Not As Bad As Expected

The winds started up around 2AM this morning, as well as heavier rain. Even so, it hasn’t been too bad. Looking at the radar images, Irene is further to our West than the original forecast. Irene is already a minimal Cat 1 hurricane and she hasn’t reached New York yet, so she’s going to be a lot weaker than expected as well. That’s all to the good.

The state is basically shutdown. Towns have closed roads all over and I-95 and the Merritt Parkway are closed. Frankly, I can’t imagine why people would be out driving in this weather, but there’s always some yahoo somewhere I guess. The state has further imposed a tractor trailer ban. The state has about 250,000 power outages at this point and that will likely continue to increase. School has been cancelled for tomorrow pretty much all over.

The worst is yet to come, but I’m more optimistic than before for us getting through this with minimal damage. The sustained winds haven’t been bad so far, the gusts have been pretty good, probably into the 40 mph range. One tree has sustained damage to its top, with most of it’s leaves stripped. Other than that, no damage to speak of.

The kids slept through the night. Getting them to bed was the hardest part, but the fact that the brunt of the storm hadn’t arrived meant there wasn’t anything to actively feed their anxiety, so they slept well. The lass finally came down as I’m typing, as did the boy. One good thing about the timing is that the worst of the storm will hit during daylight hours, so this won’t be some faceless nemesis in the dark for them to deal with. They’ll be able to watch it come and go. With a little luck, watching it go will reinforce to them that bad times do, in fact, come to and end.