This is going to be fun

[selenay]

So, hello there Hurricane Bill. You're going to be fun, I can tell.

I was planning a night away this weekend with my knitting crew. Lots of knitters, a few babies, food and yarn in a cottage on the shore. As Hurricane Bill will be arriving on Sunday and the heavy (100+mm!) rain will be starting by daybreak, we've decided to postpone. None of us want to be trying to drive home through a hurricane.

OMG, my first hurricane!

As of this morning, the eye will pass around 150km south of me. Yesterday it was supposed to make landfall right on top of me. Nope, they really can't be sure where it's going except that it's going to be making a big dent in the Maritimes. They're saying category 1, possibly category 2 when it gets here and definite hurricane force winds.

Tonight I'm stocking up on water, batteries and easy to prepare food. The government has told us to prepare for 72 hours without power, just in case, and the water will be undrinkable after the first few hours. I've got a Coleman stove with a spare gas bottle, so we'll be fine for cooking, and we can always fire up the BBQ and eat through the meat in the freezer if we have to.

Mum and I went around the yard yesterday putting away anything that could be picked up by the wind. We have tons of duct tape. The cats have a couple of weeks worth of food. I'm going to pick up some cash while I'm out tomorrow, because after Juan people discovered that with no cash machines or debit machines they couldn't pay for things even when a few stores finally did find a way to open without power.

historyterry - if I'm not online on Sunday at our usual time, I'll have lost power. Don't worry. Hopefully my cell phone will still be able to send things so I'll update my Twitter feed/Facebook status if I can.

Please let this be media hype? Juan was our fifty year storm and that was only a few years ago!

Comments

[fahrenheit-f430.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's MacGyver-level preparation.

Good luck. *snugs*

[feather-autant.livejournal.com]

Sel! I was wondering how close you were to Bill's path.

Get some oil lamps. They rock when the power is out.

Stay safe and let us know how it all goes. ::hugs you::

[selenay]

Hurricane Juan came through here a few years ago and the biggest problem was that people didn't prepare and didn't know what to prepare for. This time the government is telling us to Be Prepared and I've been paying attention to the gossip at work about what they learned from Juan.

I'm still really hoping it will turn out to be media hype. And there will probably be things I'll wish that I'd done. But I'm trying :-D

*snugs you* I am starting to think there is no guaranteed safe time to visit me.

[selenay]

Um, yes, I am right in Bill's path. Eek.

Got several big battery powered lamps and I have no idea where I'd get an oil lamp, but between the lamps, flashlights and candles I think that I'll be OK. It's not like it's winter with only three hours of usable daylight a day, thankfully.

We're doing everything we can to prepare in hopes that this will mean nothing much happens. After all, it's always the ones you don't prepare for that are the problem!

[catseatsocks.livejournal.com]

I lost my wallet so I can't get water or food or extra cash. Oh well. I actually lost my wallet just before Hurricane Juan too.

[catseatsocks.livejournal.com]

Any department store sells oil lamps, though you may have a hard time finding one a few days before. I even had a hard time finding kerosene during Post-Tropical Storm Noel.

[livii.livejournal.com]

I was living in Halifax when Juan hit. It was pretty intense! No one really realized it was going to come - no hurricane had made landfall in 50 years and it was only the afternoon before that they started going "oh hai guyz, you should prep for this." It was a Sunday afternoon, of course, so everything was closed!

We were super lucky - our apartment was on the ground floor and actually down about two steps, so we just watched a wicked storm from our windows and went to bed happily. My friend who lived on the 27th floor of Fenwick Place had her windows blow out. :( Our power went off but was back on in about...I'm thinking it was 15 or so hours as we were on the same grid as a hospital and two big grocery stores. I had friends in the North End who went two weeks without power though, and my friend's sister came over to shower because she was on a well and so didn't even have water. The city was so trashed, and we were off school a week (though that kind of worked for me, my parents were visiting so I had loads of time to hang out with them!)

