I Survived
Posted in The Life of the Historian on 08/29/2011 11:23 am by RonnicaWell, Irene turned out to be fairly easy on us here in Raleigh. We only go her outer edge. In fact, if I had been just 10 or 20 miles further west, I would have seen significantly less, if anything at all.
Power stayed on at my apartment, so I didn’t get to take advantage of my emergency supplies:
But I still got a good bit of reading done, while watching the hurricane coverage.
I actually enjoyed the weather Irene brought. All day Saturday as she was pounding us, it was in the 70s. I opened my windows wide–until the wind shifted and started blowing the rain in. Still, I was able to keep one or two windows open all day.
Though I avoided power loss at home, the church is another story. I volunteer at our church’s food pantry on Saturday mornings, and when I went in to do my shift, found that the church wasn’t at full power. I don’t quite understand how it works, but somehow our church was at 1/3 power. What that means: no A/C. Made for a lot of improvising on Sunday, but everything worked out.
While the winds here were fairly mild as far as hurricanes go, we did get occasional gusts up into the 40 mph range. At one point, these winds were whipping around the corner of my apartment building and knocked over one of my tomato plants:
Not bad at all. I don’t think it’s an accident when a storm like Irene weakens just before it makes land (remember Katrina did the same thing). I think that we can only attribute that to the mercy of God.












