible curse that is.
Really, I like my work boring, that whole life of adventure thing seriously sucked and living with the consequences sucks worse so all in all I prefer boring, besides, in security things only get interesting when something goes wrong, often badly so.

And soooo, yeah, I did the rounds last night - after locking little miss pain in the arse in her place with enough battery power and food to keep her well supplied for three days - since sending a puny lightweight out in the storm was kind of a dubious proposition, as if I have any room to talk on that front, yeah, imma hypocrite, so what.

Mind you I have gear for everything from 101F down to -40F, and snowchains for my boots, and lights, and radios, and sufficient recharges to keep cameras, lights, radios and cellphones (for what that's worth, when you lose power to the towers...) running for 72hours continous if need be, it's a running joke that I am kinda batman-prepared, but I personally get paid a premium to specifically ensure that, but anyhows...

So, roundabouts 11:32pm and I am well into the first patrol when I hear the sound of a tree coming down, accompanied by a flash of sparks from the northeast end of the complex, and the power flickers, dies, and comes back on weakly... then a few seconds later a big flash bounces off the clouds some further east, quickly accompanied by KAAA-WHAA-BLAMMMM.
And ALL the power goes out, totally and completely.
.."wellll...shit."

So I hoof it back to the office and grab my pocket emergency radio, mini-flasher, and clip half a dozen cheap disposable hand lights to my belt (I can expense these) in case anybody needs one, kick the E-radio to my left shoulder clip and switch it to NOAA Weather Band 7, switch on the mini flasher light and clip that to the right shoulder clip and go back out there.
That way folks can find me if they need to and anyone in hearing can get updated weather information - I am told that my presence out there calmly walking the rounds unperterbed whatever by natures fury was quite a comfort for many, which is of course most of the POINT of the thing.

Of course, the loss of power soon brought a problem to a head that I had already been addressing with the property management, which was thought then to be a minor quibble.
See, some of the smoke alarms in the units are hard wired with integral batteries, in order to prevent residents from ripping the batteries out after one false alarm too many - MY opinion on this is better quality smoke alarms, cause false alarms are extremely detrimental to security given that enough of them and people WILL start subverting the damn thing or flat ignoring it.
You so much as TRY to cook bacon and the damn thing will go berserk, but mine remained oddly silent when an electronic device shorted and caught fire recently - I woke up to the scent of burning electronics, and had to handle that and blow the smoke out of here and yet not one damn peep from the stupid thing - so I had already been discussing that problem.

And now it came to a head, see the batteries corrode after a while, and when the hardwired building power cuts out, that caused most of them to go off, not the little low battery chirp, oh no, this horrendous dying up and down wail which ranged from mildly annoying to migraine inducing.
This sent one disabled resident into near panic, who thankfully spotted me and called me over - she's got a bit of a rep for bad temper, mostly cause ever since she wound up disabled her family and friends have been slowly but surely shutting her out cause she's of no use to them any more and I know all too well the fury of being thrown back on ones own cause more able bodied people can't be bothered... her fury does not extend to me since she knows I have my own issues and am quick to render aid or assistance to the disabled for that very reason.
(Yeah, her increasing rage about it and bad temper over doesn't exactly encourage folks either, I know)
So she's stuck there with a dead cellphone battery, no wheelchair (medicare won't pay for one) no power and now her smoke alarm is going freakin beserk, to which after a few attempts to muffle it I borrowed a golf club from a neighbor also disturbed by the racket and, uhhh... remonstrated with it.
And so much for THAT problem.
I do have the ability to charge a cellphone in an emergency but in this case it was simpler to just loan her mine so she could call a ride, which settled that one.

The next one was entertaining in a demented sort of way, as that resident came home from a party and couldn't quite find their own unit in the dark, which perplexed me till I got close enough to detect the distinct aroma of eua-de-impending-hangover and realized why.
I get him to his unit, pass him a hand light and start pouring him through the door and... THE HELL IS THAT FREAKIN NOISE... hoo boy, okay, fine - one more "remonstration" later that problems solved.

