Here’s how to help …
Update — I’ve stuck this one to the top of the front page for a while to make sure it gets noticed. The death toll in Japan is now up to 21,000+ and they’ve confirmed at least one American death — Taylor Anderson, a 24-year old school teacher from Virginia — as well. Scroll down beneath this entry for the latest blogging.
… are the looters? Where’s the riots?
There aren’t any.
And I’m not surprised.
Hopefully most people in the state will have better insurance than we turned out to have.
An Ohio insurance trade group says damage from the Sept. 14 windstorm that smacked the state caused at least $553 million in insured losses and generated the largest number of claims filed since 1980.
The Ohio Insurance Institute reported Tuesday, Oct. 7, that 131,624 claims have been filed as a result of the damaging winds with 24 insurance companies (72 percent) who offer policies in the state. The results came from a survey done weeks after the storm swept across the state, spawned by the remnants of Hurricane Ike. The storm caused hundreds of thousands to be without power for days and forced Gov. Ted Strickland to declare a statewide emergency.
I’m still pissed about the paltry five hundred bucks we got — and while we didn’t sign away any rights by cashing the check, we also don’t get any more. They simply ignored our request for a review or for a reconsideration or anything else. My sister got the same thing from HER insurance company, the only difference being they told her if she had pictures of the food she lost they’d “consider” giving her more.
We’re *still* in recovery mode — we still haven’t been able to restock even half of the food we lost and the trees that are damaged are only about half taken care of, because the insurance won’t pay and we sure as hell can’t afford to pay someone to do it.
The only good thing is, we’re all safe. No one in our family was injured or irreperably harmed by this. We’ll all recover. It’s just going to take a lot more time than it should’ve had to take.
Here in Montgomery and Greene counties, there are presently 13,000 people without power again. This time they’re blaming lightning, winds, and in one area a fire in a transformer. As usual with DP&L, no ETA on when it’ll be fixed.
News says 67 people are now dead as a result of Ike — they say this includes deaths in Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania that are hurricane related. Did the freaking thing come here or not? Every other newscast has a different spin on it. It was Ike. It was Ike fallout. It was caused by Ike, but wasn’t Ike. It was caused by Ike and was the remnants of Ike. It was a windstorm that just hit around the same time as Ike was moving up the map, but it wasn’t related to Ike at all. It was a windstorm caused by Ike. Ask ten people and you’ll get ten different answers. I wish someone in an official capacity would make up their damn minds about it.
Also, a small earthquake hit north of here earlier Monday night according to the National Weather Service.
The quake, centered about 10 miles north of Sidney [Ohio], occurred at 9:06 p.m. and registered a 2.9 reading on the Richter scale, said Charlie Woodrum, a meteorologist with the weather service’s Wilmington post.
Wonder how long it’ll be till someone comes along and decides global warming is to blame for that, too.
On Sunday, September 14, at 2:00 p.m. hurricane Ike whipped through the Ohio Valley and left some 2.5 million people without power.
One hundred seventy hours and seven minutes later (that is, Sunday, September 21 at 4:07 p.m.) our power finally was restored. As I write these words, there are still a hundred thousand or so people around the state without power, and some of them may be that way for most of the upcoming week.
Because we run our own servers, all of our websites — including not only sites and blogs under the naebunny umbrella but those we run for other folks like Dulahan, CinnaNuts, CC Quilting, Shayna For School Board and a few others — were down as well. (Luckily, when our electricity came back up, our Internet did too. Dad’s house got power back at 11:30 last night, but they still don’t have the Internet back.)
We lost everything in two refrigerators and a chest freezer. Laundry is at critical mass and the house is a disaster after going this long without sweeping, etc. The water softener was of course down for 170 hours also and we have seriously hard water. Just during the course of the week, I’ve got rust stains building up on all the porcelain.
A plus — even if it was rusty and sulfur-smelling, we still had hot water throughout (yay for gas hot water heaters!) and we have lots of windows in our house, so we could stay relatively comfortable heat-wise. There were a couple days when it was just unbearable but for the most part it was almost pleasant.
We’ve got several trees in various stages of breakage and/or down, that we have to get taken care of. At the moment, we’re concentrating first on trying to get everything back up and running, so the trees and outside work can wait till tomorrow or Tuesday. Thankfully we lost no roof shingles or windows or anything like that — there are a lot of people who weren’t nearly so fortunate. I know a couple people who suffered total losses and their houses are going to have to be rebuilt. A couple of downed trees and a bunch of debris is not even comparable! I’ve also heard of at least four deaths here in the Miami Valley. I’ll take downed trees any day of the week, thankyouverymuch.
More for the plus side, we are all safe; everyone else in the family who lost power (Maggie & Joel, Cindy & Crystal, Dad, Ben & Alvin, Joel’s parents, Tim’s parents — the only ones who never lost it were David and his family) have gotten their power back as well. We were the last ones to get it! Just for the fun of it, I kept track –
After our personal cleanup and restoration efforts, we’ll begin wading through redtape to get everything reimbursed through our homeowner’s insurance. Hopefully they’ll also pay for a couple of these trees that we’re not going to be able to bring down with a chainsaw ourselves. Governor Strickland declared a state of emergency and pronounced Ohio a disaster area, but we don’t know if the feds will or not. Apparently if they do, then FEMA will be paying part of it. I don’t care who pays, I just want to get back what we lost — and that’s part of what I pay homeowner’s insurance for, so they need to get busy here.
