Hurricane Hermine

Originally Posted by JButera

Lucille, what time should we meet up at Rich's place?

I think we should wait until after the hurricane is over.
Seriously, I've been through a number of hurricanes, and they can be terrifying. I hope and pray for the best for Rich.

Rich, wake up and tell us you're OK

Originally Posted by Lucille

Rich, wake up and tell us you're OK

Rich may have lost power. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/weather/...lorida-n641866

Originally Posted by WebSlave

Yeah, and it just HAD to be in my back yard............

Well, hopefully it won't be too bad. If it had been looking like we were going to be dealing with a Cat 2 or above, we would have loaded up the Jeep with an overnight bag and headed out of here. Who knows, maybe by tonight we will be wishing we had done that. I know Connie is pretty nervous about all this.

One good thing about living in an area surrounded by trees is that often the high winds will just skip over the tops of the trees, and hopefully not impact the buildings too much. The bad thing about living in an area surrounded by trees is that sometimes the trees fall down, which CAN impact the buildings severely. Luck of the draw, I guess. From what appears to be the direction the high winds will be coming from (east or southeast) we don't have any tall trees that could be a danger. We do have a large live oak on that side of the house, but they have a pretty extensive root system that should keep it stuck in the ground. If not, well Connie has been wanting to have that tree removed for years now anyway. Just might need to have a porch rebuilt too, I guess.

Of course, the wrinkle here is that we don't have any home owner's insurance. For a couple of reasons. One being that the insurance policy (State Farm) we had was so ridiculous in their hurricane coverage (the deductible was a substantial percentage of the value of our home) that we figured the costs of repairs would wind up coming out of our pockets anyway. They would not unbundle that expensive but useless hurricane portion of the policy, so we decided to just drop it entirely. And then when Charlie passed through years ago, we heard so many horror stories about the insurance companies down south dragging their feet paying claims or even outright denying them, requiring attorneys to get involved, that we just decided that the insurance wouldn't be of much help anyway. The insurance companies are always your friend when you are handing them a check, but apparently when you actually NEED that bill of goods they sold you, well, good luck with that.

Anyway, I figure the money we saved over the years by not throwing our money away into the black hole of the insurance companies will go a long way to paying for any damage that does happen. Of course, maybe I will think differently after the fact.....

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I really hope Rich has not been without power all these days. Right now it is hot and humid where I am, as usual. The back yard feels like going into a sauna in the mid afternoon.
It must be pure misery with the same sort of high heat, high humidity weather there in Florida for those who cannot use their AC.

Originally Posted by Lucille

I really hope Rich has not been without power all these days. Right now it is hot and humid where I am, as usual. The back yard feels like going into a sauna in the mid afternoon.
It must be pure misery with the same sort of high heat, high humidity weather there in Florida for those who cannot use their AC.

Homes/offices (47,500+) and cell towers are still without power. Hopefully, Mr. & Mrs. Z have a pool.

Yeah, power went out here at 11:30pm on Thursday after a lot of flickering and momentary blackouts. Power wasn't restored until today at 7:00pm (Monday). And yeah, trying to sleep without AC is really no fun when the air is holding about 120 percent humidity. Couldn't open the windows otherwise all that humid air would get into the house, and quite likely cause even more serious problems because of it. Anyway, more later. Got a bunch of stuff I need to address. Needles to say, this has not been a real fun experience.

Ya rich is alive!!

Originally Posted by Reptiles 101

Ya rich is alive!!

Heck, we are STILL trying to get things back in order after the hurricane. Spent all day yesterday with the chain saw cutting trees that had fallen across our path. More importantly, this is the "thoroughfare" that would need to be open if we would need to get the well pump repaired. Why this is important will become clearer later.

Anyway, I do have to admit that I am VERY glad that I didn't have any animals to worry about while the power was out. Not to mention that normally this time of year we would have been up to our eyeballs in baby snakes.

One thing I did learn during all this is that I'm pretty much convinced that misery loves company, and all mechanical and electrical devices jump into the fray at every opportunity. Plus the human brain when put under stress just goes south and all the things you did in the past that you thought were good ideas at the time accumulate into a mass cluster fark because it all reached critical mass just when you really needed everything to go right.

The rodents chewed up the wiring on my Onan generator a few years ago. I contacted a guy a year or two about repairing the wiring for me. He asked me for the model number and serial number, so I got that info and called him back with it. He said "fine, no problem, we'll get this taken care of". Never heard back from him. Called another generator repair shop and they said they had a backlog for about six weeks that they had to take care of first. So I just gave up, thinking that in the past, any power outages we have had lasted no more than 3 or 4 hours, at most. So no big deal now that I don't have the animals to worry about. If the power goes out, Connie and I just take a nap and wait it out. Who needs a generator?

Meanwhile, I had the garage built, and the breaker box was getting pretty filled up. So the electricians asked about a breaker that seemed unused, so I told them to go ahead and use that one for the garage. Well, that was the breaker that another electrician set up to connect an exterior 240 volt connector with my portable generator so it could run the breaker box from the actual breakers to provide power where I needed it the most. So I wound up having to rewire some things to get that portable generator to work. I will have to make a more permanent fix later on so that I can have the generator hookup outside and still be able to put power to the garage if I need to. Might come a time when the power would go out and I would need to get a vehicle off of my lift.

