On July 5th, Hurricane Arthur headed up the East Coast.
We're used to storms in Atlantic Canada. Or, I should say, the COAST is used to storms.
www.jacksonville.com
I do not live on the coast.I live about an hour's drive inland. See that first big red circle/storm icon? And the black line? That's sorta where we are.
Oh, just so you know, Canadians do not refer to distance in miles or kilometres, we refer to distances in terms of hours to get there.
Okay, so Artie was SUPPOSED to track as predicted in this map.
But he didn't. Plowed across the Eastern Seaboard, realized we had nothing to do on the 5th and at about 6am, turned left and came UP the Saint John River Valley. See where it says "Jul 05 11am EDT"? Yeah, umm...BAM!!
Winds gusting, and frankly, STAYING, at 65 mph hit us all day and into the night. Now, 65 mph is an 11 on the Beaufort Scale, basically a tropical storm. A hurricane is a 12.
Fredericton does not get hurricanes, like I said, we're an hour from the ocean. Or tropical storms. Usually all the storms come up the coast, hit the cooler waters and go pffffffft.
But, Artie must have wanted to see what it felt like to smite a small town who were told, by anyone with a TV network and a barometer, that we should prepare for heavy rains and not to worry about high winds. Nova Scotia was getting the winds.
Ummm. Yeah. About those winds...this house had 10 poplars. each was about 35-40 feet tall.
author photo
Now it has a new lawn.
We lost power at 8:20 am Saturday and had it back at 9:50 am on Thursday (Hubs reminded me it was not Wednesday as previously reported...by me). We got our phone line up again on Friday at 10pm.
It was estimated that on Sunday, July 6th, 140,000 homes in New Brunswick were without power. There's still 5000 homes in the dark.
We had running water, many homes did not.
Our grill has a side burner, so we could cook and more importantly, I could make EARL GREY TEA!!!
Therefore...no arrests were made.
It was an experience, to say the least. And yes, all kinds of people said "Now you know how the (insert name of people group who survived withouth electricity) felt."
A) There WAS NO ELECTRICITY in 1822 when Great Grannie Melba Toast walked backwards across New South Wales!!!
B) see A.
Please don't guilt trip me about missing something by reminding me that the ancients did fine without it. They also didn't have sunscreen, toilet paper, or dental floss.
Think about it...
TOILET PAPER.
I would rather go powerless, than paperless.
The ONLY people I'd give props to for living in a modern age without running water or electricity are A) those who have no choice...B) and those who do.
My hat's off to you, Mark and Rachel Charles. (https://www.facebook.com/wirelesshogan?fref=ts)
And now, we're wired and rolling, and already I miss the quiet evenings and the long chats with Hubs and #4.
Sigh.
Weird, eh?
Maybe, just MAYBE, we could unplug?
I hear ya. Definitely a few pros to the powerlessness, like hanging out and figuring out new ways to do things. But overall, just powerless. :) I missed the warm baths and fans the most, but we too were blessed to have running water in our outage a couple years ago. Some people were without and it was a looong outage (also unpredicted--derecho). Just goes to show, generators are always nice to have around. :) Glad you made it out with no casualties outside trees!
ReplyDeleteI am sad about those trees. :(
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you are up and running! Did you feel like you were experiencing Little House on the Prairie? Get out the oil lamps. I know that was hard.
ReplyDeleteI refer to distance in time, too. Who cares about the miles? It takes me an hour to get there! :)