10 – Sandy Comes to Visit

[Ed:  Tropical Storm Sandy hit New England after sunset, Monday, October 29, 2012.]

Hurricane Sandy is scheduled to come ashore early this evening.

The storm has me worried a little, but only a little.  My family lived through a fair number of hurricanes and tropical storms during our 18 years in Tampa.  You prepare, stay alert, and wait it out.  There’s really nothing else you can do, except evacuate.  If the power goes out, you open your fridge and freezer as little as possible, and eat the contents on a first-to-spoil priority.

A little pre-game activity, occurring down the block

We never had to evacuate our Tampa home, and I hope I will have the courage to make the correct decision when a hurricane's approach finally does force me to leave.

Yesterday, I grabbed emergency provisions: a 5-pound bag of potatoes and a couple of jugs of cranberry-pomegranate juice. Potatoes for sustenance and cranberry juice for ... flavor. Storms take hours to pass and there’s nothing much to do during that time, so I put on music, open a book, and sip on gin and juice – and this time, it's cranberry-pomegranate juice to honor my new cranberry-growing home state!

This apartment is 100% electric, so I found my backpacking stove, fuel, and some candles scented with  lovely "white linen."  Flashlights are always at hand in my household, since Pallas Athena requires a daily walk well after sunset.  Music is courtesy of my iPhone and its docking station, and will function even without NStar, our local electric utility.  The ice cube bin is full.

Let's go down the checklist: Food, candles, flashlights, music, ice, cranberry, and gin.  Yep, I’m prepared.

The backyard of my next-doot neighbor.  Sandy is still 6 hours away.

The water supply may or may not work if the electricity fails.  Depends on the building’s water tank: how big and how high it is.  Pumps won’t work without power, and pumps are the normal source of water pressure.  But if a building's water storage tank is large, filled, and very high, it will provide good pressure until it's drained.  Like most modern buildings, ours is on the roof, so we should have water for a few hours even without power.  City water towers perform a similar function for their neighborhoods.

Water would be nice for boiling my potatoes tonight, but it's not essential; I can fry them in butter – and butter will not spoil over a couple of days if my refrigerator becomes powerless.  Paprika, salt, pepper, and Tony Chachere's Cajun spice will keep away the blandness of plain potatoes.  By Tuesday dinner, however, those butter-fried potatoes might become "Funky Sandy Home Fries.”

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As it turned out, Sandy was no big deal.  There was a lot of racket on the roof (I’m on the highest floor) which made me consider what actions I should take if something attached to the roof blew off and ripped open my ceiling.  Gin and cranberry juice are both excellent sources of inspiration when planning ways to survive a natural disaster.

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Sandy did have an effect on my work, however.

We have a project to collect real-time travel information and display it on 22 signs spread along 75 miles of I-93 north and south of the city.  Through a geek-tastic web of 2 cellular telephone networks and the internet, traffic information is collected by sensors along the highway in Boston, processed in Phoenix, sent to Quebec, back to Boston, and displayed on construction-style portable signs -- the same signs that hold up the sensors that collected the data a few seconds earlier.

On Sunday, we lowered all of our signs, as requested by MassDOT.  It took eight hours, because there are so many of them and they're spread over a long way – the round-trip distance alone is 150 miles.   Superstorm Sandy blew in Monday evening, was rude and inconsiderate to everyone in her path, and quickly departed before sunrise Tuesday.  On Wednesday, my guys and I spent another full day on the side of the road, raising the signs and re-starting everything.

One of our signs – Zero-A; what an imaginative name! – is on top of the I-93 viaduct just north of the Zakim Bridge.  (It's located on a highway oddity: the left-hand exit lanes for an off-ramp that never got built.)   Since the viaduct is about 80 feet above the ground – seriously – this sign is subject to strong winds every day.  When Sandy came through, wind gusts increased to the point where the sign actually blew over: it weighs 1,500 pounds and sits on an integral trailer 8 feet wide.

Zero-A is down!

Ouch!

Immediate inspection showed no significant damage, other than four car batteries scattered across the tarmac (they're neatly lined up against the barrier wall in the above photo), and a significantly bent sign panel with broken hinges.  We'll have to turn it on and connect it to the cell networks to fully determine the extent of Sandy damage, though.

Took a few days to schedule a crane truck to come pick it up.  The five-minute effort to set it upright the following Saturday was a little dramatic with the 1,500-pound sign flipping up under only a semblance of control, and bouncing on its tires a few times before settling to rest..  A Suffolk County deputy sheriff with flashing blue lights, the crane truck with yellow flashers and an arrow board, and my black Outback with lots of very helpful window decals – a short parade that took hours to organize, 30 minutes to assemble, and lasted 5 minutes to complete the work.  

Glad to have the cop, though; one jellybrain decided he could still drive in the leftmost lane, despite the police cruiser there with his blue lights flashing.  Even though he was 50 feet away with lots of highway noise and strong winds, we could clearly hear the cop yelling at the jellybrain.

Up she comes!  Jeff in the background watches closely; Derek, at the right, operates the crane by remote control. 

Righting the sign was a great experience; enhanced by the bitterly cold morning, grey skies and a stiff wind, being six stories above the ground, and listening to guys who spoke English with a heavy Boston accent.

Afterwards, my guys and I did a bunch of careful poking around inside the sign panel, inside the battery compartments, and inside the enclosure for the electronic controller, applied a little off-the-cuff engineering, and – viola! – the sign is up and running again.