Sunday Morning After the Big Storm

This morning the street is littered with chips of debris, something must have happened while I slept. There isn't much of a wind shaking the trees at this hour but limbs are swaying spastically, off and on. It is not raining, though everything outside is wet.

A Fox business show invited an atheist on to find out how atheists prepare for a hurricane. I can't figure out how to embed it but you can see the video HERE. The panelists get very upset. The atheist says he would prepare for the hurricane by buying candles, checking his flashlights, having a plan, and having a backup plan. Even though the others believe that God did not send the hurricane and cannot stop it, they defend the practice of praying that it will not harm them. Apparently that is comforting to them. The atheist notes that heroin is also comforting to people, which, not surprisingly, offends them. The Fox panelists appear to feel that they are the ones making sense in this interview, there is smugness all the way around the table.

I see that three million people along the East Coast lost their power last night. I am glad to say that we aren't among them. Looking at Facebook I see a number of people in Montgomery County are in the dark, including County Councilman Marc Elrich, who lives over in Takoma Park. That probably wasn't your best move, Pepco, the CC got a little upset last time the electricity went out, as I recall, this is just going to provoke them again. Well, what can they do? I saw Pepco crews trimming the branches from the power lines this week, knowing that a big storm was coming, somebody told me they saw crews from Pennsylvania helping them, I heard radio ads where Pepco was saying they're going to do everything they can, promising to do better this time. I think they know people have reached a limit with them, but you'd have to change the entire corporate culture to get things to work right, and that isn't likely to happen.

Of course Facebook isn't the best place to find out that people have lost their electricity. Some people post from their cell phones, but a lot of people can't get to it without power.

Oh by the way, something a little off-topic but tangential. We have a Verizon landline phone, and it has always been staticky but a couple of weeks ago it just went dead, right when the strike began. Four different times, crews of managers filling in for real workers came to our house and tested things. Some of them went up in cherry-pickers and looked at the boxes, but some didn't try very hard. One lady said, "I'm sixty-two years old, I'm not climbing up that pole, would you?" The last guy spent hours up there and left, puzzled, he said he could get the signal at the next box two blocks away but it wasn't getting to the box on the pole outside my house.

Finally the strike ended and an actual Verizon worker came out. I told him what they'd said and where they said the problem was and he laughed. He was polite about it but there was a bit of a chuckle. He pointed to a different pole on the other side of the house. "That's where your line comes from," he said. Fifteen minutes later he showed me a two-inch piece of cable that had eroded, the insulation was cracked and the wire had finally broken. He had snipped it out and spliced the cable back together. Now the phone works perfectly, there is not even static on the line. I suppose it was brave of Verizon to send out managers during the strike, and they seemed like nice enough people, but we really needed somebody who knew what they were doing. Verizon makes plenty of money, they ought to take care of their workers.

I just looked at the Doppler radar and you can see that the last band is just about to pass us. The weatherman says it will be sunny later.

We've seen some hurricanes in this region, and at least in my neighborhood this was not the worst one. We got a lot of rain, and by the bits of branches and leaves in the street I'd say we probably had some gusts of wind during the night. I have seen times when trees in the woods across the street were snapping like firecrackers, when high winds were sustained for hours, this one wasn't like that, at least where we live.

Today we will clean up and put things back where they were, those who live in the flooded areas will wait for the water to go down and then they will clean up and put things back where they were, if trees are down somebody will cut them up, if the power is out somebody will hook it up again eventually. So far they say eleven people have been killed by the storm, eleven families will not go back to the way things were the day before yesterday. Three million people have no electricity, I'm sure millions more have damage that they need to deal with today. A gigantic storm has come through our neighborhoods, it has passed on and soon we will resume our normal lives, more or less. I can already see the sun getting brighter out there.