Care for some dramatic weather?

[Sharkey]

Big series of storms hit the coast (and the rest of the state) this week. The storm tonight is supposed to be the worst, and so far, that's proving to be correct, although some of the wind last night was pretty heavy too. Here's what I woke up to find this morning:



There's a couple of bits of good news, this truck was purchased as a "parts vehicle" for my 4x4, and, the tree mostly missed it, leaving only small dents in the cab roof and a good ding in the fender of the bed. No broken glass.

Now I have some firewood and yet another project.

Judging by the weather this evening, I may have more photos like this tomorrow. The wind is hitting 25-30 MPH sustained with gusts to 45. I made a trip to the transmitter site to put three of the FM translators on the generator due to power failure, and got off the mountain top just as the strongest part of the storm hit. Had to drive around trees on the road on the way home, and there's at least one fir tree down alongside the driveway. I heard at least one other go down to the west. Too dark to see anything now, but I know I lost some of the sheet metal off of the roof of one of the horse sheds.

I’m surprised I still have power at home. All of the batteries are charged, there’s a full tank of hot water, and I’m posting using the laptop in case the utility power dumps while I’m typing.

Guess I shouldn't complain, the weather service is calling for gusts of 105 MPH on the beaches and headlands, with hurricane force winds out to sea and 40 foot swells. Not a good time to be working on a fishing boat!

[Dj]

Holy mackerel, Sharkey, that's some weather, alright.

Glad to hear all is well so far. Best of luck riding out the storms.

[Sharkey]

Well the power lasted until about 7:45 PM, and failed right after I got out of the shower. Talk about timing, I decided to shower early just in case the power failed and there would be no juice to run the pump.

Power had been off most of the day south of the bridge over the river, and I heard someone at the radio station say that the crews would be working all night to try and keep up. The neighbors say that it's not unusual to have the power off for a day or two. The feeder up this valley supplies only about six households, so unless the failure is lower down the river so that it affects more customers, it may take a while for the crews to restore service.

I'm OK for the time being, I charged the house batteries on the Housetruck, so lights should be good for several days. The reefer can run on LPG, as does the cook stove. I have two fully charged batteries in the solar power system that can power the water pump through the 3,000 watt sine-wave inverter built into the system. Too bad all the solar panels are still in storage in the metal shed, not that there would be any significant sun to excite them. Of course, the wind generator is in storage also, not that I would want to have one up flying in wind like this, too much turbulance. My Air 403 wind plant sounds like a weed eater in high winds anyway. My nerves are frazzled enough hearing things blow around and bump against the roof without hearing that thing wailing and buzzing like a nest of hyper-hornets.

There are the two 8D batteries in the Crown, as well as six golf cart batteries in the garage. Then there's 18 more golf cart batteries in the electric Rabbit that I could hook up and drain if I needed more power. Then there's the 6 golf cart batteries in the Electrak. Hmm, I also have at least four gel cells in storage.... I don't think electric power is going to be a problem.

If it carries on past tomorrow, I'll have to see about setting up my LPG fueled instantaneous water heater for showering.

Right now my only concern is heat. I've found that using the wood stove in wind like this is a problem. After 32 years of living in this truck, whatever change in the aerodynamics of the air flow at this place, something makes the smoke pour out of the stove, even during only breezy times. It's not the chimney cap, I already tried installing one of those wind-vane rotating caps, it only helped a little. My best guess is that somehow, the air flow over some part of the truck is causing a low pressure in the interior which is sucking the smoke out of the joints in the pipe, the doors, and even between the castings that make up the various parts of the stove. It gets so bad I have to open windows to let the haze out. No thanks, I'll take my chances with no heat until the wind lets up.

Once the power is back, I'll run some other tree falling photos from years past through the scanner.

[Mark R. Obtinario]

We here in Castle Rock experienced the edges of what hit Mr. Sharkey. And while the sustained winds and gusts were no where close to what was experienced down on the coast, we had our share.

Our power went out just after we went to sleep last night. For most people it is just a matter of pulling up the covers and sleeping through the night. For my wife and myself it is a horse of different color.

Both my wife and I have sleep apnea and use CPAP machines to help us sleep well.

When the power goes off with a CPAP mask over your face it feels as if someone has put a pillow over your face. You don't stay asleep very long at all.

Fortunately I had charged up the deep cycle battery I used last year when I was down in LA after Katrina and Rita. The only problem last night was the only invertor that was easy to get to was the small one that can handle only one CPAP at a time.

Being the nice guy that I am I set my wife up and let her sleep peacefully the night through. I slept (more like tossed and turned) all night on the sofa so as not to keep her awake. This morning I woke up with my throat feeling like someone had taken a rat tail rasp to my throat.

Tonight, if we have a repeat performance I have the big invertors out of the storage unit ready to go.

Thankfully the PUD had the power on after only 10 hours. That was long enough to make the house downright chilly.

If the power had stayed off another hour I would have had the gen set up and running to power up some electric space heaters, the deep freeze, and the well as needed. I don't like the cold and what it is that happens to a person that as soon as you can't turn on the water you have an unquentiable thirst and an irresistable need to use the toilet?

Now if I just had the Crown fixed up like I would like we could have just moved out there and spent the night and not had to worry about anything.

Maybe next year.

Mark O.
Castle Rock, WA

[Sharkey]

Now that's looking on the bright side, there's always the possibility of another storm to knock out your support systems.

The power is still out here, almost 24 hours. No problem, lots of batteries and inverters to go around. I did notice that the spring water had failed again overnight and so I made a trip up the hill to the spring head to find out why. Just like last time, a fist-sized rock had lodged itself in the discharge pipe of the catchment basin and stoppered up the flow.

Now that the water problem is solved, I don't need the electric pump to pressurize water out of rain barrel, and there's enough hot water in the tank for a shower tonight. Tomorrow may be another issue, though.

I'm running the fridge on LPG, and the lights in the Housetruck on the T-105 batteries. The big sine wave inverter in the solar power system is backfeeding the utility load center in the house so that I have lights and such, and I've run that power to the Housetruck to power the laptop, as I had pretty much used up it's battery by this afternoon. I thought that it would be better to use sine wave power to run the laptop instead of the mod sine that the inverter on the Housetruck puts out. it also spreads the load between two sets of batteries.

I also climbed up on the garage roof and connected my old "Quadlam" solar panels to recharge the Housetruck batteries. I have no idea how long this outage will last, so as long as we aren't having damaging winds, I'll keep trotting out PV's and connecting them as long as I can catch even a few ampere-hours of sunlight to fill the batteries.

Of course, my neighbors are running gasoline generators to keep the lights on, and I get to suffer the noise...

[Larry]

Now I am feeling really bad about the sunny 60 degree weather were having! Errr - not really !!! Think I'll take the boat out this weekend and do some fishing! Woohooo.

Larry

[Tim Clevenger]

Yeah, it's finally beginning to look like winter here in SoCal. Forecast for my area calls for 21 degrees, winds gusting to 50 mph, and 6-10 inches of snow through Monday. Time to put the snow shovel where I can find it and the chains in the trunk.

[Dj]

Sounds like you left coasters are starting to get the sort of weather we central folk had a few weeks ago...

I'll be thinking of y'all while I ride my motorcycle today. I didn't fire up the car once all last week either. Supposed to rain all next week, so I'll probably be back to driving the car... might as well make the best use of this perfect weather today.... 77 degrees, 13 mile visibility partly cloudy... heck, if I had a plane, I'd be riding the bike out to fly the plane.