Winter Hurricane '06

This is a wind map from the "Winter Hurricane" that hit Seattle. The reds are sustained 50mph+ winds. The highest recorded gust that I have heard of in the Greater Seattle area was 117mph. The Weather Channel described it as essentially a Cat 2 hurricane.

I began to feel the effects of the storm Thursday morning at work, where we lost power twice in 10 minutes despite the fact that we were running on the generator already. Apparently backlash from the power grid that we were still connected to was screwing us up, so from that point on the generator was unhooked from the main grid. Unfortunatly, someone forgot to do the same for the datacenter that hosts the Google search engine used by all Boeing sites, including our tech database. It went down at about noon, and never came back up.

When it came time for me to drive home, I spent 30 minutes sitting on the on-ramp trying to get onto I-90 West for the 1/2 mile trip to I-405 north. I got fed up, hopped off the ramp and headed for a gas station to top off and grab a snack. The rain was coming down pretty hard, and I began to see lightning fairly frequently. I then heard on the radio that I-5, the only major highway through the city of Seattle, was closed due to standing water, and that many other streets and roads were closed due to storm damage or mudslides. Luckily, I'd found one place up here that sells Rand McNally (sp?) maps back when I was circumnavigating Mt. Rainier, so I pulled those out and plotted a surface street trip home. The drive ended up taking over 2.5 hours to go about 17 miles. At the 2hr mark I stopped at Thenos Dairy to grab some ice cream and sit on the hill watching the storm and the traffic. A couple of other people had a similar idea, none had been in their cars less than 2 hours. The last thing I did before heading home was stop and grab some groceries, I had been out of almost everything except leftover pizza.

Once home, I settled in front of my computer to watch some TV and destress from the drive. I should have cooked something first, but had no energy. About halfway through the show I was watching, at about 10pm, the power went out. I shrugged and went to bed to conserve what heat I had.

I woke up at about 2am to the sound of screaming. The wind was whistling through the front door at a pretty rapid clip. It was pretty cold. Trees were banging the building, and I could hear "pops" coming from the roof, like nails being pulled. Stormy was huddled on top of me sharing warmth. I went back to sleep. Woke up to Stormy working her claws in me at 8am, it was bitter cold, and she was freezing. Got her warmed back up, threw on a couple extra layers of clothes, and set out in search of a place to buy firelogs. The Home Depot right next to the complex was running a couple of registers off of their last generator, bought a 45lb case of firelogs and headed home.
A crackling fire has never felt so good. Nor has 3 day old cold pizza ever looked so unappatizing, but it was all I had for the timebeing. I set up this jury-rigged pizza warming device, it never was able to melt the cheese, but it did heat the pizza all the way through, and it actually tasted very good.

My routine for the day was as follows:
light fire log, fall asleep
wake up when flames die out, close flue, fall asleep
wake up when it's too cold to stay asleep, light another log, repeat

Most of the day, the cell network refused to take any of my outgoing calls. Sometimes I would get the "network busy" error, but most of the time there was no reason. I'm guessing they were reserving what bandwidth they had for emergencies.
Stormy had a hard time coping with the cold, she's definitly a warm-weather cat. During the day, she became agitated and started running around, then she battled her way to the top of the Christmas tree and attacked it. Eventually, she learned that if she slept under the covers with me, instead of huddling on top, she could keep much warmer, and this helped a lot.
You can see some of the shingle damage done by the storm, I haven't seen anything more major than a downed 15ft pine tree, but the news has lots of pictures of very hurricane looking devastation.

I finally got power back on just after midnight Saturday morning. Once I was sure it was on for good, I got the apartment ready for it and went back to sleep. I woke up at 6am to a warm apartment and a cold fridge, and best of all when I fired up the computer I had internet too! That makes me one of the luckiest people in greater seattle, as most are without either one or the other or both.