I wasn’t supposed to be here today. I had a “mandatory company meeting” in Stamford, Connecticut. But over the weekend, I began to pay attention to Isabel, that bright orange spiral then well out over the Atlantic. By Monday, it seemed evident that Isabel was on a path to come ashore & then head up inland just to the west of Harrisburg, 90 miles west of Paoli. Given how many miles wide this storm is, we’re certain to get hit with something. What nobody seems to know is just what.

 

Normally, when hurricanes hit the east coast, they “bounce” off the coast & head upward, becoming Nor’easters. If they’re still hugging the coast when they go up the Jersey shore, we get a serious rain dump. We live fairly high up in a section of Paoli called Valley Hills. We get a lot of water cascading down the hill, taking off top soil &, if the gutters are clogged or the storm’s bad enough, some water in the furnace room.

 

When Hurricane Floyd came through in 1999, there was serious flooding in the Philadelphia region. I worked in the IBM offices in West Goshen then & I remember that at noon, we were all told to head home before the rain got too hard. Because I live just five miles from that office, I stopped to run an errand & while at the store heard that Paoli Pike, my direct route home, had flooded in Malvern. So I headed up 202, a longer route but generally on higher ground. It was one of the scariest experiences I’ve ever had – the rain was so heavy as to make visibility near zero and there were spots on the freeway itself that were rapidly turning into ponds. I felt like I just barely made it home.

 

We never lost power, so were able to keep in touch with the outside world, and only had a few buckets of water to deal with in the furnace room. But there were several deaths, almost all due to flooding, in Chester County and in the larger Philadelphia region. Manayunk, the Philadelphia neighborhood that sits on the banks of the Schuylkill River, was inundated. They had to evacuate people in boats.

 

So Monday, I took some precautions & made sure that my boss – who lives in Orinda, California – and the team putting on the meeting in Stamford both know that I might not show up. It looked pretty clear that I could get to the meeting. But it also looked pretty clear that I might not be able to get back home again. Especially if I took Amtrak.

 

Yesterday, the meeting itself was cancelled, suggesting that either enough other people were in the same boat – literally – as me, or that there was some concern that Isabel might turn into a Nor’easter. The office in Stamford is just one block from the water.

 

So I’m home today, planning to put up a Plexiglas window bubble that should limit the water-to-the-furnace-room problem & read the instructions on my brand new “wet-dry vac.” We’re officially in an “Inland Tropical Storm Wind warning” & a flood watch until some time tomorrow. (A watch being one step below a “warning” as these things go.) It’s supposed to start raining around 3:00 today, though the eye won’t reach up here until midnight or later. Isabel herself appears headed straight for Buffalo, a town I don’t associate with hurricanes. By then it should just be a big ole rain storm.