After a couple of days, Connie and I figured we would take showers with some heated water. So we turned on the little hot water heater in the building in preparation for the showers. When I went over to take my shower, I turned on the breaker for the lights in that bathroom, and the light in there looked like it was about a 5 watt bulb. WTH? But I took my shower anyway, and then Connie took hers. About that time I noticed that water pressure was REAL low. Turned that breaker off and on, but didn't hear the generator change tune to indicate it was picking up that load. Besides that, when I turned OFF that water pump breaker, the light in the bathroom went off. WTH? THAT shouldn't have happened. Walked down to the well and looked things over, but nothing seemed amiss on that end. Besides the water tank showing zero water pressure, that is. Then I recalled the electrician who had originally wired that building. The guy reversed the hot and neutral legs of the breaker box for the entire building. THAT made things exciting when I was trying to put up new lighting systems in the rooms. I thought another later electrician had fixed that problem for me, but who knows how the hot water heater, bathroom light area, and the water pump were wired? In any event, it appeared that the water pump had likely burned up.

One night I used a battery charger with an inverter to run a small fan in the bedroom to get some airflow there while we tried to sleep. Felt great until 5 hours later the battery pack went dead. So over the next couple of days I was trying to charge it back up while running the generator, but it just appeared to be not taking a charge. I don't know about you, but I have a REAL tough time sleeping if I am too warm and sticky feeling.

After spending all night fretting about the water pump issue, and having trouble sleeping anyway (did I mention that a couple of tree tops had snapped off and fallen across the path to the well, so even if I could find someone to come look at it, on a holiday weekend, no less, they couldn't GET to it with a truck), thinking about how much work we were in for trying to clear that tree out of the way, and then clear all the brush from around the well itself, I have to admit the following morning my brain just was just not functioning well at all. So it came time early in the morning to start up the generator to power the freezer to keep from having all that food go bad on us. And, yeah, to add even more insult to injury, the generator just would not start. I about wore myself out pulling the starter cord on it, and I'll be honest, I was just THIS close to totally losing it. It had rained pretty hard over night, so even though I had thrown a tarp over top of the generator, I just figured that maybe it got too damp anyway. So Connie and I dragged it in another building to help it dry out. Of course I had filled up the gas tank last night, so that 5 gallons of gasoline made the generator somewhat heavier than I would have liked.

I thought I had also likely flooded the generator engine too, trying to get it started, so I got some tools to pull the spark plug. Oh yeah, the day before the screw on cap on the spark plug had come off, so the ignition wire was barely touching the terminal for the spark plug. So I'm reaching for the ignition wire to pull it off of the spark plug and thought I should make sure the ignition switch was off....... IGNITION SWITCH??? Jeeebuss.. I had simply forgotten to turn it ON when trying to start the blasted generator. Luckily I didn't have a hammer in my hand, or I would have handily smacked myself in the head with it.

So after a bit I put the spark plug back in, hooked up the ignition wire, TURNED ON the ignition switch, and tried to crank it. Still nothing... Connie was standing around in case I burst into flames so she could grab the fire extinguisher (which probably wouldn't have worked anyway), and saw the instructions about starting the generator and read them out loud in case I had again over looked something. Said something about checking the oil before every use. Well, OK. Then I remember my friend asking if I had changed the oil recently on the generator. Well, no.... I have NEVER changed it. In YEARS. And on top of that a while back one of the oil filler caps had broken and was leaking oil. So, now seemed as good a time as any to change the oil. So I extracted the old oil, which seemed like pretty thick soup, and put in fresh. Tried to start the generator again, and after a few false starts, hallelujah, this time it fired up. I had had visions of losing everything in the freezer anyway, plus being without running water for at least several more days. Rumor I had heard through a friend was that Talquin Electric was saying that power might not be restored to everyone for as much as two weeks.

So we pulled the generator back into position and I cranked it up, then started flipping breakers to put power into the building. Just for the hell of it, I flipped the breaker to the water pump on, and my heart skipped a beat when I heard the generator lug a bit while it took on a new load. The water pump was working again. I thought!! I hoped!! I actually PRAYED!! I ran down to the well, and sure enough we had water pressure again. Kind of glad now that I hadn't smacked myself on the head, fatally, with that hammer like I had thought I might.

So things were looking up again.

While waiting for power to be restored by Talquin, I decided this might be a good time to try to get that downed tree off of the power line to the house. So I pulled out the 100 ft electrical extension so I could use my electric pole saw for that job. Plugged it into the generator, plugged the other end onto the saw, and..... nothing. Oh backing up a bit, I had to change out the chain saw blade before doing this, because a week or so ago, I was using the chain saw down low to cut a small tree at the base and hadn't noticed a block of asphault BEHIND the tree. So of course it dulled the chain to uselessness.

Anyway, after poking around and troubleshooting that new problem, I found that the male plug had a loose spade on it that decided TODAY to just fail.

So, I went and grabbed another extension cord, and was able to cut the tree so that it fell off of the power line without further incident. Well, there was ALMOST another incident. Later that day we waked by the carport where I had cut the tree off of the power line, and there was a pretty large branch that had apparently fallen out of another tree laying exactly where I had been standing most of the time while cutting. It had nothing at all to do with the tree I had cut, so apparently this was a wind damaged branch that finally let loose. Not sure how much noise it made when it started to come loose, but over the sound of the chain saw, I might never had known what the heck it was that had hit me.

I was REALLY thinking that Murphy's Law was going all out to do me in, and I started feeling really paranoid. So much so that I was extremely reluctant to even think about doing anything with any other tool, device, or whatever, fearing that by my touching it, it would stop working.

But the power did finally come back on, and after a few nights of sleeping with the air conditioning running, and able to take showers instead of soaking in the pool, it ALMOST seems kind of funny in a way. Honestly, if this had been a sitcom on TV, I probably WOULD have laughed about it.