My First Hurricane

I've never before lived in an area that was susceptible to natural disasters. I've never experienced a hurricane, flood, earthquake, or tornado. In that way, I guess I was lucky growing up in Pennsylavania. That changed when I moved to Lincoln Park NJ two years ago. I've been through two floods so far and I thought they were bad. We had a couple of feet of water in the garages and almost every road in and out of town closed. Then Hurricane Irene hit.

The hurricane itself wasn't the bad. It was a tropical storm by the time it got here so there was a lot of wind and rain, but 12 hours later it was over with minimal damage. And then the rivers started rising.  I'm fortunate enough to live in a town surrounded by three rivers: the Pompton River, the Passiac River, and the Rockaway River. I've never seen the rivers here rise so fast. I had gotten bottled water, cans of soup, flashlights, and candles so I was all set to wait it out. At 10pm on Sunday night Duke and I went out for his walk... except that the sidewalks were covered. That meant that all the roads within my complex were completely underwater and my garage had 5-6 feet of water in it. At that point there was no way to leave except maybe to swim, so I went to bed. I was woken up by a fireman knocking on my door at 3am. The water had risen another 1-2 feet; we were being evacuated. Two hours later, with the help of the fire department and army, a boat and a very large truck, I was out. After a three day hotel stay, I was allowed to return. Thankfully the apartments are raised up half a floor, so the water never got inside (and I'm on the second floor anyways). However, almost everything in my garage was saturated with flood water. We also didn't have electricity. The transformers for almost all the buildings had flooded as well and were ruined.  The power company, apartment management, and town officials responded quickly; however the fastest solution was to replace everything. They put in new power lines and moved our transformers up telephone poles. Ten days after we lost power, we got it back. Now two weeks later, two of the rivers are still above flood stage, I still have no hot water, and I've registered for FEMA assistance.