Electric And Gas Restored Thursday Night

Good evening everyone.  I’m happy to report that things continue to normal at home.  There is still a lot of cleaning up to do, and things to replace.  The water heater and furnace were damaged as well as the dryer and washing machine.  Just had the water heater replaced this evening.

The electricity and gas were restored on Thursday night.  Technicians from PSE&G were scheduled to come out Thursday afternoon between 12:00 and 4:00 PM.  However, they failed to show up.  My mother called PSE&G in the late afternoon, and was told by customer service that nobody would be out until Saturday.

A little while later though, a PSE&G van showed up.  They were checking things out in the neighborhood, and promised to be back out later.  The Rutgers football team was playing in their home opener against North Carolina Central, and I have season tickets so I went to the game.  It was a much needed break.  While I was out, PSE&G came back, and restored the electric and gas.

For much of the day on Thursday, I was putting everything back, and plugging in all of my computer equipment.  My weather station and webcam were back online as of early Thursday afternoon.  However, by Thursday evening, the webcam was offline again.  Looks like the network cable somehow got loose.  Once I got all the computer stuff going again, I downloaded all of the images that the webcam posted online on Saturday when the storm approached.

After doing that, I posted the three videos that I created online at YouTube.  You can now view them in the blog.  In addition, I began putting together a time lapse video of the images from Saturday.  I will be posting the video to the blog soon.  All of the historical data from the storm have been posted online at Weather Underground.  You can view it by clicking on the Weather Underground links on the Greg’s Weather Center home page.

I have to admit that things worked out pretty well.  Things were kind of done by the seat of my pants, but I was able to collect all of the data from the storm.  There are some things that I want to do differently for the next storm.  I will need to start putting together some procedures to make sure that the equipment and data aren’t put in a tough position the next time such a storm comes to town.

Hurricane Irene was a memorable experience for me.  It was the first storm that really put fear in me.  While the storm could have been much worse, it still taught me some lessons.