disaster area

for a while i thought it best to go silent; there was a thing about some low-grade stalking and the biggest hatwipe in the world who is, still apparently, the biggest hatwipe in the world.

and i was playing glitch. i play it a lot these days when it's open, and when it's closed i flail about waiting for it to open. it's still in beta, and i'm playing it real hard because i'm thinking about laying out the cash to be a subscriber which i would want to do if it was going to hold my interest for a whole year, so i'm playing it AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE to see if it will keep me interested.

since i am currently dreaming about it, it appears to be keeping me interested.

and of course i'm also in my kitchen making delightful things to eat. this week i made more roasted tomato soup and some really swell white bean and eggplant soup, and there's a really, really long list that i won't trouble you with because what i really want to talk about is the storm.

did you notice the storm?

i did.

from where i was sitting it appeared to be simply very dramatic weather, but i'm listening to the news today and national news is using phrases like "the little state of vermont was hardest hit".

at my house, i just battened down the hatches and monitored the power outages across the state. there were a LOT of them. and an "outage" simply refers to a point at which the lines have gone down, so that might be one household, or like yesterday afternoon in the islands, 1700 households. at one point there were over 13,000 outages in windham county alone.

my power flickered off for a few minutes at about a quarter to one, and when it came back on i could see according to the outage reports that 43 households in my town had gone out.

as of this writing there are still no plans to restore power to those households. and interesting thing to note is that some power was restored a couple of miles away a little after that, and i kind of expected there to be some work on it then, but today since it's all sunny and bright i thought i should go out and get some exercise and assumed that the trails would be too wet for mountain biking, so i decided to go play disc golf.

it may seem like a non-sequitur, but that's how i discovered exactly where the power lines went down and why they're not getting repaired any time soon.

first of all, i don't carry flood insurance because i live way the heck up here on a mountain a mile from a good stream that drains to a very large wetland that is itself way up above the river and drains down quite a bit.

in short, if i am flooded out, i have much bigger problems than high water.

but my town is funny-shaped: it is rectangular, but the corner i live in is waaaaay up over the spine of the green mountains and as recently as 15 years ago we had to tuition our kids out to other towns to go to school because it was not possible to get from here into the main part of town in the winter.

it's the power line that comes up here from town that went down. i live close enough to the other side that i can be supplied from any one of three directions and judging from the outages, only one of my routes was (is) still up.

but up in the notch, there's only the one transmission line.

and after i saw where the line went down, i got down to route two and got to see that it would not have been possible for crews to come up my road; the bottom of it was under say, five feet of water. and so was that low-lying neighborhood near the river.

now bear in mind that as i'm seeing this, i still think i'm going to go play golf in waterbury center, which means going through downtown bolton.

uh, not happening. the water may have receded five or six feet, but downtown bolton is still pretty much underwater. the guy from the utility company said you can get through on the road IF you have high clearance AND you don't mind your vehicle smelling like raw sewage after that.

because flooding means sewage.

i did not try to go any further than that. i did not need to see the damage all along route 2.

it turns out that a record number of roads in this state simply aren't there anymore. that's impressive, because this summer we had record floods and a record amount of roads disappeared.



if you'd like to see a LOT more flood damage, try this search.

and i was listening to the news this afternoon and learned that the state was considering FLOODING THE STREETS OF THE STATE CAPITAL yesterday.

why? because of the very real danger of the breaching of dams upstream in residential areas.

our state capital is a big bowl with the river going through it. most of the homes are on high ground. it would have been devastating to the businesses, but if the marshfield and wrightsville dams had breached, it would have been a stunning disaster.

anyway, it's considered to be WORSE flooding than the flood of '27, when dams DID breach, with great loss of life.

we think we "only" lost one man to the flood yesterday; a city employee checking on flood conditions and was washed away.

it's going to be a long time before we can get from here to there easily again.