I finally get to visually sweeping the dock to make sure no one is stupid enough to be down there, and walking back from that I get dumped on my ass by a massive gust of wind which tunneled between the buildings, and just to add insult to injury the light drizzle starts become wind-driven freezing sleet, which doesn't feel too skippy pounded into your flesh at 30-45mph.

The sudden silence of a couple more of those wailing annoyances convinces me that a couple residents have been doin a little remonstrating of their own, and more power to em, less work for me anyhows.

I pass out a couple more hand lights, and no DTE refuses to give an estimate, they were really obnoxious and dismissive about it too - pissing me off all the more cause our township is kind of in a brawl with them right now over those stupid meters, and all the crap they've been doing to avoid having to do the one thing that might actually fix the problem - repair/upgrade the rotted out infrastructure, but noooo, it's just easy to throw it all on the consumers, argh.
Hell, even the State Attorney General is all up their ass about it, having called the yes-men of the public service commission supposed to call them to heel "asleep at the switch" so expecting a prompt or intelligent response from DTE is kinda pointless, and now gives PROOF to the lie that those stupid meters would help detect outages.
On the plus side, the mild headache and ringing in the ears I've suffered since the fekkin things were installed did go away for a while, small comfort that it was.

Then nature decides to once again seemingly come gunning for me personally, which seems to happen every once in a while out there, last being a lightning strike so close I could taste the ozone and this time it was a rather sizeable chunk of wood, what we call in the backwoods a widowmaker, not enough time to duck although I got a block up in time to keep it from bouncing off my head, and thankfully it was semi-rotted although it left my right arm less functional than I would like.

Coming back to the office I spot the inevitable Comcast trucks - we're branched off a corporate line, and Comcast being the corporate titsucking toadies that they are, whenever there's a power outage around here they actually come out and hook generators to the line, one just east of our fence and another just inside the west fence - and chain them to trees cause they know what kinda neighborhood this is... I know the east one is still in place cause I can hear it right now, they got piss poor mufflers on them, that for sure.

Only at that time they weren't doing anything so I went over there to see what was up and all but stepped right on a tangle of downed lines, which they assured me weren't hooked to nothing any more (an assumption I was NOT gonna make and went around em!) and they sure as HELL had no intention of going up THAT pole till DTE came round and did something about it - them being on the phone with DTE who was telling them they had no information about an outage in the area despite being told by me and multiple residents several times over the past hour, complete with an exact and specific range of the blackout since I could see where it ended down the road and across.
Above all things, I loathe incompetence.

The rest of the shift was fairly uneventful, most folks either bailing out to elsewhere or bunkering down, and I tried to jam in a quick nap cause that two weeks I gave Univ of Michigan to build an acceptable prosthetic was up that very morning and no way in hell could I reschedule cause having only JUST settled mosta the how-dare-you-actually-USE-your-medical-coverage legal fight and bru-ha-ha, if the clock ticked over to November I would have to fight it ALL OVER AGAIN, and screw THAT with a rabid porcupine for lark.
Oh and so much for my nap cause not even one hour in, then MY fekkin smoke alarm does that crap, and it was a damn near thing to me putting a round through it, till my half asleep brain caught up and I grabbed my hander crossbow instead and executed the blasted hellspawn, gotta tell ya, I derived way more satisfaction from that than was probably healthy.
Seriously, when the power goes out that is when these things most need to WORK PROPERLY, since folks get out the candles and might knock one over, and instead compounding the problem is a no no.

Then follows dragging out to the car and having to drive to Ann Arbor, one of the most car-unfriendly places to begin with, through highway rush hour morning traffic, in this mess, and for all the advantages to my bitty-beamer, good handling in poor weather ain't one of em and since it's a thousand pounds lighter than anything else on the road these days the high winds weren't helping a damn bit, on top of morons who can't drive and those who seem to have a mental meltdown when the weather turns and immediately become gibbering IDIOTS behind the wheel.
PROTip: in bad weather, stomping the gas and jamming the brakes repeatedly is a BAD IDEA.
Oh, and no amount of supposed 4WD/AWD, traction control and antilock brakes is gonna CHANGE THE LAWS OF PHYSICS FOR YOU, argrggghhbbblleee*ragefoamrage*!

