Hardened Infrastructure
I recently had a conversation with a high school friend who lives in Newport,Tennessee, one of the areas heavily impacted by Huricane Helene. He had finally gotten back to his home, but the power was out and he had no water. He had to walk in because a bridge had to be inspected before vehicular traffic could be allowed.
In our conversation, he mentioned that he wasn’t worried about the power being out because they had a whole-house generator which apparently had saved their bacon and other food items many times over the years. He said power outages were common even though they have a locally owned utility company.
My friend was completely taken back when I told him that in the sixteen years that we lived on the North Carolina coast, I only used our generator once for a couple of hours during the height of Category 3 Irene which had decided to park itself over Carteret County for an extensive period. The You Tube video that I took off my back deck of Irene was impressive.
One of the interesting things about Irene is that in spite of its ferocity, we went over to have some ice cream on Emerald Isle the next day.
The worst storm to hit the area in our years there was Huricane Florence. We evacuated for Florence but came before the inland roads flooded and shut off access to our area. When we got home, the water and power were…