Ugh. Strong storms last night. The power went out at around 11:45 PM. We didn’t get to sleep until sometimes after 12:30 AM.
At 2:20 AM, the weather radio shrieked an alarm, scaring the bejesus out of takaza and me. I was halfway to getting dressed to head to the basement before they announced that it was a flash flood warning, not much concern for us as we’re on a hill. It took me a good half-hour to get back to sleep.
Even with the power off, our clock radio does its darndest to have the alarm go off. Unfortunately, the backup battery doesn’t do so well at keeping time, so the 6 AM alarm went off at 5:07 AM. I never got back to sleep after that.
When I left the house at 6:50 AM, the power was still off. At this point I have to assume that everything in the fridge is pretty much a loss. Hmm, checking the ComEd automated system, the estimated time of repair is 6 PM tonight. Well, so much for everything in the freezer. Bah.
As we left the house, I noticed a couple of news helicopters just a ways off to the west. Poking around the news websites a bit, it looks like they were looking at the lumber store in downtown Round Lake (Cedar Lake Rd. & Route 134) whose roof was peeled off and tossed across the Metra tracks. Thank heavens it was nothing worse than that.
So now we get to play “How Can Duncan Make It Through The Day On Four Hours Of Sleep?” My preliminary answer is “not well”, but we’ll see how things go.
I’m up in Oak Creek and we just regained power about 6:30 AM after losing it about 11:15 last night.
Meijers in McHenry sells dry ice … could you get some and save the freezer?
I’ve got a 400w inverter in my car … if you’re interested we could try to give the freezer a little boost.
Well, fortunately the only thing we had in the freezer is a couple of containers of ice cream and some frozen chicken breasts. Not too great of a loss. And even the fridge, we’re mainly looking at losing just condiments, dairy products, and eggs. Fortunately, we didn’t have any meat or anything really expensive in there. It’s more of an annoyance than anything. Thanks for the offer though!
Heh. I note that ComEd will only reimburse for the loss of spoiled food if the outage affects more than 30,000 people. We’re out of luck there.
That sucks, dude. I heard hardly nothing last night where I am. You guys must have been hit pretty hard then. All the best at surviving through the day. Good thing the weekend is approaching, eh?
Wow… I was about to post something about “last night’s storms (happily) fizzling out to nothing…” I don’t think we got a drop of rain or more than 35mph gusts last night in the west suburbs. I saw some distant lightning around 11, but they dropped all the watch boxes by midnight, and I had no idea anything else brewed up later on.
The radio screamed at me around 10, but it screams at both watches and warnings. (Thinking about buying one of the $30 ones at Fry’s, to see if I can tell them to only scream at warnings…) That was for a tornado watch, though, so I guess I can’t really complain. Must have had some locally heavy rains (which is no surprise with that sort of system).
It seems we have one night a year I fail to sleep because of storms… Part of that is that I am enough of a weathergeek, though, that I want to watch storms. 🙂
I don’t think any of them let you muffle the watches and only alarm on the warnings. That’s compounded by the fact that the people running the system seem to have lost about 60% of their competency over the last year. Sometimes the warning goes off and never stops until you manually disable it. Sometimes it just doesn’t go off, even though there actually is a relevant warning.
In the current instance, someone has misinterpreted the rule about “curtailing our regular broadcasts.” That doesn’t mean you drop everything except the flood warning for Lake County. It means you cut back the long term and marine forecasts to just the next 24 hours. But no, they dropped everything this morning and just repeated the flash flood warning again and again and again…
The newer ones will let you block everything but hurricane and tornado warnings. And since even a regular t-storm wakes me up…
Wow. All we got was a 100% chance of killer cicadas.
Haha! Killer cicadas.
Your freezer contents should be good for 24 hours without power but don’t open the door if you can avoid it. Keep the cold in. Modern refrigerators are well insulated for this, and the weather isn’t all that bad right now.
The refrigerator is probably going to have some losses, but again, if you keep it closed a lot of stuff will be fine. Just try to use it up fast once the power comes back on.
No power outage here, which is unusual. We often go down when there’s just a little breeze and no storm. No flooding either, though there was a lot of wind, rain, and lightning. The weather radio is stuck repeating the flood warning for your area over and over, and won’t even give the short term forecast. I would think it still matters whether we are likely to get more storms today or tonight, but apparently the entire region no longer exists except for the flooding along highway 173.