And now fate piles irony upon me, cause when I get there I find that in large part due to insinuations of incompetence and threats of not being paid, these amateurs down at Univ of MI went and dredged up my old mad-doc from the now-dissolved provider and pulled him in as a "consultant", to which he gave them the specs of the various units they used to make...
Being technologically and otherwise incapable of producing a BM2 unit by a substantial margin, they went and cranked out a variation on the M175 - a unit we mutually designed back in 2007 intended to be built in countries which lacked a modern medical tech base... to their credit they did build it out of more modern materials but still.
So the choice comes down to accepting a less advanced prosthetic, or fighting a horrific legal battle all over again, AND a second legal fight to force a change of provider, cause this is quite literally the best these hacks can do, err, yeaahhhh, so, there we are.
Throw in ninety some minutes of reverse engineering and extensive testing and measurement to get a decent fit and alignment, to meet my barest-minimum standards, mind you.

We finally get power back on at about 11:00am, for half the complex (thankfully including me) and after an obligatory check on the residents (not on shift, just a courtesy call) I go an have a "discussion" with the property management about them damn smoke alarms, which maybe they shoulda listened to me in the first place about and now they know why, not so much to hand out an I-told-you-so (man the Cassadra gig gets up my friggin back it does!) but to ensure they are REPLACED, immediately with something actually effective, which WILL be done, now - kind of like closing the barn door after the herd has fled, I know, but for the next time...
I didn't hang around though, since DTE being unresponsive lead to every single resident without power calling to bitch to folks who had no control over it kinda irritated me and I seriously needed sleep by that point.

Hell of a day, yeah.

Oh, and just so ya know, working in a new prosthetic isn't like breaking in a new set of boots - no two are ever the same and there's a longish adjustment period involving a significant amount of exertion, pain and annoyance, a couple hours of which ain't too fun neither.
Not to mention all the other crap stackin up in my in-box in the meantime, so imma be busy a while.

-Frem

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Wednesday, October 31, 2012 3:52 AM

BYTEMITE

Boy, 9-11 really did change things for New York. It's good to hear they pulled together and haven't fallen back on the old ways.

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Wednesday, October 31, 2012 4:04 AM

BYTEMITE

Ouch. All of that on top of a new prosthetic, especially how they give you so much pain and trouble. Sounds like you did good though. Just be careful you don't trigger another immune response.

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Wednesday, October 31, 2012 4:28 AM

MAL4PREZ

To whoever said it in a post way up: yeah, the press tends to overdo things, but I'm telling you this storm was NUTS. It's earned whatever names they give it. I said that I went out during the height of it, and journaled it when I got home, but nothing does it justice. It was really like the end of the world. It's one thing to walk past dozens of downed trees in the daylight, another to be there in the dark, with the wind blowing and trees falling right and left, not knowing where they'll land next. I saw two big big trees go down, one on cables about 30 feet from me with all the sparks and flashes and such, and I heard many more. The sound of that strong wind in so many big big trees, and the cracking snaps of trunks getting torn apart... wow again. I won't ever forget it.

The fact that this wasn't just a single local storm, but it was happening across a 1000+ mile stretch, really blows my mind. This thing was a really, really big deal, and I sure hope this isn't a new weather pattern settling in for the long run. If it is, we as a society have a lot of changes to make in our infrastructure and lifestyles.

Kwicko - that video of the power plant was scary. Holy cow!

Good picture series, Niki.

Frem: Yikes - I didn't know the storm was so strong in your neighborhood too! Wow. Big big storm.

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Wednesday, October 31, 2012 4:29 AM

MAL4PREZ

double double

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Wednesday, October 31, 2012 5:32 AM

CAVETROLL

Late checking in. Busy, busy the last couple days with preparation at home and at the job. My preps at home were very light. I replaced a window well cover and extended the output for my sump. At work, during Irene we lost power at work for 11 hours. The preparations for the sump pump failed. At the time the best we could do was daisy chain the UPSs and shut down the servers. Moved the servers out of the basement. The problem being, after 11 hours the UPSs ran out of power and shut down. Then when line power came back on they were in a shut down state and did not restore power to the sump. Result: 3 inches of water in the basement. Not a huge catastrophe, if the receptionist hadn't thought that storing cardboard cases full of records on a concrete floor was hunky dory. Of course the answer to that was hand it to the IT guy and let him deal with it.

