SIDE SALAD - Everything crunchy is good.

THIS JUST IN! TROPICAL STORM ERNESTO: RUINS LUNCH, WATERS LAWN

What if they gave a hurricane and no one got it?

Turns out that Willie Drye, author of Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, got more from Ernesto in the Side Salad North Carolina Doppler 12,000 Weather Bureau than we did in Tampa.

He filed this report on Friday:

From: Willie Drye
Subject: bu-bye Ernesto

Hi guys:

Ernesto has pretty well cleared out of Washington County. It was more of an annoyance here than anything else. My barometers bottomed out around 8:45 a.m., and by 9 a.m. they were rising, so that's obviously when the center passed closest to us and started moving away.

From the maps, it looks like the center went mabye 25 or 30 miles west of us, and it was a tropical depression by the time it got here. We had a couple of downpours, and the wind somehow found a way to blow rain under our back porch roof and cause a leak in the kitchen ceiling that I discovered when I got up around 6:30. Still, there wasn't much all that much wind, less than you'd see during a bad summer thunderstorm. Now it's still overcast, but very cool and we've turned off the AC and opened all the windows.

Our next-door neighbor directly across the street had roofers working on her place last week, and apparently they didn't know or didn't care what they were doing because her roof leaked so badly her bedroom ceiling came down. We saw a different roofer's pickup truck parked in her driveway after the rain stopped. This guy did maintenance on the roof of our 110-year-old house earlier this summer and knows what he's doing, so I hope he gets her roof squared away.

I think they got it a little rougher south of us, where it came in as a strong tropical storm somewhere around Cape Fear, which is near Wilmington. There were some worries about flooding, and this morning the Nitwitness News crews where standing in the rain in Greenville, chirping and pointing at cars that had stalled in flooded streets.

So that's it for Ernesto.

Later,

Willie

Posted by Jeff at September 4, 2006 01:53 AM | TrackBack