OT - Batten Hatches, Rig for Heavy Weather

[Olham 164]

Sounds lesser, but it washed away many people's houses and goods outside of New Orleans.

[Bullethead 12]

The speakers of the 1MC (ship's PA system) crackle to life. Then a bosun's pipe tweets a a voice says "Now hear this, now hear this! Secure from general quarters, resume normal underway watches. And sweepers, time to man your brooms."

 

Well, it's now 1530 my time on Thursday. I've been back home since 1200, I've been drinking since 1300, my lights here have been back on since 1400, and I've now done everything around the house that can't wait a few days. So I'm fresh out of the shower and have just now sat down for the 1st all day, in front of my desktop with a bottle of bourbon and in the sweet embrace of central air conditioning, for the express purpose of bringing you all up to date. NOTE: as part of resuming normal operations, I have to go back to work tomorrow :).

 

Anyway, my last post was yesterday about 1230. The storm kept slowing down so the time for the bad stuff to hit my area got moved back to about midnight last night. But we scared it off. Just an RCH before it reached us from the SE, the storm took a very slight jog north before resuming its NW path. I guess Isaac realized how preparted we were here and didn't want to mess with us :). By that time, the storm had piddled around over land so long that its circle had been divided diagonally from NW to SE. The NE half was still all nasty but the SW half had disappeared from radar, so was only wind, and that rather slower than in the other half. If the storm had kept on its path, we'd have been just barely on the bad side of the divide and would have eaten the whole diameter of the storm and the worst it had to offer. But that last-second jog to the north put us on the clear side of the divide by about 5 miles, so all we got was sustained 20-30 knot winds with gusts of about 50 and hardly any rain. As a result, I wasn't called out all night and slept right through it. By the time I woke up at 0600 this morning, the wind had backed around from NE to SW and died way down and it was only drizzling.

 

At dawn, we sent out recon groups along all the roads, noted the problems, divided up the work up amongst all the teams we had ready (all our fire stations, sheriff deputies and jail inmates, and the parish and state road crews), and off we went. Lots of chainsaw and bulldozer work. We got done with that by about 1030 (which shows how little there really was here), declared the war over, and then back to the fire station to sweep and mop out all the muddy boot prints. And so on home.

 

All in all, we got off VERY much lighter than expected. 5" of rain at my house so far but it's still drizzling now and again and probably will for a few days. Looks like the lower half of Mississippi got the worst of it, and in fact is STILL getting it right now. Plus of course all the folks along the coast who got flooded out. The whole area is still at risk of tornados for the next few days so we're not quite out of the woods yet, but we're much better off than we had any right to be and my power is back on, so I'm counting my blessings and hoping the Dark Gods haven't noticed.

 

I've attached a pic of what my yard looks like right now. Lots of rake work but that can wait until the weekend. AFAIK, we only had 2 trees fall on houses, all roads are open and most folks hereabouts now have electricity again.

[Hasse Wind 46]

Good to hear it wasn't that bad in your area.

[UK_Widowmaker 571]

Don't worry BH...you don't need Inmates, Fire Officers, Police, Army, Road crews!...I see you have a Collie there!...he'll sort it all out

[Bullethead 12]

I see you have a Collie there!...he'll sort it all out

 

That collie's a she, same dog I've posted pics of before. She was looking at the fallen limbs to see if any were suitable for building sheep pens ;). But you didn't notice my cat. Look about 1 dog's length behind the dog and up to the brick walkway. Now you see why so many cats are black with white feet. The line between black and white on his legs lines up well with the irregular line between dark bushes and lighter grass. That way he can ambush critters even out in the middle of the yard, as long as he has a bush behind him.

[Von Paulus 8]

The line between black and white on his legs lines up well with the irregular line between dark bushes and lighter grass. That way he can ambush critters even out in the middle of the yard, as long as he has a bush behind him.

Does he (or she) bring you sometimes the outcome of their hunts? I think that this is a more usual behaviour in the female hunters, like wanting to show us that they are useful.

[Bullethead 12]

Does he (or she) bring you sometimes the outcome of their hunts? I think that this is a more usual behaviour in the female hunters, like wanting to show us that they are useful.

 

The cat is a he, named Hurricane Gustav or "Gus" for short, because he was blown into my yard as a starving little kitten by that storm 4 years ago this coming Saturday. He has his own door so can go in and out at will and often brings his prey inside. But he's very considerate and conscientious about it. If he's hungry, naturally he wants to eat inside where it's cool, especially because he's gotten all hot and sweaty catching the thing. He brings his meals in dead and eats them in my shower so I can just hose the blood down the drain.

