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On Saturday, while I was at home with my family on Long Island, waiting for Irene, I read a lot of threads in GD about the hurricane and a lot of threads about how there were too many threads about the hurricane, and too much news about the hurricane in general.
On one hand, it's clear that MSM loves drama, and it's really hard to tell how serious something is in when it has its own theme music and special graphics and gets the whole infotainment treatment. Our media literacy tells us to beware the hype.
On a discussion board like this - it's a real-time venue for thousands of people to process a constant bombardment of information, and there are often several threads about the same thing. Sometimes they kind of annoy me and I wish people would consolidate their discussions, but I just ignore them. And sometimes, I get very caught up in the topic and search for every new discussion, even if a new thread doesn’t really have that much new to offer. For me, Hurricane Irene was like this. I grew up in the Midwest. This was my first hurricane. We have giant trees all around my house. My house is very old. And I have a 6-year-old son. I was obsessed with every new discussion. It didn’t work me up, it actually calmed me down. It made me feel like I was doing something when there really wasn’t much more to be done but wait.
There were some things we did to prepare that I didn’t need DU for. I didn’t learn in GD that I should have candles, batteries and canned goods, obviously. But it was helpful and comforting to me to feel connected to this community while we were waiting for the storm.
However, there is one thing I did learn from a DUer that I hadn’t heard anywhere else. We had a whole freezer full of meat and I was worried about losing all that meat were we to have an extended power outage, which we did. I had been making ice all day on Saturday and had tons of ice in the freezer. Someone suggested filling zip-lock baggies with water and packing them around everything. I did that and it worked.
Yesterday, when we still didn’t have power, we decided to go ahead and take everything out and grill it. We had some family visiting just for the day, so we figured it was a good opportunity. All the meat was still pretty much frozen when we took it out. We grilled everything and didn’t have to throw anything out. We fed family, friends and neighbors and sent people home with leftovers. Nothing was wasted.
So, no our house didn’t blow away, and no I didn’t learn anything here about hurricane preparedness that saved our lives. But DU did save my meat!
:evilgrin:
Anyway, the power came back on at 2am. Over 150,000 homes and businesses lost power on Long Island. There are still a few thousand waiting to be restored. I know some folks whose cars were totally submerged, or had trees fall on them. We lost the family boat. Some houses in my neighborhood had trees fall on them. I’m glad I don’t have any stories to tell that are worse than that. I know other people do.
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