Outages

NOLA Power Outages Thursday morning

Well, we survived Hurricane Isaac without much damage, which is more than I can say for most of the trees around here.  It's Thursday morning and the power has been out since around 2 am yesterday.  At the height of the storm I could feel the house moving in the stronger wind gusts, which is rather disconcerting to day the least.  The map shows the current power situation around 30 hours later (the red lines are the ones without power).  There's no telling how long it will be before we're back on the grid, but I think most of the damage was due to trees taking down power lines, so I guess it could be anywhere from twelve hours to a few days. There are two trees down within sight of my house, one of which took down the power lines, and the other looks like it just took the telephone/cable lines.  Although we had an overnight curfew (it was quite peaceful), traffic is picking up on S. Claiborne now despite the lack of traffic signals.  We have had a few breaks from the rain, but for the most part it has been raining for two days now.  There's some standing water in the low spots of the basement -- seepage from the completely saturated ground outside, and without ventilation it's getting kind of musty down there. At least the cloud cover has kept the temperatures down and it's been rather pleasant sitting out on the front porch enjoying the breeze. The police department has been patrolling regularly and a few looting arrests have been made, so things are much better in that regard than they were seven years ago, and the new floodgates and pumping stations worked without a hitch, so despite a huge amount of rainfall, things were generally under control and there was never any hint of street flooding near my house.

This house, built in the 1920's was designed for New Orleans in the pre-air-conditioning era, and fortunately most of those features have been preserved.  The porch, window screens, casement windows, etc. have really made things tolerable. The neighbors came over for dinner by candlelight last night and even though there was no a/c, the breeze coming through the open windows made it quite pleasant.

I'm guessing I won't be getting out on the bike again today unless it really clears up.  Even if it does, there's a ton of clean-up that needs to be done, and unfortunately I have a brother in law who has been in intensive care in Baton Rouge since yesterday, so we may be driving up there some time soon.  Since I-10 is closed around LaPlace and the Causeway is still closed, it could be a long trip.  We may be able to wait until things are open again, however.  We're supposed to be back at work tomorrow and classes at Tulane are set to resume on Tuesday.  It's about time to give the generator a little break since I'm still not sure where I will be able to find gas......