 

But he also sometimes feels sorry for the dog. The dog is a poor but enthusiastic hunter, knowing nothing of stealth but always charging in full speed. Very occasinally she catches something but usually ends up barking up a tree while the squirrel laughs at her from above and showers her with bark chips and excrement. So the cat will bring in live squirrels and drop them inside for the dog to chase around. With no trees to climb, the dog usually succeeds in catching the squirrel eventually, although often my house gets trashed in the process

[UK_Widowmaker 571]

Oh Yeah..never spotted the Cat....and my apologies to your Girl

[RAF_Louvert 101]

.

 

BH, very glad to learn that you and yours have survived the storm. Great update BTW, and thanks for sharing the photo. Do I see more chainsaws in your future? I think I do.

 

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Edited August 31, 2012 by RAF_Louvert
too much coffee

[Bullethead 12]

Do I see more chainsaws in your future? I think I do.

 

Where I live, the following pieces of gear are required for daily survival: a minimum of an 18" chainsaw, a generator, a 4WD pickup with a winch, a tractor (with a minimum of bush hog and box scraper attachments), a 16' flatbed trailer, 20' of log chain with a come-along, several tow straps, and a shotgun. It's nice to have a blue wrench, a welding machine, a chain fall or overhead crane, a backhoe/frontend loader tractor, a bulldozer, and a side-by-side ATV (with a winch), although you can get by with renting these things from your friends and neighbors for a few beers.

[hood 2]

Where I live you need a hearing aid and a soup spoon.

[RAF_Louvert 101]

.

 

 

Hood, I'll be there too soon myself I fear.

 

"Huh? Whatzat you say? Chicken poodles poop a bunch? Oh ... chicken noodle soup for lunch. Sure, that sounds good. Now somebody go switch the TV to 'Matlock' gawdammit, I didn't fight in the war so I could sit here now and watch this Josh 2.0 moron."

 

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[HumanDrone 4]

Well, since I'm in Montevideo, Uruguay right now (for work) I just have to find a thread to hang a post off of, and I like this one - I was following along to see how BH and his lot made it through Issac, glad to hear that you "got off easy", BH!

 

Now none of those things in your "required equipment" post apply to me at home in western Pennsyl-tucky, but since I have a little bit of land, I do have a good chainsaw with 20 & 24 in bars, my Jeep Grand Cherokee has that pretty nice 5.7L Hemi and the Class 4 tow package, and I do have a 4WD diesel compact utility tractor with a 60" belly mower, box blade, back blade, lawn roller, front loader, and a loader frame for whatever you want to build on it, and a trailer to haul it all in (and get mulch, and rock, and stuff like that...). I'm storing my son-in-law's 35 tom wood splitter for him (for fair use!). My garage wall looks like a hardware store -since my wife always worked alongside me, we have two of many things like shovels and iron rakes, and of course my come-along, and 1.5 ton rope haul, a huge coil of 3/4" nylon rope, wire rope chokers, chain, my trusty double-bit ax, etc... My father-in-law has the gas welding/cutting set (oxyacetylene). I probably could use a shotgun, though you're not allowed to discharge firearms in the boro - we cheat a bit on that one when it comes to ground hogs, a safe shot with the hill behind the little critter with a .22 is almost indistinguishable from a firecracker anyway.

 

But we're still lightweights compared to BH's bayou - criminee, I just saw my first rattlesnake in the wild a couple of weeks ago, and he was just a little fellow, maybe 24-30" most - and I'm 56 years young!

 

So that's my little post from the Southern Hemisphere. At 5407 miles by "Great Circle" routing, it's the farthest from home I've ever been. It's interesting seeing the sun in the northern sky, stuff like that. Good day y'all. Glad to see BH is okay, and apparently Missouri finally got a bit of rain. Send it our way, if you could, please, my spring is slower than I've seen it in years, just a drip according to my Wing Commander!

 

Best,

 

Tom

[Hasse Wind 46]

Where I live, the following pieces of gear are required for daily survival: a minimum of an 18" chainsaw, a generator, a 4WD pickup with a winch, a tractor (with a minimum of bush hog and box scraper attachments), a 16' flatbed trailer, 20' of log chain with a come-along, several tow straps, and a shotgun. It's nice to have a blue wrench, a welding machine, a chain fall or overhead crane, a backhoe/frontend loader tractor, a bulldozer, and a side-by-side ATV (with a winch), although you can get by with renting these things from your friends and neighbors for a few beers.

 

I wonder how the natives survived in that area thousands of years ago?

[HumanDrone 4]

Not as well as we do!

[Bullethead 12]

I wonder how the natives survived in that area thousands of years ago?

Not as well as we do!

 

HD is quite correct. One of my major interests is American prehistory; I learn all I can about how the Indians lived (which changed a lot over time) and I practice a lot of their technologies myself. From what I've learned so far, it appears that my bailiwick has almost always been a poverty-stricken, lightly populated backwater between more prosperous areas, even in Indian times. But that's another story.

