Nor'easter of 10/29/11

Hi Everyone:

There is a very good and valid reason why I didn't write a blog last week. No power, no computer, no blog.

It had been 24 years since where I live, had a devastating October snowstorm. The very heavy wet snow took down uncountable branches and numerous trees. The destruction was immediate and widespread. In a very short period of time, we went from living in 2011 to living in approximately 1850. It took me almost 5 hours just to clear my driveway to get a car out a day after the storm. My wife and I took a short drive to check out the surrounding areas and were flabbergasted at the amount of destruction we saw. Road closures were the norm and not the exception. We didn't get electricity restored until Wednesday night, for a total of 4 days without power.

During the aftermath of the storm, I noticed 2 things that really got my dander up. The first was that the road that we live on is the only East-West road in my county. Obviously that means that the road is heavily used and is an important connection between the east and west sides of the county. I guess New York state didn't think so. The road that I live on is a state road and is maintained by the state. In just a short 5 mile distance, there were at least 20 trees that had fallen onto the road, taking down about 6 telephone poles and blocking at least one lane of the 2 lane road, 20 times. The road was even closed at one place, where trees blocked the entire road. At another spot, the road was so narrow that firetrucks were unable to squeeze through. You could seen the different paint colors on the guard rail from vehicles that were a bit to wide. With all of that, you would think that NYS would have at least tried to remove some of the trees from the road. But nooooooo! My road wasn't fully open until Wednesday morning 11/2, 4 days after the storm. Now I'm not expecting miracles, but to have the only East-West road in a county closed for 4 days is unacceptable. I'm not sure why it took the state so long to fix it, but I'm pretty sure there wasn't a lot of common sense used.

The second thing that got my dander up was an email that I got from my Republican congresswoman, Nan Hayworth on Wednesday, 11/2. The email had important information regarding where to pick up dry ice and bottled water. The problem was that the email didn't have any info regarding my town. It's as if we didn't exist. The second problem was that she sent the email 4 days after the storm. I later found out that dry ice and bottled water were being given out as of Monday 10/31, including my town. Her email was 2 days late. I guess her common sense was left by the wayside, since her email was days late and short on info by leaving out our town completely.

All in all, we survived the Nor'easter of 10/2011, none the worse for wear.

Til next week.

Peter