First, has anybody heard from Jo? I know she's got a summer cottage 25-30 miles west of me. I think it's right on LIS. There were a lot of evacuations in that area & some loss of property. Anyway, I'm hoping her cottage didn't flood. Jo, are you around???

Here's some pictures we took of Irene as we were doing NWS spotter stuff during the storm. When it got really dicey & trees/power lines falling all around us we heeded NWS instructions of "safety first" & took shelter. So, all of these pictures are the start of the storm or well after the worst.

View from our room at the Inn at Mystic pre-Irene. The bridge is Route 1 (Boston Post Road). Note where the water line is under the bridge.

I'm posting this one just because we thought it was a riot. Note the height of the bed compared to the wingback in the right corner of the room. This was a handicapped room. Yeah, right.

Mystic all battened down & waiting for Irene. All is calm. Those boats are all triple lined with storm fenders. Mystic ran out of space on the hard to haul all the boats so many were forced to find safe harbor where they could. We even had trailered boats in our front garden.

This is our street. Those are my daylilies. Here it comes & it's hours before high tide. The sound is just at the end of this N/S street.

Here it comes from the east. That's our marina & the boat we allowed to be parked on our property. There's still the east side coming at us but for some reason we didn't a good picture.

We went back to the Inn to get a second wind guage & found the entrance blocked off with yellow police tape. You can see the tape over the road if you look closely. I held the tape & DH drove under. We packed up & left knowing we might not be able to get back in later or get in & be stuck for who knows how long. Note the water level under Route 1 as compared to the picture above. Police were getting ready to shut down the road. Still not much rain/wind...just water oozing higher.

After leaving the Inn we found the water's coming into downtown. This is about 2 blocks from the Mystic River drawbridge.

There are idiots everywhere, I guess. The water's getting pretty deep.

Mystic River - wonder who's dock this is? It's surely not supposed to be there!

This is not supposed to be a velocity zone. Yeah, right.

If I was onboard I'd be about to lose my lunch!

Martha, I think we're going to need the basement sump pumps...

Who said this river was a safe harbor???

Post-Irene - end of my street.

We also had the snow plows out. Stonington did a good job of pre-positioning assets. They were clearing streets as soon as it was safe.

I'd rather be lucky than good...

Aren't these pretty trucks? They are from Michigan.

My hero.

We were on the northeast quadrant of the storm - the wind side so we only got 3.1" of rain according to our measurements. The highest gust of wind we recorded was 64 mph. I can't even imagine if Irene had hit as a Cat 1 or Cat 2.

The most disconcerting part was when the tide did not go out. It was well past slack tide & we were still flooded. Finally, I called Neil (the meterologist we report to at the NWS) & asked, "Hey Neil, when is that wind going to come around?" He assured me it would & Sunday night's tide would be OK. I wasn't so sure but he was right...turned around about 5:00 p.m. Sunday.

/tricia