Last weekend Hurricane Irene tore through the Poconos like a woman on a mission. The front end of the storm brought rain and winds, but the back of the storm brought strong winds that brought down many trees and power lines with them.
Even though it’s a full week later, as of Saturday power was still being restored to many unlucky residents that encountered some serious long term outages.
A few weeks before Irene we had a storm come through that left us without power for a few days and that ended up being a good ‘warm up’ for what was to come. We live in an elevated spot in the Poconos – we’re lucky because we don’t get the flooding that was seen with Hurricane Irene, but we did get the brunt of the wind damage and even on a regular rainy day our power at least flickers once or twice.
There is no right way to prepare for something you haven’t encountered before, I personally take the over prepared method and my husband and I decided to take our family to go stay with my parents in central PA for the weekend Irene was to hit. I figured if we lose power on a regular basis and are considered a more ‘rural’ part of the Poconos, that if there were to be mass outages we’d be one of the last ones on the list to get power back on.
So we headed out early Saturday morning and spent Saturday glued to the Weather Channel watching Irene’s every move. Our neighbors were on call to text us if we lost power but to our surprise Saturday came and went without a peep, we thought we were in the clear.
Sunday morning around 5am my parents lost power due to Irene, although they were on the outskirts of the storm there were still power issues and when we surveyed the damage on Sunday we saw plenty of downed trees including a tree that had fallen onto another tree that was keeping the first tree from crashing through their neighbors house.
The power ended up going out back at our house Sunday morning as well, and we were among the thousands of Pocono residents that lost power with the storm. Our power was restored within a few days, but due to the massive amount of outages there were Pocono residents still without power even a week later!
So how does one prepare for the unexpected? Living where we do in the Poconos a generator is becoming more a necessity then a luxury. When the power goes out it’s not just that it’s an inconvenience, but for those of us on well water that means no water – no toilets, no showers…and having 3 kids that really really poses a problem.
There are plenty of areas in the Poconos that never have power problems, but if you’re in an area that loses power often be sure to have the essentials on hand incase the power does go out again for an extended period of time. Water is #1, a generator is nice but can be expensive to buy and run, flashlights, anything you’d need to survive for a couple of days.
Hopefully everyone weathered the storm ok (pun intended)