This year we were prepared. All the files are now on plastic shelving. (Boy, does it take a long time to burn 40 cases of destroyed, out of date records) On Monday I moved all of the files up one shelf, leaving nothing on the bottom shelf. That bought us 18 inches of flood space. The sump was plugged into an extension cord that was in turn plugged into the owner's RV. The RV was plugged into the building line power. Line power would feed the sump until it failed, then the RV's inverter would feed power to the sump until the house battery in the RV failed. The plan was for the owner and I would both try to get in on Tuesday morning to check the basement and start the RV generator if needed.

Monday was a long, gray day full of rain. The dogs told me they didn't need to go out, they could totally hold their water until the rain stopped. Cabin fever almost set in. The wind wasn't too bad. A couple of big gusts sent the neighbor's trash cans sliding down the street. Another neighbor's fence collapsed. My fence agreed in spirit, but only assumed a few degrees of tilt. After landfall the storm's center of rotation expanded to about 50 miles. It arrived at my house around 10:30. Perfect timing to put the dogs out one last time before bed.

Tuckered out from a long day and the added stress I decided to turn in. Then the southeastern wall arrived. And with it, the higher winds. I figure that is when I lost part of my roof. Not the sheathing mind you, just the shingles and tarpaper. So, I'm going to be shopping about for a roofer. I have a tarp protecting things now, FEMA style. One of my gutters will need replacing, along with the fascia board on the rear of my house. I also have a piece of siding that has come loose. I got off very light.

The drive in to work on Tuesday morning was very light. The roads were officially closed except to essential personnel. The rain was driving hard but the winds were substantial, but not cruel. I didn't see one car pulled over by a police officer. However, the proportion of trucks, SUVs and vans to cars was huge. I left my little commuter car at home in favor of my pickup. I saw a few tree limbs down and one tree. There were a couple of neighborhoods that were dark. I avoided 495, since the 11 o'clock news had warned that the Delaware river was 10' above normal in Philly. The river is much broader near me, but why take chances? 495 isn't that much higher than the river bank.

Very sad for the folks on the Jersey shore and the Delaware beaches. And of course NYC. Sadder for the loss of life. This was a monster storm, glad the loss of life wasn't higher. But then again, we'll be feeling the effects from this for a couple of days yet. The western arm of Sandy is going to be coming back for a visit tomorrow.

Glad that Mal and Shiny got through it okay. Frem, sorry for the aggravation you had to endure. Happy all of ours came out of it alive. And I'll echo cheers to Governor Christie for keeping politics out of this.

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Wednesday, October 31, 2012 6:55 AM

RIONAEIRE

Beir bua agus beannacht

Cave, I forgot you're in MA aren't you? I'm sorry I forgot to wish you well by name, but I'm glad you're alright. I'm glad Shiny and Mal4 are alright. And Frem, ug you had trouble piled on trouble, but I'm glad you guys are okay. Maybe Wendy taking a little time offduring the storm is a good idea since she's physically small and big winds could be hard on her body, they knocked you over after all and you're bigger than she is. I'm sure she'll be glad to get back on the job.

"A completely coherant River means writers don't deliver" KatTaya

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Wednesday, October 31, 2012 10:47 AM

KWICKO

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." -- William Casey, Reagan's presidential campaign manager & CIA Director (from first staff meeting in 1981)

I am quite heartened by the lack of reports of any widespread looting, at least so far.

"I supported Bush in 2000 and 2004 and intellegence [sic] had very little to do with that decision." - Hero

"I was wrong" - Hero, 2012

Mitt Romney, introducing his running mate: "Join me in welcoming the next President of the United States, Paul Ryan!"

Rappy's response? "You're lying, gullible ( believing in some BS you heard on msnbc ) or hard of hearing."

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