Hurricane Irene...not a fan!

A couple of weeks ago, Hurricane Irene hit New Jersey. I thought we were pretty prepared because I had felt urged about a month before to get our 72 hour kits updated and completed, so I did. We brought in all of our patio furniture so it wouldn't be blown away, filled a 50 gallon basin of water and placed it in our garage, made sure we were stocked up on batteries, gas, and groceries. We turned our fridge and freezer to the coldest settings so if we lost electricity we'd get maybe an extra half day before the food went bad. I even filled our tub with water the night before so we could take a bath at some point if we lost our water.

That night the wind and rain came and came.

The next morning....no electricity...not too surprising. I looked out our windows and no trees on our house, our yard looked okay except for a little marshy.

So, I'm thinking we'll just be "camping in our house" for a few days without electricity - not too bad - it might actually be a little fun. We eat breakfast, and around 11 am Gavin says he wants to play play-dough. I'm thinking that's a good idea, so I went downstairs to get the play-dough only to discover about 4 inches of water in our entire basement.

Not so good!

Kind of hard to use your shop vac to get the water out when you have no electricity and you don't own a generator. So, Tad called a friend from our ward who has an extra generator and within the hour about 7 guys/friends from our ward were here helping us get everything out of our basement, dry off what could be saved, and remove all of our carpet (which was ruined).

The funny part was when Gavin came downstairs and saw all of the water he said, "Mom, can we go swimming down here today?" At the time I didn't think it was so funny, but now I do. He was thinking "Hey, this will be fun" instead of thinking if his toys would be ruined. Kind of like the saying "If life gives you lemons, make lemonade". If life gives you floods, go swimming. Sometimes I guess I could use the perspective of a 3 year old.

Luckily we had tile under our carpet, so now we will just have a tiled basement and we've spent many hours going through everything we had down there. We've had to do some small repairs to the walls and we're almost done re-painting. Hopefully be the end of this week we will be "back to normal" almost.

We were without power for 2 1/2 days and without phone or internet for 4 1/2 days. Luckily no problems with our water line.

The sad part is, we were lucky! We've had several ward members whose basements were filled to the ceiling with water and they lost everything. The Jersey shores lost beautiful boardwalks. Our stake is still helping people who have suffered so much loss through the church's "Helping Hands" program. Tad went out today for a few hours to help some non-members.

The whole experience has taught me that you need to be as prepared as you can, but still the unexpected can happen. So, we plan to buy a GENERATOR for Christmas - definitely a good investment. I have also learned how wonderful people are and how great our friends are in our time of need. The kids and I went over to my friend Alene's house while the men cleaned up our basement. Alene and my other friend Heather made us dinner and kept us busy. I had so many offers of help - it just really makes you grateful for your friends and for the wonderful church that we belong to.

A small portion of the things from our basement "drying off" in our front room.

Our carpet and pad out for the garbage man.