Home, After the Storm

As previously noted, I was in Denver for a long weekend with friends from college. I spent a fair bit of time checking the projected storm track and airport closings, but they kept saying Albany was going to stay open until late Saturday, when there wasn’t time to do anything about it. Yesterday morning, every flight listed on the Albany International Airport web site was canceled (except for a few Delta flights that showed as arriving early, which knowing Delta, I attribute to incompetent data entry), except mine and a few later Southwest flights. I fully expected to be spending last night with friends in the Chicago area.

Amazingly, though, when I got to Midway airport, they still showed my flight as leaving on schedule. And, in fact, when I ran to the gate (it was a tight connection), they were just about ready to board. I gather from overheard phone conversations after landing (I ignored the announcement to turn off my iPod, and was busy reading a book, so I didn’t hear anything from the flight crew) that we circled a couple of times before coming down; I didn’t notice anything unusual– a little rough air on the way down, but every plane in or out of Albuquerque I’ve ever been on has been significantly worse. We were apparently the first plane to land at Albany yesterday, only a few minutes late. Nice job, Southwest Airlines.

On the home front, SteelyKid was already spending the weekend with her grandparents. Our awesomely nice next-door neighbors helpd Kate storm-proof the back yard, and the backup generator we put in after the big ice storm a couple winters ago worked like a charm. Kate had to run some extension cords to plug the router into one of the backed-up circuits, but other than that, Chateau Steelypips weathered the storm with no problems.

All in all, our neighborhood came through pretty well. The neighbors a couple of houses up had the big oak tree in their yard (which they just spent months re-landscaping) come down (its trunk has been rotting for a while, and splintered spectacularly), but while it’s filling two yards with dead tree, it didn’t hit anything. The people at the next major intersection had a big maple come down across the road, but I talked to one of them while Emmy and I were out walking, and he’s actually fairly cheerful about it, having taken up woodworking as a retirement hobby– he’s going to be all set for raw material for a good while.

We’re fairly lucky, of course– our neighborhood is a mile or so from the river, and up on a good-sized hill. Others in the Capital Region are not so lucky– the Times Union has a slide show of local storm damage including multiple feet of water in the Stockade district of Schenectady. The bad thing about flooding is that it will be a good while before the rivers go back down, because all the water that fell across the whole region has to make its way down the hills. Things will get worse before they get better, but all in all, it could be a whole lot worse.

This is not, of course, something that happened by accident. The relatively low toll from a severe storm smacking into some of the most populous areas of the country was the result of the exceptionally hard work of thousands of people, from the emergency crews who were out in the storm keeping people safe– a neighbor said that the town road crew cleared the maple up the street out of the road within ten minutes of it falling– to the government officials and weather forecasters who made sure everybody had plenty of time to prepare, to the construction crews and building codes that build the East Coast’s infrastructure well enough to survive the sort of storm we’re not expected to get more than once every couple of decades. Everything worked out because everything works, and that’s a credit to a huge number of people over a long stretch of time. Long enough that we tend to take it for granted, even though we shouldn’t.

Anyway, I hope my East Coast readers all made it through OK, and for those in storm-affected regions (basically, anything low-lying in New England), life gets back to normal as soon as possible. Normal-ish blogging will resume tomorrow, once I get a bit more rest.