Hurricane Sandy Making Its Move
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- Spot the differences
So for the past couple of weeks, many of us from the east coast have been recovering from Hurricane Sandy.
Earlier in that Monday night, I had gone to a friend’s house and a decided to walk back. People always like to use the word “howling” to describe strong winds but that was definitely an understatement in that case. They say the winds were up to 66 mph that day, I image stronger during the storm. You know when you hold a blade of grass in between your thumbs and blow at the edge to make a whistle? To me it seemed like the wind and trees were giant versions of that. I like storms but that was a little terrifying.
When I was getting closer to my house I heard something huge crash behind me. Good timing… As I walked into my house I get a call from my friend, she had just lost power… Less than an hour later we had lost power too. I used the limited light to read and pass the time til I could fall asleep and wake up in the morning.
The next day, a couple of us grabbed our umbrellas and headed outside to see the effects of Hurricane Sandy. From my house everything looked pretty normal but once you walked a little bit down the road it was like you were in a different place. Dozens of trees had fallen but not just fallen, uprooted. The wind was so strong it pushed the trees hard enough to snap roots thicker than my arms. Electrical/telephone poles were taken down by fallen trees, blown over or even just snapped in half. One pole that fell on the main street was connected to a live wire that burned a strip in the ground (Youtube video). Luckily nobody was hurt where I live but there were a few material casualties.
As we made our way down to the lake, we walked passed a gigantic uprooted tree and 2 other trees that had fallen. branches have fallen there before so it didn’t seem so bad until we began to realize things missing. We walked by one of the trees and had to do a double-take. Where did the playground go? We looked at each other and took a closer look. The splintered wood from the playground had blended in with the fallen tree but underneath all that you could see pieces of the shattered green slide that we all you to pile up on. We joked a little about not having enough wood for our bonfires and continued to walk to the dock by the water. We stood on the dock for a little while and as we were going to head back we turned around and realized the benches that were always there were gone. Another friend had later told us he found them by the island, which is at least 400 ft/200 m away.
During the weeks that followed, I saw trucks from Indiana and other states come to cut the fallen trees that blocked the road. The snow storm that came a couple days later caused a slight delay but so many without power during this cold weather didn’t stop people from taking their chainsaws and continuing some of the work on their own.
For cars and the high-demand generators, every gas station for miles and miles were sold out. People like myself drove for hours in search for a generator and gas because nobody really knew how long we would have to camp out for.
Definitely thankful for the hot water, but surviving without electricity wasn’t too bad. I like that it forced me to get up and do more things than I normally do and I definitely got a lot of reading done.
Is the earth trying to fight back? Is it a natural cycle that came around? Tell me what you think.
Light Bulbs and Ventures 