Isabel aimed straight at us (according to the computer model) (1 Viewer)

[Kirk Gunn]

Ouch - this day hurts ! Lost power at 8pm last night, and the wind was blowing insanely hard. The TV news said it was ~ 40 knots, but there was no way. Gusts had to be hitting 50-60 at 8pm.

Out of 1.2 million people in the area, over 600k lost power. Plus the building we house a data center in flooded at 7am this morning, so I've been doing Disaster Recovery moving servers and data to a secondary computer room all day. Not fun..... Especially when my boss turned down the funding last year to do a true DR scenario with data replication between facilities. Suddenly e-mail is business critical. DUH....

On a brighter note, my home (in a heavily wooded lot) made it through unscathed. My boat has some slight damage, but considering the flood was 8 feet above normal high tide and the entire downtown Annapolis area was flooded badly, I consider myself incredibly blessed.

Time to get some sleep before my next shift tomorrow. 12hrs on, 12hrs off for the next 5 days !!!!!

 

[Stephen Orr]

Hey, hey hey! Virginia Beach is (slowly) getting back on line! We lost power at around 9:45 Thursday morning, and it JUST came back on at 2 p.m. today (Saturday). Everything in our fridge/freezer is kaput. Our cable-net is still out, so I'm at our church office (my wife is secretary here) using dial-up. We're borrowing a powered TV antenna until the cable kicks in.

We fared pretty well. Winds kicked through here off and on at about 85 mph. My fence is still intact, although at an odd angle. No siding or shingles missing. Six doors down, a tree crashed through a fence and into an alley. There are uprooted trees, missing fences and signs, and incredible damage everywhere. Someone called it an arboral armageddon.

Not far from where we live, some friends took in neighbors whose house was absolutely destroyed by a falling tree. I took a picture on it. The insurance company is writing it off, and told them just to put their stuff in storage until they can be relocated. I don't know if they will rebuild on the same site.

In Virginia, Dominion Power said that 1.6 million people were still without power as of this morning. I know that for a while, 95 percent of Hampton Roads was without power for almost 24 hours, and there are still A LOT of areas that are blacked out.

Everyone is out trying to find someplace to eat. We were fortunate yesterday that the local Ruby Tuedays was open (windows still boarded up), although the wait to get in was well over an hour when we got there. This morning, we managed to find a Shoney's open with their breakfast bar.

We've spent the last couple of days driving around looking at damage, and helping people move big branches, etc., to the street. I'm just glad it wasn't any worse for us than it was. Except for the power outage, we had no other problems. We even watched the Shackleton miniseries and Bulletproof Monk on DVD on my little portable 7-in DVD player.

We still don't know if school will be in on Monday. Schools that lost power have probably lost all their refrigerated and frozen food, and will not be able to serve breakfast or lunch. We'll find out tomorrow. Traffic lights are still out all over the place, even the light at the major intersection a half block from my house. Some major road are blocked off, and an important tunnel in Norfolk is flooded and unusable for at least two weeks. Many houses along the shore line are either gone or totaled or significantly damaged.

Well, time to sign off. We're thankful that we made it through safe and sound. Now....

I heard Survivor was pretty good on Thursday...

 

[NickT]

I talked with my parents who live in midtown Newport News and they had no power or phone, so they called my on their cell. No major damage around where they were so they got through pretty well. I looked around the Daily Press and Va Pilot websites at some of the pictures of the damage, lots of trees on utility lines and fallen on houses. I'd say that it's the worst storm damage I've ever seen there in the 25 years I've lived there. I even saw that there were curfews in Newport News, Norfolk , and Va Beach. That's something I can't ever recall happening either. Hopefully, all will be back to normal soon.

Oh yeah, what tunnel got flooded? Midtown or the Downtown one?

 

[Stephen Orr]

Midtown Tunnel was flooded. Our power went off again at 6 p.m. and just came back on at 1:30 a.m. My ceiling fan just woke me up - blessed relief! - and I just finished checking out the house to make sure everything was okay.