Blowin' in the wind

Strangely, the entire US seems to be subject to these kinds of things at the exact same time, but yesterday was another big (and apparently now annual) Pacific Northwest windstorm. We don't get tornadoes here, just crazy gusty winds. (And the occasional volcanic eruption or earthquake, but let's focus on one natural disaster at a time here.) Last year's (pictured to right) storm (70 mph in the city/115 mph in the mountain passes) knocked down fences, trees, and most importantly, caused some serious powerline damage all around the mainlines just outside of our neighborhood. (Incidentally, I find it hilarious that the Washington State historians have elected to call it the 'Hannukah Eve' storm, considering that Jewish holidays actually start at sunset, plus the minimal relative size of the Seattle Jewish community. Case in point: note that the spelling at the top of that article is 'Hunnukah'. Good stuff.) Plus it was really cold, so we were huddling in the dark -- wood-burning stoves with electric fans apparently aren't all that effective or safe without the fan running -- for a few nights before moving into the graciously offered house of some local friends who were out of town. In the end, power to our place wasn't restored for more than a week. And did I mention Meh was pregnant during this adventure as well?

So I was warily watching the swirling winds at my office yesterday morning (which generally has it much better than our house, which is near the lake and on a hill). Our building had a roughly 1 minute outage (should I be worried that MS doesn't invest in immediate switchover generators or at least UPSs for a completely electricity dependent company?) during our morning meeting, but other than that, I just saw things getting blown around the parking lot for the most part.

The drive home was where the fun began (as it was also during some of the heaviest winds of the day, which apparently topped off at 'only' 60 mph) - downed branches and giant piles of swirling leaves and debris grew in frequency as I headed up toward our place. Then I entered the 'live fire' zone, where branches were actively whipping off of trees and onto the sidewalks, roads, and cars. At one point I heard a giant thump right above me - I guess a branch or something went onto and bounced off my roof (didn't seem to leave a trace luckily). Traffic was snarled, cars were dodging falling branches and driving around the ones that were already down, and you could hear loud cracks every few minutes of a weaker tree giving up the ghost.

I made it home intact, where Meh and Zachary were having bathy (sorry, baffy) time after a tough traffic jammed drive of their own. Some of our heavy lawn furniture (already theoretically tarped down for the winter) had been tossed around like toys, so I tried to pick everything up in the still gusty winds. We started prepping to hunker down for the night, when a loud boom preceded all power in the house going bye-bye. D'oh, so much for making dinner for Meh. Our friends J & S graciously offered to bring us over some food - we have such supportive friends!

As it was still light outside, and Korby was moderately insane for a walk, he and I went out to investigate. The main power pole that feeds our neighborhood had been blown down into the road, and there were several spaghetti-looking strings of live wires covering various parts of the road and sidewalk. Luckily, the sheriffs had already blocked off the road north of us with flares, and were diverting people to the south - but I figured we should abort the dinner run based on the traffic situation (J & S, thank you guys so much!!). The neighbors' generators all spun up quite quickly; looks like folks learned from last year - where there were about 3 then, I counted at least 6 as Korby and I walked around. Our next door neighbors (who have two young kids) were extremely kind and generous, coming by to make sure we were okay and offering us a movie and/or warm place to hang out with them. In the end, we just ended up going to bed early (after a canned/dry food dinner, and after watching a little bit of a DVD on my battery-powered laptop), but Zachary was up and down throughout the night without his rain-noise-generator to keep him asleep. I occasionally heard large construction vehicles/machinery out on the main road, and then a few chainsaws, and (quite impressively considering the damage I'd seen) the power came back on at 3:40 am. Zachary slept a bit better with his white noise, though he was still up quite early in the morning.

Things seem a bit calmer wind-wise today, though now the wind has just been replaced with torrential downpours. (For the non-Seattle-ites: Yes, it rains here in the winter. But usually it just mists for months on end; 'heavy' rain is pretty rare.) In response to last year's storms, the local power company has put together a live updating map of outages; looks like we were quite lucky, as most of our general area was actually still out as of this morning (note all of the big red X's clumped in the northeast corner of Lake Washington). There are some impressive pics of some of the local area damage here. Thankfully we had our own trees trimmed fairly recently, but I really should start researching portable generators if this is going to be happening so frequently.