Everyone pulled together quickly though, and things were up and running as fast as they could. A lot of the power outages took a while to fix because so many wires were down, trees on them, etc. The city looked like hell but Haligonians are so awesome, the radio was telling us where we could get coffee as soon as the storm was over, and everyone helped each other out. Hopefully it'll be the same where you are (you're outside of the city, I think?) and even more hopefully, it won't make real landfall, just give you guys some wind and rain. There are generally a few bad rainstorms a year from the tail end of hurricanes anyway.

(Then the winter following we had White Juan with that insane snowstorm. Halifax was the craziest place I ever lived for weather!)

[selenay]

{{hugs}} I just saw that :-( I really hope you manage to either get the wallet or get a temporary card. The timing sucks totally.

[selenay]

My aunt was living here during Juan and it took her six days to get power :-( She survived it, but the BBQ proved to be a key factor in that! Her house was OK but it was a total mess everywhere. This is one of the rare times that I wished that I lived closer to the city.

I'm out in one of the communities on the edge of Darmouth with the ocean about a hundred meters from the front door. We'll be safe from the storm surge but the winds here are always worse than they are in the city because they come straight at us. The good thing about being on a fairly new subdivision is that there are no trees taller than my waist out here!

The bad thing is that my neighbour's roof is so badly built that it's probably going to get destroyed on Sunday. I know because it was built by the same guy who built my house (we replaced the roof last summer) and parts of it came down in the Christmas storms this year.

I'm half-anticipating that if we lose power, it will be gone for a while. There was a province-wide power cut on Christmas Eve and we were one of the last places to get power restored because we're at the end of everything. At least I have books and knitting, so I won't be totally bored if the power is out for a couple of days.

Everyone is saying the same things about Juan - it wasn't supposed to come anywhere near in the forecasts and then it made landfall in the city. I think that's why there's so much preparation going on. Better to be prepared and not need it than unprepared and post-Juan again.

I've heard about White Juan. And it's connection to bad summer storms. I'm in for some fun experiences, huh?

I'd say "bet you're glad not to be living here anymore", except that I saw the news about the storms in Ontario. Weather over here is much more...er...definte about being Weather than it is in England.

[paranoidangel]

OMG, my first hurricane!

But we have had them here too. I distinctly remember one when I was about 11, give or take a year.

[fahrenheit-f430.livejournal.com]

I remember that. There was much sniggering from my US hurricane belt flisties that You Canadians Were Too Polite To It. Y'know, after the 'fucking hell! D: *rush round making sure everything/one's ok*' thing had been done.

Might be helpful to fill the bath a few hours before the storm makes landfall and keep a bucket for filling the loo cistern from the bath. Have you masking-taped the windows, 'cause I've heard duct tape glue is a bastard to shift off glass. All shiny electrical nice things raised up off the floor? You're covered. :D Disturbingly, give me a natural disaster situation and I'm fine, like Mad Max with sensible knickers on... Electrical fire? I go to pieces with sentimentality and otherwise Total Girliness.

I hope it's hype too as these things are very nasty. I was worried for weeks when averysmallthing was caught up in Katrina and she evacuated.

*snuggles you moar* There is. When it's snowy so you can stick a shovel in my hand and shout 'CLEAR MY DRIVE!' while I do the hyper sugar-OD Brit Sees Proper Snow thing and bite your hand off for the shovel and opportunity.

[gmul.livejournal.com]

Hope it all passes miles from you!

Batteries, gas bottles, UHT milk and stuff in tins/packets all have the useful feature of not going off any time soon so apart from storage space it's much better to buy way too much than not enough.

The advantage of living in something that's designed to be 'off grid' for a while at a time is that if the power goes I just have to remember to flick different switches to make the lights come on.

What's November like for visiting? (He asked, with at least a small degree of seriousness.)

[sugoll.livejournal.com]

Fingers crossed that it all goes well. Or, better yet, suddenly just turns into a light squall.

[selenay]

But that was the tail-end of the hurricane, when it was largely blown out and there wasn't much rain with it.

