Hanna aftermath

Hanna went through Saturday night / Sunday morning. From my perspective, it felt like the most substantial storm to hit the county since Dolly in 2008.

We lost power Saturday night and didn’t get it back until early Sunday.

No flooding where we were, though the rain caused some leaks and a little water damage that needs fixing.

And the air conditioner got broken and needed repair.

But all up, fared reasonably well. One preparation tip: download at least one movie to your portable electronic device before the hurricane. Sunday would have been much more tolerable if there was even one thing from Netflix or Amazon Prime or Vudu or something on my iPad.

Of course, personal inconvenience is not the biggest problem. I’m now waiting to see how the COVID-19 cases are going to track out a couple of weeks down the road. Hanna might have made more people shelter in place and reduce cases, or it might mean more people were stuck inside with each other and increase cases. We’ll see.

Update, 28 July 2020: Whoa. I had not gone around the corner to the back of the yard.

More damage that I thought at first. That tree is down for the count.

I also had one strange, sad thought. Three years ago, I suspended data collection on a field project that had been running for several years. There was a point where, weirdly, Hanna would have provided an research opportunity. I could have seen the “before” and “after” effect of Hanna on the population of sand crabs out as South Padre Island. Could have been a paper in that alone.

But the project got suspended end of 2017. But even if I hadn’t stopped it then, I might have stopped it this year with COVID-19. I have been trying hard to stay put and I don’t want to go to the beach since they have reopened them, nobody is wearing masks, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of social distancing,