Irene Aftermath

As I'm sure everyone saw on the news, Hurricane Irene swept through the East coast this past weekend and did some damage along the way. This week has been quite the roller coaster of events between the earthquake on Wednesday and the Hurricane Saturday mixed with Tornado warnings throughout the night. Needless to say we weren't quite sure what to expect.

They had warned us about flooding and possible power outages. Most of the East coast was put in a state of emergency with driving bans. We were all encouraged to stock up on water, non-perishables, and batteries. Jordan went out Friday to get bungee cords for our deck furniture as well as our trash cans out front. We were preparing for the worst and didn't know what to expect.

It started raining around 2:00pm on Saturday and was falling pretty heavily by the evening. The sun went down before we could really see any damage begin outside, so we were in the dark most the rest of the night (no pun intended.. ok maybe a little) with regards to how things looked. By 9pm we had a few minor spots of water in the basement that Jordan was able to clean with the Shop Vac and use towels to keep anymore from coming in. Between 10 and 11pm we received a handful of Tornado warnings for our area and were encouraged to seek shelter in our basement or central room in our house.

I fell asleep on the couch sometime around 1am. I was up at 3:30 to feed Lucy and again around 6:30. Jordan really didn't sleep for fear of basement flooding or one of the trees out back crashing into our deck or worse yet, our house. 

Once the sun came up we were able to survey the damage. 

A few months ago I showed you some pictures of our deck out back. 

This is how our backyard normally looks on a daily basis:

You can see the shallow creek in the back with a lot of weeds and grass down below. Whenever it rains the creek always rises a few feet, but nothing to ever worry about. 

After Hurricane Irene swept through, here was the view from our deck when the sun came out Sunday morning:

I took all these pictures from inside the slider on our first floor, not actually on the deck. The winds were still pretty high at the time and some of the trees were swaying pretty heavily so we opted to stay inside for a few more hours until things settled a bit.

I couldn't get a great picture of it, but the field on the other side of the creek was completely flooded. You could only see water from probably half a mile. You can see a little bit in this picture. You can see water between the branches and leaves all the way to the top of the picture:

Since the other side of the creek is lower than our side, the water luckily went that way instead of flooding our house. It's difficult to see, but there is actually an 8 foot slope at the edge of our property. So the water would need to rise more in order to reach the basement slider.

These were taken from the walk-out slider in our basement. 

Just to give you an idea of how far the creek was from our house. We had about 30 feet between the house and the water along with the 8 foot drop, so we really had nothing to worry about (thanks goodness). 

Other than a few broken branches out back, we had no damage. Late Sunday afternoon one of the trees two houses down fell. Thankfully it fell into the creek and did no structural damage to anyone. By 6pm the creek was almost completely back to it's original depth. 

We really lucked out that this was all that we had from the storm. We lost electricity for about 30 seconds that morning, but that was the extent of it. Others were not so lucky. A tornado touched down in Lewes and did some damages to houses. 11 people lost their lives across the coast. It was scary and bad, but it could have been much worse and for that I am thankful. I'd rather have the hype and preparedness for nothing.

Hopefully you all had a safe weekend and no one was seriously affected by Irene!