Hurricane Ida

Hurricane Ida ripped through my area on Wednesday, leaving lots of damage.

My personal experience wasn't bad at all. Although it was raining when I got up Wednesday morning, it was mostly just cloudy during the afternoon. I even did a relatively quick run for groceries in the afternoon without getting wet.

Late in the afternoon (maybe a little before 5pm) it started raining, and built to a heavy rain fairly quickly. My smartphone began giving me alerts that flash flooding was a danger, which it continued to do into the wee hours of the morning. This was more annoying than helpful; my apartment is on a hill that's probably 30 feet above street level, and AFAIK the street isn't prone to flooding. Still, I think I saw that NJ had one of the highest Hurricane Ida death counts, so these alerts probably are helpful reminders to at least some people near me. (There was one flash flooding tragedy on Rt 22 very close by.)

More concerning was that I got one alert about a tornado. As I've mentioned to some of you, as someone living in an apartment, my options for dealing with a tornado aren't very good. The closest thing I have to an internal room is the walk-in closet to my bedroom. I can't believe that would withstand a direct tornado hit, and it doesn't sound like a very good place to be trapped in the event the building is damaged indirectly by a tornado. No place to live is perfect.

One good thing about my apartment complex is that my electricity arrives underground, so I rarely lose power during a storm. My power went out for maybe a minute during Ida, and then returned for good.

Although I saw a news chart suggesting I was in a band of NJ that got 8 inches of rain, the National Weather Service recorded "only" 6.4 inches at the Somerville Airport.

Hurricane Ida stats

When I got up on Thursday morning, it was actually sunny, though a little cool. I had a dental cleaning scheduled for 9am, and when I got a text message from them that morning I assumed the appointment was still on. (I really didn't know the extent of the road closures near me at this time.) I went there, called to be let in (which is their normal procedure during COVID-19), but my 3 attempts to call all went immediately to voicemail. (I only left 2 messages.) When I verified that the door was locked, I just left. (The dentist's office is in a sort of medical strip mall, and the parking lot was empty enough that I'm sure most of the doctors/dentists in there didn't have staff in the offices. I now know that many people wouldn't have been able to make the drive in.)

With the dentist visit canceled, I went back home (maybe a 2 mile drive, since my dentist is very close to where I live), I did my usual morning jog. Today I went up-and-down a bunch of streets between Post Street and Finderne Avenue, and things really didn't look too bad. I saw one place where a large section of chain sawed tree was by the side of the road (presumably cleaned up earlier in the morning), and lots of leaves and small branches that had blown down, and I suspect there were some flooded basements that I went past without knowing they were there. But generally speaking this didn't look much different than the 10 worst windstorms we get in a given year.

I was kind of curious what the effects of the storm were. I knew Duke Farms was closed, so I couldn't go there. I hadn't heard that Manville was flooded, but checked Google Maps to see if a tiny park in Manville (Dukes Park) was accessible. It implied that the bridge that crosses the Raritan was blocked. With nothing better to do, I walked down there. As has happened before during very heavy rain, the bridge was flooded. (I think it flooded during Hurricane Sandy, though I don't think it had happened since then.) 

North Street Bridge between Manville and Bridgewater

Somewhat surprisingly, while I was there I did not see that New Jersey staple, the person in a Humvee that disregards all the signs, police, and other officials and tries to blast through the water. Perhaps there are limits to what these guys will try, or maybe it just happened while I wasn't there.

Returning to my apartment complex, I did see a tree that blew down. This seemed to be the worst of the tree damage at the apartment complex.

An arboreal casualty of Hurricane Ida

I was somewhat surprised at the rainfall and damage that Ida was able to do here in NJ. Generally speaking, if a hurricane comes ashore on the Gulf Coast and works its way overland to NJ, I don't expect the remnants that get up here to be anything more than a fairly large rainstorm, the type that might drop a couple inches of rain over 2-3 days. Although Ida had lost a lot of her wind, she still had vast amounts of moisture in her even after passing through 10 states to get here.

What used to be extreme weather (droughts, heat waves, storms) does seem to be becoming routine. I can't believe us humans aren't contributing to this.