Blow Me 2006

[solarbird]

The Moors of Kenmore

I took some pictures of the aftermath of the big windstorm, which is so far being called Blow Me 2006, as it's not at the same time as anything else in particular. Darn!


Good Morning (Friday)

Five blocks away, a neighbour house got kind of mooshed. They're right in the wind corridor coming up from the lake, not that there was much of anything they could have done about that without a time machine:


Tree Crushes House

I took that shot on the way in to take my chemistry final, belatedly from last summer, which means that I finished Fall 2006 quarter before finishing Summer 2006 quarter (Friday) which is kind of funny. Anyway, afterwards, I took this shot by Burke-Gilman at UW. The busses had to be re-routed off campus as too many of the roads were partially or completely blocked. UW wasn't as bad as a lot of other areas, but it was still a bit of a mess with a lot of campus looking more or less like this:


Tree Down

Heading back home in the dark, I got off at the Lake Forest Park shops, off B-G, near Goat Trail Road:


Branches Like Lighting

I kept heading northeast towards home, but eventually had to turn back. Aside from the pitch darkness, which I could actually handle, I just hit an obstacle I couldn't get around safely. It's hard to tell, but the police tape in this photo was about at the height of my head, and the tree went tens of feet off either side of the road. Bonus points: possibly-live wires off to the right. You can't see those here:


Night Tree Down

I walked back down towards Burke-Gilman to take the long way home, but a 331 bus came by right then so I grabbed it for all of two stops because I feared the Burke would be blocked by downed trees. (The sidewalk leading to it at a large shrub already down.) Even the walk home in the very dark from the closest bus stop was kind of an adventure - particularly the part about crossing Bothell Way with no stoplights and no streetlights. FUN

Overnight wasn't bad; we had hot water and some heat and the oil lamp worked fine, and even better, we had some power left over in the server UPSes so we ran a nice bright compact florescent lamp for a couple of hours before that died out.

Saturday morning we got a paper again - Friday's print run was cancelled for the first time in decades, with the power being out at the printing facilities and only about 12,000 copies made - so we hung out, ate, I did some cleaning and cleaned up a bit of the yard until we went down to the shops for BBQ lunch and just to check things out a bit. This was some of the debris two blocks down:


182nd Street

I think I've mentioned that we're right on the Lake Forest Park/Kenmore border:


Welcome to Kenmore

I wanted to see whether Goat Trail Road was still blocked - and walk down to see it - but we decided to do that on the way back from the shops instead. That did mean crossing Bothell Way again without any stoplights, but at least this time it was during the day, but with the Road Closed signs still up, we didn't really want to walk half a mile or more down hill, just to have to turn around. Bothell Way was such a mess that people kept ignoring the No Through Traffic and Road Closed signs and trying to find another way around - we'd warn people off, but they'd ignore us and go see it for themselves. We ended up having probably a dozen or so people go by in both directions in cars - first towards the closed road, then a few minutes later, back the other way.


I Assure You...

I took this from Burke-Gilman, on the walk - that's also where I took the shot above. The storm was long over, but the light was still strange.


Lakeside Sun

I was right to worry the night before - Burke-Gilman would have been blocked, though I'd probably have been able to make my way past the blockages since no wires were immediately involved. But by yesterday around noon, the biggest had already been cleared:


The East Road

Then we got lunch and it was tasty, and tried to borrow some internet but couldn't as the shops route their packets through the library system which routes them through Bothell which had no power, so we were sad.

I wanted to look at the downed tree on Goat Trail again, this time in the day, so we started back that way. Here's what's left of the barricade telling people that this is a no-through-traffic road from that side:


This Side Too

And sure enough, it's a tree down. More correctly, there are a couple, both in the same place. On the left side of the tree that is in front - the one with the yellow caution tape on it - you can see that someone has, since the previous night, cut out all the lower branches, making kind of a gate. We're pretty sure that Gravity House did that. (We don't know them, but we know the house is named; they have a little sign.) The cut-out area is tall enough to walk under without bending over, which I mention again for scale:


The Gap of Gravity House

And here're the wires I saw on Friday night:


Nice Catch

And here's the top of the utility pole, now in easy reach:


This'll Be On Craigslist Tomorrow

Lines are down like that all over the county. As of this morning, only half of PSE customers affected had lights again. Yikes!

Anyway, after that, we walked through the gap, and I took this from Gravity House's driveway. On the right is the gap we walked through. On the left is the next tree down. The street, mostly invisible, is going left-to-right on the screen. We ended up climbing over the next tree. Both were lying on wires, but by this time we were sure all the wires were quite out, so we didn't care.


Between Trees

This is looking back at the trees after having climbed over and through on what from here is the left side:


Looking Back

This was the Seattle Times-style version of the same shot, but they've already put up their Reader Gallery so I'm not sending it in. I still think it's a pretty good photo.


Newspaper Photography

We were almost home when we saw this, which I'm pretty sure had not fallen yet when we walked out. Surprise! Gate's down, no way home! Or, well, no way home for that house in the upper right.


No Way Home

Then we were home and it was still warm, and power came back on, and suckered us into bringing back up our servers just in time to go HA HA FUXX0R J00 and go away again which meant all our servers crashed instead of going down cleanly. So annathepiper started the crossword puzzle and we worked on that, and then just kind of hung out and dozed. Then power came back up a few hours later and stayed up, so spazzkat and I ran out for milk and eggs and some other fridge groceries and chinese food, which I ate while fixing the mail server, and things were pretty much back to normal for us, except when kathrynt and llachglin phoned. They were heading back up from Tacoma and asked if they could crash up here with their baby if their house was still dark, which it turned out to be, and we said sure, and that was actually kinda nice. They got here, crashed, then the next morning we woke up and spazzkat made pancakes and eggs and bacon and we played with the Wii a bit and watched the baby until they went home again.

And that's pretty much the end of that adventure for us. Back to normal lazy Sunday now, yay. I think I'll take a nap. ^_^