BurnsFamily Blog

Wow! It’s like living back in the Midwest! Unfortunately, our ground can’t handle multiple inches of rain per day…and our trees aren’t accustomed to 70+ MPH winds. So all sorts of crazy things are going on around here. We even heard thunder!

Since we’re linked into the emergency services groups we get to hear some of the more exciting things that are happening around us, but we’re fine and so far the house is fine too. The rains helped us find a new leak in the roof of Bill’s car. Exciting? Yes. Fun? Not so much.

Thankfully, we live a short distance from Home Depot — did you know that a “Delta faucet cam repair kit” has the precisely sized replacement components as a BMW cell phone antenna roof boot? Neither did we before this weekend’s rain. And while BMW charges $85, Home Depot’s version of the parts cost $5.

We lost power for almost an hour the other day along with almost 700,000 other folks, but our vast array of battery backup units kept things operational. You know, essential things like the DSL line, this blog, our email server, and the TiVo. Oh, and the scanner and ham radio gear.<grin>

Our airport was clocking winds at 80 MPH, and the coast was seeing swells of 30 feet. Several cities near us declared “states of emergency”. Whoa!

And in the ski slopes, they are predicting 10 feet of snow with 140 MPH winds at the peak. 6 new inches an hour. This is supposed to be one of the top 5 snow storms in the past 50 years here.

And we’re only done with 2 of the 3 storms headed our way.

This week’s three back-to-back storms really was a 1-2 punch. First the rains soaked the ground thoroughly. Portions of the Los Gatos Creek trail were flooded. Then the strong winds kicked in. It blew all sorts of stuff around the neighborhood. It pushed over very large trees, and damaged many of the other big ones around us. For some reason, our trees were unaffected, but we parked our cars elsewhere just in case.

The old fence between our neighbors didn’t fare so well…it was bent to a 45 degree angle during some of the stronger gusts. Looks like we’ll be replacing a section of fence with them next Spring. Another item for the to-do list. For now, we’ve just shored it up so that it doesn’t completely collapse or damage either of our houses.

Coincidentally, on Saturday we had a “How to do Damage Assessments” class as part of our ongoing emergency training we do. Makes it all seem so much more “relevant” when you’re in the middle of the biggest rain in two decades and discussing topics like “When to drive through standing water” (you don’t) and “How to record levels of damage and communicate to the County Emergency Operations Center”.