Thursday, September 8, 2011
No power. A quick check of my cell phone told me it was 8:30am. I walked outside anyway to see if there was anything interesting to take in visually. The only thing I saw was a bunch of neighbors doing the same thing as if that is something everyone does when the power goes off in the middle of the night. Without a NYSEG truck in sight, I assumed we would be without power for at least a little while.
My thoughts shift to my grandma; I call and am sickened by a busy signal. I assume that this must mean the phone is off the hook, or more likely, underwater. If they had to evacuate in the middle of the night, I start to wonder where would they have gone? Since I was lost without the Internet, I call up Kellie who informs me of the water levels and all the initial damages and road closings. I'm also told the river still had not crested. (It wouldn't until nearly 6pm that evening at about 25.71 feet - a foot and a half more than early predictions.) At this point, I call my pastor, Matt, because he lives about 2 blocks away from my grandma's house. After catching him up on the situation, he agrees to get as close to the house as he can get to confirm that my grandma and uncle aren't still inside. Between phone calls, my mother calls me and I have to break to her the news that grandma and uncle are unaccounted for, but that Matt is seeking her out as we speak. What a horrible conversation to have. As Matt approaches my grandma's house, which has four feet of water inside, neighbors inform him that both my grandma and uncle evacuated in the middle of the night; my mom calls me again to tell me that grandma called her via the Good Shepherd phone. I call Matt to let him know that everyone is safe at the church, and everyone breathes a collective sign of relief.
After breakfast, Andrea and I take a walk around our neighborhood to assess the damage locally. The one street where our friends, the Elliot's, live is very flooded to the point where it looks like the first floor could have been breached. (We'll find out later the next day that it came 4 inches short.) All the neighbors within a 10-block stretch, including Wilson Hospital, is without power. But unlike the rest of us, Wilson has power generators and that is the only sound we hear when traffic isn't going by. Just to the east of us, we can see that the entire Westover community is utterly destroyed and underwater as far as you could see. And finally, just about 20-feet away from our home one of NYSEG's substations is completely submerged underwater. The entire tour was predictably frustrating and truly unbelievable.
At this point in time, I was starting to feel fairly certain that power would not be restored soon. Andrea and I started bottling water and filling up our bathtub with water. With a bunch of food in the refrigerator and freezer, I made the extremely difficult decision that lunch would be composed entirely of ice cream.
Our downstairs neighbor told us that Cyber Cafe West was open, so that afternoon we used their Internet to read what was happening and and view some photos. It was horrifying, especially what had happened to Owego, where Andrea's grandmother lives.
I've always advocated the gas stove over electric ones and days like this confirmed it. Although the electric spark wouldn't ignite, it gave me an opportunity to try out an experiment that I have wanted to try. Equipped with an oven mitt and safety glasses, I lit a piece of dry spaghetti on fire and poked it toward the gas burner. Success! Before long, we had a full dinner of leftovers all cooked on the stove top - a meal of chicken, mac and cheese, corn and potatoes.
The idea of spending a night in the dark seemed a bit depressing, but we managed to read the Bible and play a full game of Scrabble by candlelight. Handy power-outage tip: If you want to double the brightness of your candlelight, put a mirror behind it!
No comments:
Post a Comment