 

To return to Isaac, I spent most of yesterday driving all over the parish. I visited all our fire stations to assess their damage, inventory their remaining supplies, and collect the accumulated garbage. In the process, I also assessed damage to houses, businesses, and infrastructure. The general impression gained was the same as previously reported: everybody inconvenienced and a very few folks screwed over. The main problem here now is that the whole supply chain feeding this area got disrupted so there are some temporary shortages of things like milk, bread, and gasoline, but those aren't expected to last very long.

 

Later in the day, however, I performed what I consider my most useful service ever as a fireman. We have a nuclear power plant here. It survived the storm perfectly intact and there are absolutely no fears for it or of any radiological issue. However, it somehow lost prime to its big pumps that suck cooling water out of the Mississippi River. I don't know if this was due to the storm or just bad luck, but without those pumps running they'd have had to shut the plant down for a while. The plant would have been OK but thousands of homes and businesses would have lost electricity, which is the last thing we need around here with so many power lines already down from the storm. So I took a firetruck down there and primed the pumps with the water it carried. It was a simple job easily accomplished at no risk to myself (the hardest part was washing the truck after the 6-mile round trip on a very muddy road) but it did a lot of good. And that made me feel a lot better about doing little more than lie in a hammock for most of the storm :).

 

I suppose this was kharma. Earlier in the day, I'd gone to one of our stations that still didn't have shore power but its generator wasn't running. Nobody was still living at the station but the station always needs power to keep various batteries charged and the air brakes of the trucks topped up. So I called the guy in charge of the generators and learned that he'd shut it down because it was low on fuel. When I told him it had been refueled, he told me to start it up. And the generator ran for a couple of minutes and blew its engine....

[HumanDrone 4]

So, BH, you are near the Waterford Nuclear plant? I don't do much work in the nuclear stations, but have done a few jobs for Entergy. Glad you were able to help them out! Yeah, nukes are a lot safer than people give hem credit for - even Fukishima would have been okay if an earthquake considerably more powerful than the (very powerful) one it was designed for hadn't hit it. Big problems when that happens, though!

 

As to your station generator: maybe the guy said it was low on OIL? ;) Tough break!

 

Best,

 

Tom

[Mr_Dirt 1]

Good to see you made it through with a small amount of damage and thanks for sending some much needed rain this way. Your dog sounds like she hunts the way I fly in the skies over Flanders. Fast and not very stealthy therefore I gets shot at more the shooting at. We need most of that same equipment after a tornado goes through the area. Glad to see you and yours are okay.

[Bullethead 12]

So, BH, you are near the Waterford Nuclear plant?

 

No, we've got River Bend here. While I was there, they told me that Waterford was already down at the time (don't know why) so losing the 2nd plant would have caused a major blackout. It must have worked because they haven't called us back and the lights are still on :).

 

NOTE: River Bend has its own water tanker for this and other jobs but for some reason it wasn't available. That's why they called us.

 

Good to see you made it through with a small amount of damage and thanks for sending some much needed rain this way. Your dog sounds like she hunts the way I fly in the skies over Flanders. Fast and not very stealthy therefore I gets shot at more the shooting at. We need most of that same equipment after a tornado goes through the area. Glad to see you and yours are okay.

 

Glad some of the rain made it up to where it was really needed. We had a big drought last year but solved that this year so really didn't need any of it.

 

It's interesting how things work. Last year, we had a record-setting drought here ourselves but running through the middle of this desert was a record flood of the Mississippi River. The River was so high because the winter of 2010/11 was so long and cold. This year, we got enough spring rain to break the drought but the winter didn't really happen. So right now, I'm living in a wet, muggy jungle but the River is so low you can almost wade across it. It's 1-way traffic for barges right now and even then, they have to break the big barge tows up into single columns to get them through the narrow, shallow channel. Maybe this low water had something to do with the nuclear plant's pump losing prime.

 

Anyway, while we got off pretty light in my area, things elsewhere are far from good. Things are especially bad in the several parishes along the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. First they got the storm surge from the lake, then they got like 10-20" of rain, and now they're getting all the run-off from up in Mississippi where they also like 15-25" of rain. Rivers are overflowing, dams are breaking, and people are still being evacuated there as we speak.

 

There's also extensive flooding in La Place (SW corner of Lake Pontchartrain) and in the whole SE quadrant of Lousy Anna, some of which is also still getting worse even though the storm's been gone for a couple days now. Same sort of story in those places, plus the unintended consequences of all the levee construction done since Katrina. The levees mostly held up but they funneled the water into places still without levees, so conditions there were even worse than before.

 

Another thing is that the storm surge was way higher than expected from the strength of the storm alone. Isaac was friggin' huge, totally filling the Gulf of Mexico, and it was moving very slowly. So, while its winds weren't capable of raising water very high in any one place, they were able to move it over a vast area and it kept coming for several days. Thus, when the water reached land, it just piled up and got much higher than folks had based their pre-storm evacuation decisions on. By the time this was realized, it was often too late to leave. So as I understand things, they're going to change how they predict storm surge as a result of this storm.