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Slashdot Asks: Are You Preparing For Hurricane Sandy?
Forecasters are tossing around words like "unprecedented" and "bizarre" (see this Washington Post blog entry) for the intensity and timing of Hurricane Sandy, which is threatening to hit the east coast of the U.S. early next week. Several people I know in the mid-Atlantic region have been ordering generators and stocking up on flashlight batteries and easy-to-prepare foods. Are you in the projected path of the storm? If so, have you taken any steps to prepare for it? (Are you doing off-site backup? Taking yourself off-site?)
Man, this place has gone impossibly downhill further since Taco left. Makes me yearn for Roland Piquepaille's slashverts and Michael's political polemics.
3-7" of rain would be fine if it was all nice and spread out and just soaked into the ground, but water has a nasty habit of flowing downhill and finding its way into rivers...
The local river in northern NJ here raised its level by at least 10' during last years storm, resulting in the local highway being under 4' of water.
1. Precipitation:
You have to consider that the land types are different for the northeast states compared to southeast states such as Florida. Florida has soil in which the rain drains out of much quicker. In addition, engineering designs are different for states that generally get less rain than the southern states. The HDSC calculates precipitation Recurrence Intervals for engineering design purposes. For example, Florida sees a mean annual maximum precipitation of about 5 inches in 24 hours compared to 2.5 inches in 24 hours in the northeast. This discrepancy is much larger when you look at recurrance intervals of >10 years (9 compared to 5 inches). This event has the potential to drop 100 year rainfall on the northeastern states. It will last a few days, but MOST of the rain will fall in one day.
2. Wind:
This will likely transition into an extratropical cyclone. extratropical (mid-latitude) storms have weaker winds than hurricanes, but are over a much larger area. Most hurricanes have severe wind damage only a few miles from the center in the eye-wall. Tropical storm strength winds extend out further, but even those don't usually extend out far in most storms (obviously there are exceptions such as Hurricane Ike). An extratropical cyclone's winds will cause moderate damage over a very large area. The other thing to consider are trees. Trees in the north are much less resistant to the wind, especially since most still have their leaves this time of the year. The winds in this storm won't be as deadly as a hurricane's, but will be a HUGE issue for damage and power outages.
Storm surge:
This is a page with estimated storm surge. This storm will also stick around for a while, so it will be able to pile more and more water up against the shore, as well as have a chance to coincide with astronomical high tides. There are many places in NYC that will flood (although they will be properly evacuated).
3. People
If the center hits around southern New Jersey, this storm will directly affect Washington DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, NYC, etc. This is a very large amount of people to worry about. These people are used to Nor' Easters but this should be much stronger than a typical Nor' Easter.
I do understand why you think this is being over-hyped, especially when you compare it to the smaller but much more powerful hurricanes that strike the south. Overall, I don't expect this storm to cause many deaths; I think the people will generally be prepared. I do see this storm causing a lot of damage and long-lasting power outages. When you have these affects over such a large area, it could take time to get back to business as normal. Lastly, you should look for more information on Irene because it was very damaging, especially with the flooding in NY and VT, where both the infrastructure and the land type is not used to that kind of rain.
My father now has a generator wired into the house, and set up so they can run the furnace, and a couple of outlets (run the fridge for a while to keep it cold), with enough gas to run it for most of a week. They already have a bunch of oil-lamps, and make sure to keep them fueled. They keep several gallons of water in the bathroom to flush with (they're on a well, no electricity means no water to flush the toilets, which is pretty nasty).
Since they have a hardwired generator, why not put the well pump on the generator? My parents have a 5KVA generator that has enough power to run the well pump as long as no other big loads are powered on (the startup current on the well pump is apparently too much current draw when combined with other loads). Once the well pump fills the pressure tank, he can turn it off and has 15 - 20 gallons of usable water before the pressure drops too low.
If I had a generator, I'd never use oil lamps - rechargable batteries and LED flashlights are much safer, you can get a fast charger to recharge AA's in 30 minutes or so, which is less time than you'll need to run the fridge. Or get a D cell LED lantern - it'll run for 48 hours or so on a set of non-rechargable alkalines. Or use your rechargable AA's in a D-cell adapter and you can still get a few hours of lifetime from it before you need to recharge.
