Hurricane Sandy

   The hurricane passed us last Monday. Today is Thursday. It was a historical storm, doing things that have never been done before. The radar and satellite images of Sandy at the time it hit southern New Jersey stretched from the arctic circle to South Carolina. The eye hit New Jersey, and that means that the storm surge on the right side of the storm, hit northern New Jersey and New York. This is where I live. Right at about 11 PM the remains of the eye of the hurricane passed just to the south and west of where I live and work, near Ridgewood New Jersey. Actually this hurricane briefly had a double wall, and it was the outer wall that hit us. Since then the power has been out, the phones were out, the cells were out, and the phone texts were delayed by hours. I am right now running on a generator at home. That is keeping some of the lights and the heat on. The TV's are working and the internet is back now. The answering service that I use is based at the hospital, and they are swamped. If you need to call me via the service just wait on the line and call back if necessary.
   I like to tell my patients that if they cannot get me on the phone, and they may be in labor, or the baby is not moving well, or they have some emergency, then they should just go to the hospital. We always have an Obstetrician physically present in the hospital, 24/7. We call that the Valley On Call Ob Service, or informally, we call it the Doc in Box. We do 12 or 24 hour shifts. It is voluntary for us Ob's to be part of that service. Personally, I am part of that service. I have been since the start. We only allow experienced Obs to do the On Call Ob service. The hospital pays us for this service, but it is not enough to cover the business expenses, especially the malpractice insurance costs, of providing the service. I do it because it is great to stay part of the system, it is really great to save lives, and the money is welcome. Right now there is about 14 of us that share in that service.
   I was on duty for Hurricane Irene last year. It was a busy shift. Many of the Obs could not make it in to the hospital, so I covered their needs while they were away. I was on duty when the power went out in the great power outage a few years ago. We made do with various generators, and backups to generators. We kept everyone safe, and the power came back eventually. We definitely deferred some elective procedures, such as labor inductions and C-Sections. Our hospital now has really giant generators, the kind that are built on  Semi Truck trailers. They are permanently installed.  When the power goes out now, there is just a brief flash of the lights, and everything seems perfectly normal. We still try to defer elective cases while on the generators, though.
   Around my town, and in all of northern New Jersey, there are trees down. Some came down on houses. There are about 30 houses smashed by trees in my town. Many cars are smashed. Many of the trees came down on power lines. Many of the trees were uprooted and toppled. A lot of the trees just broke off on the main trunk. During the hurricane we could hear trees cracking all over town. It makes an unbelievable sound. Usually there are about 3 or 4 cracks over a few seconds, and then the tree falls. When the power lines fall, the transformers near the fall are overloaded and explode, creating a huge flash. If the transformer doesn't explode, then the power lines that make it to the ground start sparking an electrical fire. The brightness and the colors of those fires are amazing. At 11 pm there were giant sparks of these fires all over town. It went on for hours like that. It was a like a lightening storm with continuous flashes all over town. The fire department and police just didn't stop working keeping everyone safe. They cordoned off the wires, used heavy equipment and chain saws to keep some of the roads open, and rushed all over the place. They told the entire town with a reverse 911 call to stay out of the upstairs of the houses. Personally, I saw a tree lifted up into the air about twice it's height, spinning around, leaves and dirt flying everywhere, the air so dense with debris I couldn't see through it, and then the tree was ripped apart and the branches dropped about a hundred feet (30 meters) in front of my car. That was a sight I will never forget. It was like slow motion watching it in my mind.
   During the storm I sometimes would stand at my front door. The wind was not steady, but gusty. I could hear the wind, but then would come a really loud gust just howling out of the north. It would really roar. Then the trees would start cracking and falling. My town has millions of trees. I think if it wasn't for the trees, the houses would have lost many of their roofs.
   Oddly, my town never got a lot of rain. I was watching the rain bands on radar, and the rain just skipped us most of the time. We never got it heavy. This storm was really wide. There were rain bands up to Toronto, and down to South Carolina, and it mostly skipped us. Then, the mountains west of us got several feet of snow, and the ski resorts had their earliest opening ever.
   It is now Thursday. There is no power in my office yet. The power is restored within a few blocks of my building, but not up to my building yet. So, I cannot see my patients. Originally, when we cancelled Mondays hours, we scheduled a lot of them for Wednesday. But Wednesday came and went without power, and still barely with phones. So we have been trying to communicate with them via my phone calling service. But that is really problematic. For instance, the phone calling service called all of my Mondays patients to remind them of their appointment, but they also got a message that the hours were cancelled. The reminder was automatic, and we didn't stop the automatic reminders. I can't blame people for being confused. I just hope they aren't too upset. My phone calling service is called SecureReach, and they are based in Ohio. During the emergency, it was difficult to get everything perfectly right.
   Most of the people around here are taking these problems in a good mood. I have seen these situations before, when everyone comes together to help each other out, and everyone tries to do all the right things. That especially happened after 9/11. But sometimes trying too hard to be nice backfires.
   There are lines for gasoline throughout New Jersey. The lines are hours long. The stations that have power to pump gas run out of that gas in a matter of hours, and the stations that have no electricity have their gas locked up underground. Last night I waited for Gas at a Hess station. One guy was done pumping, but couldn't get out and make room for the next guy, because he was blocked by another car. So we tried to help guide him out so other people could get their gas, but he wouldn't move. People started yelling at him, people who already had their gas. They wanted to help the people behind. Nobody from behind came up to yell; they were being patient. Eventually, the guy blocking him moved and everything got back to normal. So, the only stress there was that everyone was trying to help each other, but one guy didn't want to help enough by moving out of the way. So he got yelled at.
   My power company has about 1700 workers on the power line repairs, and some more tree workers to move the fallen trees. Even so, there are millions of trees down and it will take weeks to get it all fixed. Usually, with a natural disaster, neighboring states will send their power line workers to help. After last years freak October blizzard brought down a bunch of trees (because the leaves were still on), the crew that fixed my neighborhood was from North Carolina. They were prowling around in a pack of about 10 large trucks just looking for the problems and fixing them as they went. This time, the damage covers such a wide area, that if the North Carolina workers are not working in North Carolina, they will be in Maryland or Delaware, where they need just as much help. This time, the news reports that crews are coming in from as far as Texas and California. That would mean that the entire country has mobilized to help repair from the storm. I don't think this has happened before, except maybe with Katrina. But the width of destruction this time goes from Canada to Cuba. So the mobilization will have to be very very wide.
  Meanwhile, my patients will need to just go to the hospital if they cannot get me on the phone. And there is a good chance they cannot, as the cell service is very weak. And the phone lines are dependent on fickle generators. The phone company has a generator running right now, but who knows how long their gas will last. When they run out, if they do, there will be no internet for me to post a blog.
  The food stores are mostly open, but they are completely out of perishables. Most of the perishables were thrown away, because there was no power to keep them cold. And many people, especially the ones without a generator, have lost all of their perishable food.
  Me and my family are doing fine. I wish you all well. Send your prayers for the more than two hundred people that have died, from Canada to Cuba. People have died from drowning in floods, from being washed away in rushing water, from live electrical wires, and by being trapped by falling trees.
  On a lighter note, there will be a baby boom in 9 months. There certainly was one 9 months after last years freak blizzard. All the local hospitals Ob units were quite busy. So, look for lots of new babies next summer.
  Once again, thanks for reading my blog.

Dr John Marcus
Ridgewood NJ 07450.
Phone 201-447-0077
blog at http://doctorjohnmarcus.blogspot.com