Hurricane side effects

[papaof2]

The price of gasoline runs in cycles here. The next tanker load is delivered to the "fringe" stations (Kroger, RaceTrac) and the price of gas changes. Over the following week or 10 days, it often changes a few cents. This area shouldn't be at the next tanker delivery yet, but I noticed the local RaceTrac is up 13 cents today. That's from Hurricane Michael - the increased traffic coming into the state from Florida, the possible disruptions in crude oil deliveries along the gulf, a small number of local people filling up before the horde arrives - and you know some are coming across Georgia when the Atlanta Motor Speedway has done its usual "Park your RV here for free" for people running from the hurricane.

The price will likely be back down to last week's level in a week or so. If you don't watch gas prices on a regular basis, go to www.gasbuddy.com/ to check the ZIP codes of interest. Some areas are big enough to have their own URL, such as www.atlantagasprices.com/ although Dallas, TX, doesn't have its own URL.

[papaof2]

If you want to track some of the other effects of a hurricane, you can get maps of power outages and numbers of customers (meters) affected. For any given area, there are multiple sources.

The first is the "umbrella" site poweroutage.us which has outages by state but their numbers may not be current with what the various providers have because some of the provider outage maps are updated automatically by the info from their smart meters but the umbrella figures are not current and not all providers provide info that the site can easily access. For the currently affected states these are the links: poweroutage.us/area/state/georgia poweroutage.us/area/state/alabama poweroutage.us/area/state/florida If you go to poweroutage.us/ you get a map of the US with the states in colors that indicate the current power outage level. The map is clickable so you can see the (more-or-less) current status of any state.

The other source is the sites from the individual power providers, such as outagemap.georgiapower.com/external/default.html and www.outageentry.com/dvosm/dvOSM2.php?Client=greys (GreyStone Power). As you may be able to tell from the URLs, Georgia Power does their own outage maps and GreyStone (our electric co-op) uses an online mapping company to display outages.

More trivia that you'll click on once and then try to remember where you saw it when the next big weather event hits ;-)

[papaof2]

We've received the first inch of the forecast rain in about 2 hours and the "Heavy Rain" won't be here for another 3 hours (as the next ring of Michael's outer bands reaches us). The forecast of 3+ inches of rain is currently looking to be on the plus side.

Side note: One of our surrogate cats (neighbor's cat who likes sleeping in the sun on the lower drive and watching the birds at the bird feeder) was out back during the daylight hours - but stretched out between the 250 watt solar panel and the trash can that keeps it in place. There was a cat sized spot that was protected from the rain.

Although I heard the "Thump!" of a limb hitting either the house or the ground near the house, there's nothing visible from the windows or the cameras. Nothing obvious in the attic. No, I don't plan to walk around the house in the rain. I'll check in the morning when there's enough light to avoid the mud that 3" of rain will bring to the surface...

We've had our first Tornado Warning - a radar spotting of rotation - not unexpected as a hurricane comes across land.

[papaof2]

The weather forecast was close - the rain did stop around 5AM and we had 3+ inches. To be exact, my weather station shows 3.99 inches so very much on the plus side of "3+ inches".

That's not the most rain we've had in 24 hours; that was 5.25" in 2009 and we had heavy rain for several days - enough to cause a lot of flooding.

Now to wait for things to dry out enough to collect all the leaves the rain and wind brought down - and I had just done that :-(