Sounds like quite an exciting day! Glad I missed it :0) That is one of the benefits of being located on this side of the state (versus down in Fayetteville where I lived for so many years). Hopefully I will dodge the bullet everytime! The power cables to my house are located underground but they are arial poles down the neighboring streets so if any of those go down then I probably lose power as well. I hear that Fayetteville didn't suffer as bad as you did - I have to go there this weekend and by tomorrow morning all should be back to normal (hope).



>>Hurricanes and even tropical storms are similar to tornadoes in some ways. After Fran there were people who didn't experience any damage and they insisted Fran was a 'non-event.' I lost a 100 year old live oak tree, a fence, and my rear windshield on my car (a separate tree landed on my car when it fell). I had friends who suffered major damage. I couldn't drive down the road to check my house for almost 2 days due to the trees that were down and the debris everywhere. We didn't have power for 2 days. A friend of mine went without power for a week until their neighborhood could be gotten to. Yet some folks suffered no power outage and no damage at all. It really is a hit or miss type of thing. Swirling winds can totally bypass one house and destroy one in a neighbor nearby. On my way to work this morning I passed a beautiful home with a tree ontop of it. That was all the way up in Jamestown, NC. I'm sure they don't consider Ernesto a 'non-event.'
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>Ernesto passed this way just an hour ago, and we had about 10" of rain today. We're on a sufficiently high ground, and ours is a townhouse close to the middle of a block of seven, so no worry there. But my daughter got started on her first job this week (a fellow programmer - no Fox, though) and I drove her, since she still doesn't know the streets well. Good that I did, because the road she knows was flooded. I figured by 5pm it'll all calm down and most of the water would go away, but her office decided to disband around noon... just the worst time of day, when we were just a few miles east of the storm's eye, and the tide was high.
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>Well, it was fun driving around through all that water :).
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>And we have lost power only once, for a couple of seconds. About half of the people in the wider area lost it for much longer, i.e. until it gets fixed. Having learned from Isabel three years ago, when we were buying the house we specifically dismissed a few places because the power cables weren't underground. In this street, they are. I expect everyone will have power restored (with)in a week or so, if Virginia Power gets help from North Carolina again.