HURRICANE IRENEThe picture above, courtesy of Wikipedia, is a satellite image of Hurricane Irene as a Category 3 hurricane (winds around 130 mph sustained, gusting to 160 mph) over the southern Bahamas on August 24.
Niels wants my personal experience with the storm, but first I'll give you some stats to chew on:
Hurricane Irene began as a tropical wave on August 15 off the coast of Africa. On August 20th, Tropical Storm Irene officially formed. On August 22, as Irene was moving over the Caribbean Islands, it was upgraded to a hurricane, the first such storm of the 2011 Atlantic Hurricane Season. By August 23, as Irene was moving over Hispaniola, it intensified into a Category 3 hurricane, also known as a major hurricane. Irene moved closer to the coast of North Carolina, and on August 27, as a Category 1 hurricane, made landfall at the Outer Banks at 7:30AM with sustained winds of 85 mph. About 10 hours later, Irene reemerged over the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. The storm made several landfalls as a hurricane, then a tropical storm.
Personally, my experience was as follows.
Throughout the daytime hours of August 27th it was cloudy, breezy and showery at times as the outer wind bands of Irene started their effects near my area. The winds really started to pick up around nightfall, and I recorded at 32-mph gust with my anemometer around 10PM on the 27th (Saturday). We retained power longer than most people, but lost it between 1 and 2AM on Sunday morning, August 28th. BGE, the local utility company, reported around 800,000 power outages at the peak.
We lost power overall for approximately 24 hours, getting it back around 2AM on Sunday night. The original first day of school was supposed to be Monday the 29th, but it was canceled due to excessive outages. School opened on Tuesday for all but a couple schools.
We had no major damage, a couple pine tree limbs down here and there, but nothing major around my house. A major tree came down 3 streets over, but the major problem there was simply it was a pain in the ass to clean up. Luckily it did not fall on either house that was well within range (if it had fallen just the right way, it would have hit 3 houses and killed at least 2 people. But it fell in the complete opposite direction.
The highest wind gust around here was 49mph, and the highest sustained was 35mph, just on the cusp of tropical storm force, which is 39mph.
Other than that, this storm really wasn't all that bad. I got an extra day of summer out of and gained the ability to say I've survived an earthquake and hurricane in the same week. (Not kidding).
If you want more info, go to the wikipedia page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Irene_(2011)#Meteorological_history