If this goes as the forecaster says, it will be a Hurricane. They're now saying category two, with 100-150 mm of rain. Picture those nasty Florida hurricanes with trees sideways and rain so hard it knocks you over: that's what they're predicting.

Oh, please let them be wrong.

[selenay]

Got all the supplies apart from UHT milk, because neither of us can stand it and we drink mainly herbal tea usually :-D But yes, batteries, gas bottles, bottled water and lots of tins have been purchased. We have a dry-goods cupboard downstairs (as of this week - finally put the shelves in!) so storage isn't an issue.

I do wish that I had better 'off grid' ability here. I keep wondering about getting a generator and I'm quite seriously thinking about it for the winter. Losing my heating in -20C is not fun.

Hmm, late October/early November is pretty good for visiting although most of the touristy stuff has shut down by then. My first snowfall this past winter was 22 November (foot and a half!) but I'm told that's quite unusual.

[selenay]

Thanks! I'm really hoping it's all hype and turns out to be a light squall. This evening's forecast has a category two hitting us Sunday morning. It gets more powerful and earlier in the day every time I hear about it.

Darn, I didn't replace Princess Bride when I moved. Must rectify that...

[selenay]

Plan on Sunday is to fill the baths as soon as we get up. We've got a couple of gallons of bottled water as well and we'll be filling all the bottles and other vessels we can find with water on Saturday evening. We also bought a kettle that can sit on our gas stove, so at least we can heat and boil water should we need to. In the winter, it was doing without tea that made losing power really hard :-D

I'm really hoping it's hype. People remember Juan up here and have been 'entertaining' me with horror stories all day. I'm slightly boggling at the family on the news that have upped sticks and evacuated today - it's a bit extreme - but I'm feeling happier now that I've got preparations made. Glad I did the stocking up today - the store had been thoroughly picked over for water and batteries so we did well. There's going to be nothing left tomorrow!

Yay, you can enjoy the snow :-D And I have a guy who comes and ploughs the worst of it now, so there won't be exhausting levels of shovelling to do. I'm planning that this will mean that I'll have the time and energy to play in the snow this year :-D

Although after Juan, we got White Juan the following winter. Three feet of snow in 24 hours. Eep.

Still, yes, winter is good because snow is pretty and Brits don't get to see proper snow. Or, as my mum discovered this winter, proper snow shovels when it does snow.

[(Anonymous)]

Most people forget thst they have 55gallons of drinkable water on hand if they have a standard home water heater. In emergencies, people tend to think "oh the hot water won't be hot" and they don't think of it as a large scale water storage unit. Just a thought. You stay safe and let us know how it goes.

Carron

[fahrenheit-f430.livejournal.com]

I should've known you'd be 100% powered by tea. :D

So do I! (Umm, me mate's residing in the projected path of a severe weather anomaly) That is taking it a bit far for a cat 1 or 2. Cat 4? I'd be asking why you've bought a kettle instead of a full tank of petrol, then I'd be screaming 'GRAB THE KITTENS AND RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!'... Because I overreact.

The most snow I've ever seen was 6" at Xmas 1984. I fear if I did come to visit and assist in snow-clearing activities after 5 seconds I'd throw the shovel in the air, shout 'BWEEEE!', dive and start flapping around in it like a lost meerkat. :D

[selenay]

I should've known you'd be 100% powered by tea. :D

Well, 90%. I need my morning cup of coffee or I'm a cranky thing. Then it's tea (herbal, Chinese, Indian, good old Yorkshire) all the way. Life without tea is no life at all.

If the hurricane had been cat 4 or above, I would have stuffed the kittens in their carrier, grabbed the lappie and legged it. Due to living 100m from the shore, mainly. Running for a cat 1 is just plain silly.

The first time I saw 1 foot+ last year, I thoroughly enjoyed it...until I spent an hour shovelling and hadn't even cleared the bits around the car. Now I've got a plough guy on call so I can go back to enjoying it this winter :-)

[selenay]

We didn't have a home water heater until last year, so it didn't occur to me until you mentioned it!