Editor's Log: Storm Preparedness - The Fisherman

Editor’s Log: Storm Preparedness

Hurricane/Tropical Storm Isaias is now firmly in my rearview mirror, but it was a learning experience in many ways. All of my 40-plus years have been spent in Southern New England; I spent my first 26 years in Western Massachusetts before moving to Connecticut where I reside to this day. This means that I have seen my fair share of hurricanes come and go over the years. My earliest hurricane memory was of Gloria in September of 1985. My dad was doing a remodel project on our house and as I recall, we had some windows from the garage to dining room transformation that were still open to the outside world when the storm hit, letting water inside the addition. When the eye of the hurricane passed overhead my dad and I stood on the back deck and I was in awe of the tranquility of the event. It was of course short-lived when the eye moved past and the storm picked up where it left off, but it stuck with me.

From there I’ve fished some great bites in the surf both leading up to as well as coming off of many hurricanes and tropical storms. While these days I don’t get quite as jacked-up at the prospect of a big bite sparked by one of these big weather events as I used to (another sign that I’m getting old?), I still get excited to see what will come of the storm. In my home my wife is usually in the freak-out category to which I generally offset her panic with moderate calmness. When Isaias was building and making its way up the coast I didn’t take things very seriously, shrugging it off as little more than a thunderstorm. In reality it wasn’t the biggest storm we’ve weathered in recent years, so I wasn’t totally wrong there, but in terms of storm-related inconvenience (at least in my home state of Connecticut) it seemed far worse than any I can recall.

Power was lost at my house a little before 4:00 PM on Tuesday, and it wasn’t restored until around 3:30 AM on Friday. In that time frame we had to toss most everything in our two refrigerators, and we ran out of water before noon on Wednesday. Cell battery life quickly became a prized commodity with short neighborhood drives used to charge phones while not interfering with local clean-up and repair crews. We lost the top 30 feet off one of the large trees in my yard, and nearly every inch of grass in my yard was covered in small leaf/branch clusters.

Now I am not going to sit here and complain about the storm much more as I know there were many who had it far worse than I in terms of power outage, property damage and more, but it did make me realize how much we take little things like running water for granted. While the police department located a mile from my house had power and a running hose from which residents could fill jugs, you haven’t lived until your only means of showering for three days comes in the form of pouring tap water over your head from a gallon jug. Warm water? Yeah right. Even letting it sit in the sun for a bit only does so much as we couldn’t really account for too many shower jugs when other uses for the water were at times more pressing. Of course this was the first storm in which my wife didn’t fill our bathtub with water (I always objected to it in the past), and you can rest assured that she did in fact remind me of this little item on several occasions.

Going forward you had better believe that I’ll take storm warnings more seriously and take precautionary steps even if things look to be overblown by the media. While my family and I made it through Isaias no real worse for the wear aside from a few days of inconvenience, most of it could have been avoided or diminished had we just taken a few more preparatory steps.

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