41 deg. overcast, SW wind @ 10 mph.
Forecast = Overcast with a chance of rain. High of 52F. Windy. Winds from the SW at 25 to 30 mph with gusts to 45 mph. Chance of rain 50%.
It’s about 7:00 AM Monday morning as I’m writing this on a word processor. Can’t get on the Internet this morning, so this will have to do for now until I can copy and paste it to Blogger.
It stopped raining for just a short time Sunday morning, so Jim went outside just to check things out. About the only thing he found was that there was a small branch from the tree to my left, laying on my roof. It’s small enough that he’s pretty sure it didn't do any damage.
In the afternoon, it started raining really hard and it got real windy and didn’t let up until sometime in the evening, although I don’t think it ever completely quit raining. Then, sometime in the middle of the night, it started raining really hard again, and hasn’t let up since.
The winds have been quite strong at times with gusts in the 40 to 45 mph range. There were a few gusts yesterday afternoon that I think were even higher than that. At times the rain was going completely sideways just like you see on TV when there’s a reporter standing out in the storm, trying not to get blown away.
It’s still dark out as I’m writing this, so I can’t tell of there’s any water standing in this park. There were some pretty big puddles yesterday already, but nothing to be alarmed about.
They’re saying that it’s going to keep on storming all day here in Virginia Beach. Then, tomorrow, things should start to improve.
I sure hope so. I've had enough rain and wind for awhile!!! : (
_____________________
It's now Tuesday morning and I think we're just about through with the storm.
By about 8:30 yesterday morning, the winds seemed to die down some but the rain kept coming down, very hard at times. On the news the whole report was about the high tide coming at about 9:30 in the morning with Hurricane Sandy's winds pushing the water onto shore, plus a full moon, which also raises the tides normally.
All morning long they had been showing flooded streets and businesses and then as the tide rose, they were showing the waves coming over the Virginia Beach Boardwalk!!!
By high tide, they had closed down some of the bridge/tunnels in the city and were showing more closed roads, some of them Interstate Routes. By noon, the water levels from the high tides were dropping and some of the streets and roads were beginning to reopen. Then, sometime during the afternoon, the temperatures started dropping and the winds switched to the west.
Meanwhile, we were still having heavy rains and some strong wind gusts.
The winds seem to have calmed down overnight and so far this morning I haven't felt any strong gusts hitting me. Hopefully the worst of it is over. Today is the last day of our 2 week stay here at the park and Jim needs to get outside and get me ready to travel.
So, was the decision to stay here and ride out the storm the correct one? Well, it appears that we've weathered the storm OK, but Jim says that if he had it to do over again, we'd head inland. We were lucky in that Sandy stayed well off shore, but there was the fear that it could turn and come on shore at any time. The winds were fierce at times, the downpour of about 24 hours was unnerving, being that we didn't know if we were going to get flooded out or not.
I think that both Jim and Linda feel that it just wasn't worth the stress to hang around in the area see Joe, Nancy and the girls, one more time. It probably would have been worth it to head inland for awhile and then come back out here after the storm was over, if they wanted to visit some more with them.
Did you know that every second, a large hurricane releases the energy of 10 atomic bombs?
Happy to hear you made it through the storm. Sounded like a rough ride.
ReplyDelete