I saw someone knock over an oil lamp once in a garage - the wick holder came off and oil seeped out onto the plywood it fell onto, it created a sizeable fire before someone brought in a fire extinguisher to douse it. Not something I'd want to have happen in the living room during a hurricane disaster.
The most likely mode of failure for internet access during Sandy is likely to be "the storm knocked out commercial power, then persisted longer than the battery backup power at your service provider's facility or tower".
From the research I did, it looks like the best bet for datacard/hotspot #1 is Verizon. Apparently, they have 8-10 hours of battery backup at all of their cell sites, and 85% (in Florida, at least; not sure whether the statistic was specific to Florida or applies nationwide) have on-site generators that fire up automatically & have enough on-site fuel to run for a week. They also apparently allow you to buy an unsubsidized data card or hotspot on eBay, and activate it for $15 per day (250mb data per day) in a completely adhoc manner, with no strings, minimums, reactivation/inactivity fees, or other sneaky charges.
For some reason, they seem to explicitly NOT allow "day pass" use with PCMCIA/Cardbus/ExpressCard devices, and I'm still trying to find out whether you have to activate it before the storm (or at least have working phone/internet service by some other means at the time you activate it), or whether you can literally buy a $13 EVDO datacard on eBay, throw it in a drawer as a really cheap insurance policy against loss of internet access during a storm, then pull it out, plug it into your laptop, and do the whole process -- payment, activation, and all -- using only the connectivity provided by the Verizon datacard itself.
Apparently, AT&T has a similar "day pass" deal. I didn't bother to research it, because I already have an AT&T phone (Galaxy S3), and since my whole goal was to find cheap "backup plan" options for getting online if my AT&T cell phone lost data service during a storm, I didn't bother to look into them.
For a longer outage, especially if you have Cable internet (which tends to go out shortly after commercial power is lost, and stay that way until the day after it's restored... at least, going by everything I've ever seen from Comcast in Florida), you might want to look into something that's cheaper and less stingy with data, like maybe T-Mobile. I wasn't able to find anything specific about their backup power situation besides references to them having a fleet of portable generators, which suggests that they're worse than Verizon (who already has fixed generators on-site, in place, ready to go), no better than AT&T (call it a hunch, but I suspect that whatever Verizon does, AT&T probably pays lip service to doing as well), and probably at least a little bit worse. My assessment: T-Mobile probably won't stay up until the bitter end of the storm, but if your cable internet is going to be down for a few days or more, they're probably the best option for days #2 and beyond. I'd expect that even if they go down during the storm, they'll be up and running within a day afterwards.
One caveat about used T-Mobile devices... I'm not sure exactly why this is apparently a problem unique to T-Mobile (or at least a bigger problem with them), but apparently it's possible to buy a used T-mobile device after getting T-Mobile to verify that the ESN is 'clean', activate it with your own SIM, use it for months, then have it unceremoniously blacklisted by T-Mobile for something the seller did long after it was sold to you. For example, if someone buys a device on a 2-year contract, replaces it with another, sells the first one to you, then later defaults on the contract. Apparently, Sprint and Verizon keep track of transfers, but T-Mobile just indiscriminately blacklists whatever ESN was on file under the original contract without bothering to investigate further to avoid collateral damage).
Right now, I can't recommend Sprint under any circumstances. Their 3G network sucks so badly right now (with the possible exception of the 3 or 4 places they've semi-finished upgrading), power loss is almost the least of their problems. After Isaac strafed Miami (taking down Comcast and U-verse for about 6-8 hours), I ran speedtest on Sprint & got
Weird how a storm which "didn't materialize" (Irene) managed to be the fifth most destructive Atlantic hurricane.
It materialized, and caused significant damage to New York, Connecticut, Massachusettes, Vermont, and New Hampshire. Just because it didn't cause major problems in NYC doesn't mean it "didn't happen".