Patience55 - 13 November 2012 11:21 PM
I didn’t get the notification for the reply ... so apologies for the late reply.
Are you okay?
Heheh…this is like stories you hear about every once in awhile where some guy gets a letter delivered that was posted decades earlier. 
But I thank you for your concern, and I made it through completely unscathed.
Sandy lost a lot of steam making landfall, but utterly destroyed the jersey shore in doing so.
Winds in my area never gusted much more than about 50mph or so and never reached the levels that were predicted. Only twice in over 25 years here have I been through storms with windgusts that shook my place so hard that my stomach tightened with genuine fear. They were around 70-80mph which was lower than the weather service’s 80-120mph potential predicted for sandy.
Some time before midnight the “center of rotation” passed about 5-15 miles south of me and after that the winds dropped off to little more than a stiff breeze for the remainder of the storm. I lost power but to my great surprise it was restored within 4 hours!
There were pockets of heavy damage all around me for a radius of about 100 miles, and some areas lost power so badly that final restorations are finally expected today or tomorrow.
But the shore…
...the entire jersey shore north of atlantic city to new york was ripped to shreds. Some of the country’s most famous amusement piers and swimming beaches are GONE all along its length. The damage is almost incomprehensible. The beaches will probably be restored by dredging sand back in (a process called “replenishment” that is done routinely every 5-10 yrs in some areas, but the scale needed to replenish the severe erosion and loss to all the beaches in sandy’s wake will be nothing short of gargantuan), but there is property damage that I can’t believe will ever be completely restored.
Not to sound trite, but I fully understand I “dodged” the proverbial bullet, and when I see the shore I even get a sense of “survivor’s guilt” for getting away scot-free.
On a side note, let me say that politically I’m a left-leaning liberal democrat. But so help me, I would vote Christie “governor for life” if I had the chance. That man bellied up and had reparations in high gear and rolling before the wind and rain even died down, and was calling the shots from the battlefront, not from the governor’s mansion.
And with that I’ll bring my tome to a close, and thank you and others who were concerned for me. I survived!!
