Anyone have storm stories of Sandy to tell?

[dchammonds]

The power is back on at my place... I spent the other night standing in for my sump pump, then spending the day clearing some fallen trees blocking my driveway, but I'll
sleep good now.

[White-Light]

If the power's back on there's only one thing to do - laser party!

[LEDpaint]

I watched a substation go up followed be many, many transformers exploding for as far as I could see. One heck of a lightshow, let me tell ya. No power since Sunday evening and none expected till next Monday. Many trees down, couple of crushed houses, it's a big mess. An enormous tree three houses down from me cracked a pole off a third of the way down, downing all of those lines and simultaneously falling on a whole bunch of other lines in it's path. Probably pulled down over one hundred feet of line and a street light. My neighbor had about 1/3 of his roof ripped down to the tar paper.

[ImageLight]

We made it through with some power outages in the area but, I didn't see too much wind damage other then downed
Tree limbs. The eye passed right over us and as far as I can tell, most of the serious damage was in the northern part
of the storm. West Virgina is getting buried under snow from it..

Mark

[mixedgas]

So a visiting engineer was in to install a 30 watt yag for a "redacted" project across the hall. Our building is made of hundreds of tonnes of stone. You know the massive stuff millionaires had built as gifts in the 1890s. The lab is in the basement, and I have two flashlights. We share power with a hospital with massive backup gens. We have our own backup gen. I intended to be outta here, and home well inland when Sandy visited. Not procedure, but we have a backup gen and it had to be safer then my house.

However, as luck would have it... A signal level and timing did not match, and the guys in the lab across the hall came and asked for help. The install engineer only had a day here, and no warrenty if he doesn't sign off on the install. So I went to the pile of delay generator boxes.

None of them we tried worked. Not my fault, they were here long before I was. So not wanting to see the project crash, I started improvising.
I misused a programable signal generator. I programmed it for a one cycle square wave burst on the trigger signal from the master laser. I needed TTL, so I programmed in a 0.6 Volt offset and a 2.4 Volt square wave. This got us close. Drat, the display on the slave laser said "Clock Inverted".

So I pulled a ancient VGA card from the filing cabinet of dead parts. I stripped a 74LS04 inverter chip off the board, hooked up a 5 volt psu, and soldered the chip to a protoboard. Made a coax delay and we tried it. ServENG hit the switch and we got synced lasing.

Two and a half hours late. Oh well, I stayed and road it out till the eye came. I had a 3/4 mile walk to the parking deck, one way or another. I needed to get home to check on my Mom and the elderly neighbors. I walked in that storm to the deck. The campus loop bus passed me twice. Had the air knocked out of my lungs by the wind, and the raindrops were going fast enough to be painful. I was not the only one out in it. The thought of sleeping in the 24 hour pizza shop did cross my mind, as I passed it.

I had the car on the top of the deck. I could barely walk up the slope into the wind. I got back to the building soaking and picked up two folks who did not have cars. Gave them a ride home in the rain. The one guy's wife was panicking, the roof was damaged and she needed him home, NOW!

Traffic lights were just plain dead through the city. It was a mess.

I was frankly, stupid. Never really in that much danger, except for the walk.

I did have a pile of spare clothes and a coat in the car, and emergency gear. Its a hour commute home, and it Lake Effect soaked N.E. Ohio, prepardness is the name of the game.

Steve

[Bradfo69]

Nothing earth shattering at home - a couple of trickles of water in the basement. At work we just lost internet for a few hours but, all in all, quite lucky. I took an awful lot of laser gear home with me thinking I'd actually spend some time learning some more tricks with software and checking out some shows but alas... I think I spent about 34 hours being a slug and laying in bed watching our local NBC affiliates non-stop coverage of the storm. But... truth be told, I needed the rest. I simply don't have the space at home to set anything up and work on it.

I have come to the conclusion though that I must be getting old and crotchety and losing patience with stupid people. When you're told to evacuate a barrier island for three days and you choose to ignore it, prop up your feet, crack a beer and ride the storm out and then... want to be rescued when you realize it was a bad idea and it's now too dangerous to come get your sorry ass, F**k you. (This is coming from the parent of a first responder though.) Maybe that's un-American or a bad way of thinking but, that's just become the way I feel. I work with the public far too much and I'm getting a little tired and a bit embarrassed with the stupidity of a lot of people in this country.

[Things]

When you're told to evacuate a barrier island for three days and you choose to ignore it, prop up your feet, crack a beer and ride the storm out and then... want to be rescued when you realize it was a bad idea and it's now too dangerous to come get your sorry ass, F**k you.

Not just the US though, when Yasi hit here many people were actually forced to stay on an island that went directly through the eye (It was cat5). The island was completely leveled, and there were people on it. However there has been a grant I believe for 10 more cyclone shelters to be constructed, which will be good. The one down the street from me at the school always ends up completely packed.

Luckily though all modern houses actually have to be built up to a cat4 standard depending on where you live, so it's quite unlikely for a modern house to sustain much damage. People get complacent here because they're a pretty common event.

[Displaser]

My thoughts are with everyone that went through Sandy...

I was a first responder to Galveston for Ike four years ago, a cat3 with 113 mph winds when it came onshore. I live 90 miles from the coast and still managed to have about 1/4 of my roof ripped off down to the wood, all fences knocked down, etc. I had $16K worth of damage to my house and that was minimized as the result of all my pots, pans, bowls and buckets being placed in the attic after I realized the roof damage when the winds died down, but it was still pouring down. I was lucky, as the damage was limited and I was only without power for a week (it was only about 90 degrees @ 85% humidity... ). I had friends that were without power for three weeks.

Port Bolivar was wiped out.... I couldn't make it there by car to see first hand, but was told only a handful of houses were left standing. I do remember people being told that if they wouldn't leave the "manditory" evacuation areas, to please write their SSN# somewhere on there body with a marker so their bodies could be identified after the storm passed.

[VJ AIWAZ]

Technological Artisans was leveled we were under 11 feet of water (with the basement where the shop is )or so about 5 or so above street level
well every one is alive but most of the lasers didnt make it

[ArcDevilz]

Technological Artisans was leveled we were under 11 feet of water (with the basement where the shop is )or so about 5 or so above street level
well every one is alive but most of the lasers didnt make it

Man that's really tough. Glad your alive. When things start to get back to narmal let me know. I can send you a small air cooled argon to help you rebuild.
Ivan