As someone who is terrified of power outages I was extremely grateful that I wouldn’t be home for the hurricane that was headed for New York.
As someone who is terrified of power outages I was extremely grateful that I wouldn’t be home for the hurricane that was headed for New York. At the same time I felt like I was missing out on something, as silly as that sounds, and longed to be home braving the storm with everyone else.
I am from North Salem, a small town in Westchester County, NY that no one has ever heard of. We’ve had our share of storms, but nothing like this.
The only thing for me to do was follow the updates on twitter and the news and watch as my whole family and all my friends on the east coast prepared for the storm.
School was cancelled and most of my friends at universities headed home the days before the storm to wait it out.
The last hurricane I experienced left us with some flooding, trees down and no power for 5 days, but when I saw reports that this was going to be the most intense hurricane to hit north of North Carolina ever recorded, I knew it was more serious.
Still, I had little expectations that anything would go seriously wrong and teased my family about how they would be stuck without electricity for a week and didn’t complain so much about the rain in Sheffield that day.
I followed the storm updates closely and went to bed knowing that although they didn’t have power, everyone I knew was safe and extremely bored.
When I woke up in the morning I was shocked to see a text from a friend saying, “two kids died in North Salem.”
Our town is very small, everyone knows everyone and this was horrible news.
I then saw a text from my sister saying, “You will probably hear this when you wake up. A tree fell on these people’s house in Peach Lake and two little boys died.”
My heart immediately sank, I knew I didn’t know them, but I knew where they lived and when I learned their names later I had heard of their families.
Wanting to find out more I headed to Facebook and saw at least 20 statuses about the boys and couldn’t believe it.
The most shocking thing about it all was when I saw the BBC tweet that there had only been 16 deaths at the time reported all the way from Florida to Canada, and two of them had happened in my little town.
I felt so helpless from so far away and realising that something like that could’ve happened to someone I know scared me so much and for the first time in the year and a half I’ve been in England, I was worried about being so far away from home.
The storm was a humbling experiencing for everyone who lived in all the areas that were hit and made people appreciate the things they have even more, even me so many miles away.
As of Sunday, 4th November most of my town has their electricity back on and things are starting to go back to normal.
I’m sending my virtual love and prayers to everyone that was affected by the storm, especially those two boy’s families.
Read more about them here
