Ahira's Hangar

Wow, this weekend was something else. A big storm system started moving through on Friday. On Saturday it gave us multiple inches of rain and damaging tornadoes. On Sunday the remnants of hurricane Ike came through, dumping more huge amounts of rain on us.

So ten inches of rain or more, depending on little local variations.

Lots of roads flooded and rivers and creeks several feet over their banks.

We are fine here at my house - we are in a little band of hills, and the house is on top of a hill. And we lost no big trees in all of the storming.

They even had to cancel some of the trains that run in between the Chicago and Detroit areas. You know it is bad when they cancel train service.

Given how powerful just this hurricane remnant was, I cannot even imagine how powerful an actual hurricane must be.

Houston is twenty miles inland, and I think we have all seen the horrific damage there...

had some of the worst damage in Hurricane Andrew and that was approximately 10 miles inland. Part of that, though, was construction deficiencies. The aftermath of Hurricane Andrew led to a much stronger building code in south Florida.

But there are many other examples of bad damage far from the coast.

But think of all the profit Lowe's makes on plywood and duct tape, every time a storm blows through....

(I remember the first big storm bearing down on us, after I'd moved to Norfolk. We were encouraged to tape our windows, which I dutifully did. Then someone explained to me that the tape won't keep the window from blowing out in a storm -- rather, it's supposed to keep the glass from shattering into teeny pieces. I *guess* that's a good thing. But I think I would've preferred plywood. Alas, I was renting an apartment and it wasn't up to me whether to board up the windows....)

Raining steadily here for the last 24 hours...and bloody freezing. Today's probably been the coldest day here this year, and it's supposed to be spring. *grumble*

--A