Hurricane Isabel September 2003
| Isabel's outer arms of clouds started to darken out skies Wednesday night (9/17) while she was still well off shore. The national hurricane center maintains an archive of alerts, discussions, forecasts and charts about Isabel. We also watched our local micro-weather station, Maury School, reporting wind speeds. We started by battening down our hatches, bringing in all the porch furniture we could and tying down the rest of it. |
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And Sarah took a stroll down to the waterfront to see how folks closer to the water were preparing. The line for sand bags was steady but well behaved. |
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About 4:30 the magnolia next door went down (That was about the time of the 37.5MPH gust recorded at the school). We haven't tried to move the car yet, but we don't think the tree is actually on our car -- our neighbor who parked in the driveway is less lucky, but the fall was slowed by the phone line so we don't think that car is damaged either, but it will take some work to get it out. |
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| About 1:30am 9/19 it seemed like the worst had come and gone: the winds were down a bit, the rain had mostly stopped and the power had flickered several times but only gone out for about 30 seconds. We took a stroll down to the waterfront about 9 and Sarah took these photos. The first things we noticed were that our neighbor's fence was down, and on the corner, a good sized chunk of a tree had come down, grazing the apartment building next to it. Down by the waterfront, the streets were still flooded but the cleanup had begun. However, the weather forecasters are warning about more flooding as the rains in Western Virginia, Maryland and West Virginia flow down the Potomac to meet the still swollen Chesapeake. |
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By the time we headed back toward our house, the skies were blue and it was looking like a lovely day for picking up the hurricane debris. |
