I’ve always considered the Northeast and the Pocono Mountains a pretty safe place to live weather wise – the past few years though the occasional tornado, earthquake, hurricane and other uncommon weather events are becoming more…common. Call it global warming, the stars aligning or just the way the world changes but major events are still minimal, so for now at least, it’s still a better place to live then most.
Hurricane Sandy, better now known as Superstorm Sandy, wasn’t without warning – unlike unpredictable tornados and earthquakes that just ‘pop up’ – we had plenty of time to prepare for her arrival. As everyone who was effected by this storm knows, you can only prepare so much. Schools were closed on Monday in preparation for the storm that was to hit our area Monday night, and the storm arrived as powerful and destructive as promised. We were spared the massive amounts of rain as the storm seemed to circle in a pattern around our town with rain in areas all around us, but it was almost as if it was just a regular rain storm. The winds on the other hand didn’t disappoint and whipped through the trees bending them to their limits. Areas of Stroudsburg had lost power around dinner time and ours held out until 10pm, giving us the hope that maybe we’d get it back quickly as we’re usually one of the first ones to lose power. The brunt of the storm hit when it was dark making it nearly impossible to see what was going on, or the extent of the damage.
Tuesday morning after the storm hit and it was dwindling down all looked relatively calm outside and there wasn’t any visible damage minus a small tree or two that had broken in half. We decided we’d head out to survey the area to see if we’d be staying or heading out to my parents that had power out in central PA. The pictures below are what we saw on our trip out, we definitely got lucky in the fact that we only lost power – even a block over we saw numerous downed trees and as we ventured further out both ways on Route 191 there were trees leaning across the road. The tree in the picture below was the smaller of the two – it was either head North into Mount Pocono under a much larger tree and where the storm damage was probably more extensive or head down towards Stroudsburg which is the route we took. There were numerous road closures due to downed trees and power lines so our only safe way to get out onto I-80 was to head down into town then back up Route 80. Along our way we encountered plenty of downed trees and power lines, and almost everywhere was without power including Main Street Stroudsburg – some of the images below are of intersections without power and Main Street.
All in All it was pretty uneventful – we were extremely lucky – over the past week we’ve heard from friends and family many of who are still without power, as we speak our neighbor texted to let us know that the power came back on, only to turn off again shortly afterwards. There was no initial ETA on the power coming back on, our son goes to school in the Pocono Mountain School District which ended up playing it by ear each day but his school has been closed since Monday and still is today(Friday). Wednesday we got an update that our power should be back on by Sunday Nov 4th, then it was bumped earlier to last night at 11pm, but we got a call at 10pm that bumped it up until tomorrow at 11pm. I figure we’ll give it a good couple hours of being on to make any solid plans to head home – luckily its the weekend but unfortunately we had to close our office and work off limited resources for the week. Even with the power on our telephone and cable lines are still not working and will probably take some time to come back online.
We have been getting updates now that we need to be sure to fill up on gas before we head back because the lines at the gas stations are so long. With the Poconos being so close to New Jersey and there are so little stations with gas available and/or power, everyone is heading out to PA to fill up. The Exxon gas station near Pocono Medical Center right off I-80 now has the National Guard stationed there to keep everything in order as people are starting to lose their cool waiting in line (we’ve heard up to 6 hours I’m not sure if that’s really true or not though).
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