Oh Yay!, I've been waiting for a break in the weather to debug the furnace, instead we have a cyclone forming off the coast right opposite me....going to be category two by the third of March.
This is where you want to be living in a brick house with a poured basement. I think the three little pigs all took shelter in the Brickhouse. I personally wouldn't want to live in anything besides a brick home with at least 6 feet below grade basement or 4 feet foundation. Tonight we are getting hit with -20-30°C winds at over 40 km an hour with expected 3 to 6 inches of snow. We normally don't see this in March. But, no big deal. The snow tires are still on the two vehicles. My wife's cara-van can usually get through 4 inches of snow. My Tahoe can get through 8 inches of snow. The jeep can usually do 8 to 10 inches of snow with the Nuby off-road tires. I really hope you're not gonna get hit as hard as you think. It would really suck to have a shark or whale in your front yard.
My house is about 1Km from the beach and 500 metres from a major river on land 10 feet/3 metres above mean high tide level so I'm vulnerable to storm surges from cyclones with a recent one predicted to be 9 metres above high tide level. When I built the concrete block workshop in 2009, I had it over engineered a bit: I overheard the blocklayer say to his offsider "This is a #%^&*$ atomic bomb shelter!!". Right now I'm borrowing power from the next door neighbour. I had a couple of big branches fall and hang off the power cable 2pm yesterday, the cable strain relief clips on both ends took all the load for a short while and then house end broke and pulled the terminal box apart. I still had power but it was obviously dangerous, the utility company used to cut the power and chainsaw the worst away but today they pulled the pole fuses and cut the cable off the house. They told me to get an electrician to replace the terminal box and he'd arrange to reconnect it. I had a friend who is a sparky ring his wholesaler and I had to drive in immediately and pay cash for what was probably the last four pole terminal box in the area as there are so many trees down across house power lines. While the cable is down I got up on the flat iron roof and used a 20 foot hand powered pole saw and cut some major tree branches down that I couldn't for risk of hitting the power cable, I have a massive pile of branches built up on the footpath now. This 40 foot tall tree below has had about half of it's branches cut off while the power cable is down, house is on the left and the street and high tension power on the right out of view.
It's currently category two and predicted category three tomorrow morning and hopefully will track out to sea.
It looks like your powerlines are pretty close to trees. I have this too on one of my properties. The powerline feeds about 50 properties. I am the third from the end of the line. Back in August we had a windstorm that a tree fell on the powerline which put us out of power for about 12 hours. I have a small 5000 W generator that can keep me running. I have it only hooked up to lighting in the refrigerator and deep freeze. Normally I will not start this until six hours out of power.
I have a 2KVA set which still needs me to fit a replacement carby to the Subaru 5Hp motor, I got lucky with borrowing some power from the new neighbour and she's glad not to hear an engine through the night if possible.
Wow, Mark. Sounds like a huge mess. Sorry you are having to battle your way through this. Hang in there, mate. Denis
I've been through a few hurricanes, one while on a ship, so I can relate to what you're going through. The chaos afterwards sucks so bad.