Happy Birthday to me — I got my power back!
Here’s the latest candidates for the ol’ Darwin Award:
SURFSIDE BEACH, Texas — Authorities say tens of thousands have ignored evacuation orders and are staying behind as Hurricane Ike takes aim at the Texas coast.
An Associated Press survey shows that in three counties alone, some 90,000 people have chosen not to leave despite dire warnings from forecasters.
The emergency management coordinator for Galveston County estimates that 80 percent of the residents evacuated. That leaves more than 11,000 residents in the county that is expected to take a direct hit from Ike’s massive storm surge.
[...]
More than a million people evacuated southeast Texas ahead of Ike. But citing faith and fate, tens of thousands more ignored calls to clear out, coastal authorities said. The National Weather Service warned that people in smaller structures in some areas “may face certain death.”
The choice to stay — always questionable, sometimes fatal — was an especially curious one to make so close to Galveston, site of a 1900 storm that killed at least 6,000 people, more than any other natural disaster in U.S. history.
Need to change the name of that town to “Suicide Beach.”
FOX News has more. More pictures, including the one above showing some fool driving alongside the seawall, can be found here.
Barack Hussein Osama — oops, Obama — says that he is more experienced in executive matters than Sarah Palin because he has managed his presidential campaign for the past 18 months.
Speaking on a cable news channel September 1st, Barack Hussein Osama — oops, Obama — said he is better prepared to handle a disaster like Hurricane Gustav because of his pursuit of the White House. “Well, my understanding is that Governor Palin’s town of Wasilla has, I think, 50 employees. We’ve got 2,500 in this campaign. I think their budget is maybe $12 million a year. You know, we have a budget of about three times that just for the month. So I think that our ability to manage large systems and to execute I think has been made clear over the last couple of years.”
“For Barack Obama to argue that he’s experienced enough to be president because he’s running for president is desperate circular logic and its laughable. It is a testament to Barack Obama’s inexperience and failing qualifications that he would stoop to passing off his candidacy as comparable to Governor Sarah Palin’s executive experience managing a budget of over $10 billion and more than 24,000 employees,” said John McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds.
“I am appalled by the Obama campaign’s attempts to belittle Governor Sarah Palin’s experience. The facts are that Sarah Palin has made more executive decisions as a mayor and governor than Barack Obama has made in his life,” Republican National Committee Victory 2008 Chairwoman Carly Fiorina said.
I want to know what difference does it make anyhow? He’s not running against Palin, he’s running against McCain. If she was running for president against him, then it would matter. (I’d still argue that she’s got more experience.)
In any case, he’s running against McCain. Much as I don’t care for the man, let’s face it, McCain’s got scads more experience than Osama — oops, Obama. I might point out too that McCain has spent very nearly his entire adult life in service to this country in one way or another. Osama can’t say that, either.
Nor am I saying that they did not suffer a horrible tragedy or that they do not need assistance.
I *am* however, just a little bit sick of hearing the death toll of 12 and the virtual destruction of an entire town being likened to New Orleans. Let’s get a grip and put things in perspective, folks, this ain’t even apples and oranges.
I am also damned sick and tired of hearing how they don’t have enough guardsmen and guard resources to do the job because everybody’s been deployed over to Iraq for Bush’s illegal war for oil. If this mother-lovin’ war was about oil, they’d be giving us the damn stuff. I would not be paying $33.00 to fill up my 11-gallon gas tank (that wasn’t even on empty).
I read a FOX news and AP article earlier in the week where several refutations were made in response to some of the claims about how poor Kansas was suffering such a terrible response and it’s all Bushitler’s fault. After I read the article, I did a little research and found that several of the things being said were verifiable through other sources. Note that I am not saying ALL of it is verifiable, because I don’t know if that is true or not. I didn’t waste that much time on it, I just checked a few of the facts and satisfied myself that it was accurate enough.
I then naively expected that this would be pounced upon, everyone would say “oh ho! Shame on you for misleading us, Governor Sebelius!” and life would go on.
Instead, the information contained in that article seems to have been pretty much ignored. No one’s stepped up to refute it, they’re just not mentioning it at all. And the media’s going along with it. Therefore, I am providing both links to the original article and a Reader’s Digest Condensed™ of the salient points.
Enjoy! Discuss!
In the meantime, he’ll continue to provide reams of entertainment. The good Mayor is going to be on 60 Minutes this Sunday. When confronted in the interview about delays in rebuilding his city after Hurricane Katrina, Nagin had this to say: “You guys in New York can’t get a hole in the ground fixed, and it’s five years later. So let’s be fair.”
Way to go, Ray. FOXNews.com – Mayor Nagin Takes Swipe at NYC Sept.11 Rebuilding.
