Good Night (Hurricane) Irene!

We’ve been affected by hurricanes twice – by Irene in the late summer of 2011 and by Sandy in the autumn of 2012.

Hurricane Sandy caused the most destruction – our Manhattan apartment building is near the East River and the storm caused it to overrun the adjacent FDR Drive and our street, East End Avenue, and to flood our building’s basement.

Then the force of the surge pulled an oil tank from the basement wall that crashed on the concrete floor. The toxic mix of raw sewage and oil made the building unsafe, and in addition we lost power, phone and elevator service, as well as cooking gas, and we were all evacuated for several weeks.            (See Cooking with Gas) 

Sandy wreaked havoc where she made landfall, and every night we got a meteorological education on the news. Hurricanes, we learned, are usually unaccompanied by lightning.

But Hurricane Irene was an exception that proved the rule. In the early morning of August 28, 2011 we were asleep in our Connecticut country house when a terrifyingly loud crash woke us and sent the cat scurrying under the bed.

From our bedroom window we looked down at the deck and saw that lightning had split the trunk of a large tree a few feet from the house. It fell across the deck hitting the railing and bringing it down.

It happened our house had the dubious distinction of being the only one in our condo community to have suffered Irene’s wrath, but we thanked our lucky stars the damage hadn’t been more than a broken deck railing.

By the way, our old scaredy cat stayed under the bed until suppertime.

– Dana Susan Lehrman