Day 5

 

Please allow me the indulgence of post-dating this entry.  Today is actually Friday, October 30, but I'm postdating it to Thursday, October 29, in order to better relate recent events.

Hurricane Zeta came through Atlanta early Thursday morning as forecast.  It started raining at around 2:00 am, and by 4:00 I was starting to think the whole event was overhyped, as is so often the case in these weather events. But the reason I was awake at 4:00 am is because the day before, the National Weather Service started issuing some pretty dire warnings about hurricane-strength winds, and advised people to immediately make survival plans for life-threatening conditions.  It specifically warned about falling trees and the possibility of those trees hitting houses.

That was more strongly worded than most NWS warnings.  Here in Atlanta, by the time most hurricanes reach us after making landfall on the Atlantic or Gulf Coasts, they've lost a lot of their initial intensity.  They'll bring a lot of rain to be sure, but they've already been downgraded to tropical depressions and the winds aren't so much of a factor.  They're a nuisance and quite annoying, but not generally life threatening or requiring life-or-death survival plans.

My survival plan was not to let Zeta catch me in bed, unprepared and underdressed, so I figured I'd pull an all-nighter on this one and stay up to monitor the situation. I played a video game (Shadow of the Tomb Raider) to keep my mind off the storm outside and up until 4:00 am, the few times that I did look outside, it didn't seem to be so extreme.  The big orange blob on the NWS radar maps seemed to be tracking northwest of me, with only the outer edge of it passing over Atlanta, and by 4:00 am, it looked like most of it had already passed.

But that back end was where all the action was.  Starting at around 4:00 am, the wind started howling and the rain dramatically picked up in intensity.  To be frank, it was pretty frightening.  I tried to immerse myself in the game to keep my mind from worrying, but that effort failed at 4:30 when the power went out.  I lit some candles and although I knew that the power would be out for several hours, I consoled myself that there was just a little bit more time until that orange blob completely passed the Atlanta metro region. 

At 5:00 am, still some three hours before the first light of day this time of year, I heard the distinct sound of wood cracking and a tree falling.  I braced myself for the impact, but heard nothing.  It must have been a tree elsewhere in the neighborhood.  I did hear several branches strike the roof with loud bangs that scared the cats to behind the couch, and a steady fall or acorns and other tree products on the roof.  This went of for a while and the rain was starting to let up in intensity, although the wind was, if anything, picking up.

And then it happened.  At 5:30 am, sitting in the dark on the sofa in the den, I heard the loudest crash I could imagine.  My mind registered it at first as thunder, a lightning strike directly to the house, it was that loud.  It wasn't thunder or lightning though, even though some small part of my memory still holds that initial impression - it was the dreaded 70-feet-tall, 36-inch-diameter poplar in the back yard, finally falling from the hill out back onto my house, just as I had feared (dreaded) for 16 years now.  

Don't know if I screamed or not. Can't remember if I did or didn't.

After I collected myself a little bit and realized I hadn't just died, I searched around the house by candlelight (remember, the power was out) to see if any room had collapsed.  No damage found on the inside.

Even though the rain had let up a little from earlier, it was still coming down pretty hard, but I put on a raincoat and went out to examine the exterior.  As soon as I stepped out the front door, I was confronted with a maze of dangling gutters, wood, and branches.  I made my way through the rubble and didn't see much else.  My car was fine parked out in the driveway and I didn't see any more branches or wood dangling from the roof - perhaps the loud crash was just one large limb that broke off a tree and landed on my front porch?

But then I got to the back of the house and saw the real damage - that poplar was down, and formed a bridge about 10 feet above ground from the top of the retaining wall holding the hill back and the top of my roof.  The tree extended clear across the house, and the tangle of branches out my front door was just the upper reaches of the now fallen tree. This was bad, but at least it didn't collapse any walls or penetrate the ceiling.

There wasn't much else I could do in the pitch black of 5:30 am during a hurricane, so I went back in the house, sat staring straight ahead in the dark, and waited for the light.  

This is what I found.

I called Allstate to file a claim, and reassuringly, they said I was in good hands and that they would take care of it from here, but then disappointingly said that they were getting a lot of claims right now, and that it might be several days before an adjustor called me.  In the meantime, if I needed to hire someone right away to stabilize the situation, I could go ahead and proceed, but make sure to keep all receipts.  Also, watch the price - there's a lot of gouging going on after events like this, and they won't pay extortionist rates.

I wasn't sure exactly what to do next.  I was traumatized, I was depressed at the prospect of a long and expensive repair to the house, and I hadn't slept for almost 24 hours.  I showed the damage to several neighbors out taking stock of the damage (I was by far the worse hit, the "victim" of this event although I had been spared so many previous storms).  Then I took about a three-hour nap to give my mind some rest and relaxation before taking on everything that needs to happen.

It's going to be a long haul.  2020 kicked my ass, real good this time, and I won't get past this ass-kicking for a long while.