Portsmouth officials review evacuation plans in the Emergency Operations Center.

When the Portsmouth Emergency Operations Center (EOC) started monitoring Hurricane Exie, it was a Cat 2 storm some 350 miles east of Brunswick, GA, but four days later, it was battering Rhode Island with sustained winds of over 100mph registered at Town Hall.

Fortunately, Hurricane Exie was a only a simulation.

But for the leaders of town departments who convened for a "tabletop" exercise at the Portsmouth fire station today, it seemed very real.

Chiefs and assistants from the Police and Fire Departments, the head of DPW, the Town Administrator and finance director, a representative from Portsmouth Water, and two EMA volunteers watched as Portsmouth Emergency Management director John King ran the Hurrevac software that marched the slow-moving storm up the coast. King rolled the simulation forward in six-hour increments and chaired "EOC meetings" as the town worked through its response.

It rapidly became obvious that a significant concern of everyone in the room was the north end.

"Almost 15% of the Town's population is in Island Park and Common Fence Point," said King, as participants surveyed FEMA flood maps and evacuation charts. With Island Park, the risk of storm surge and flooding is direct, King noted, but even the higher ground of Common Fence Point comes with a risk. "It effectively becomes an island."

And so, 48 hours ahead of the arrival of tropical-storm-force winds, the group began to consider evacuation plans. The official time projection for evacuating Newport County built into the software was 7 hours, King said, but noted that Portsmouth only takes about five. Still, with the time required for communication and mobilization, that puts the decision point well ahead of the arrival of the storm.

The group shared their obvious concerns. "It's been so long since we've had a major storm that people won't get out," said Town Administrator John Klimm. "Look at other locations around the country," said Police Chief Lance Hebert, citing North Carolina and Florida. "Even there, the majority of people only leave 12 hours before." One of the volunteers noted the added communication challenge presented by the events surrounding Irene last year.

"Studies show that a resident has to hear about the evacuation from three different sources before it really sinks in," said King. "Public education is our best tool to let people know we've dodged a few bullets but really bad things can happen in those two areas."

With the installation of the Town's new CodeRed "reverse 9-11" system — which should be operational soon — and a new Facebook page and web site set to be rolled out for Emergency Management, the group hoped that some of the need for advance information could be met. For those not as comfortable with technology, the non-emergency lines at both the Police and Fire departments would be staffed, ready to handle the anticipated influx of calls.

Portsmouth EMA Director John King surveys the track of Hurricane Exie.

And as the simulation rolled forward to the day before the hurricane, the group made the decision to put out the evacuation order. "Effective at 6am tomorrow, unless you hear otherwise," said King. "We need to tell people to keep their eyes and ears open."

The group discussed the logistical challenges posed by Gaudet School in Middletown being designated as the new consolidated Red Cross shelter for Aquidneck Island. Unlike the shelter at PMS, the Red Cross will not allow animals at this location. "Pets are the number one reason people don't evacuate," said King. "I don't know how we address that at Gaudet." With less than 12 hours left on the clock, the group planned their internal communication options, discussed the 24-hour staffing of the EOC, and ticked off the touch points needed with the state and non-governmental organizations.

Then Hurricane Exie arrived. It seemed that the team had made a good call, as the storm tracked slightly east of earlier projections, bringing the area of strongest winds into line with Aquidneck Island. By the time the evacuation was complete, Rhode Island was beginning to experience tropical force winds. They picked up throughout the afternoon, knocking out telephone and internet and closing the bridges off the island.

"Where are the utility trucks?" asked Klimm.

"There are a half-dozen pre-staged at Turner Avenue," said Hebert.

Throughout the night, the storm continued to intensify, eventually knocking out even the public safety microwave links to the RIEMA headquarters. King noted the importance of having ham radios as backup.

After battering the island with 100+ mph winds for three hours, Exie began to drift off. With traffic lights out, and Hebert said they could ask for help from the National Guard, pre-positioned at the State Police Headquarters, as the DPW crews headed out to begin the cleanup. Although there was substantial wind damage across town, the hurricane's track meant that the storm surge missed the Sakonnet, and once again, Island Park and Common Fence Point escaped serious impact.

As the simulation wrapped up, the group was scribbling notes and planning next steps and additional meetings to finalize preparations.

Klimm called the session "really helpful." King expressed a note of cautious optimism. "It points out that we have a lot of work to do," he said, "But we have some action items."

Full disclosure: I am one of the EMA volunteers, and was a participant-observer in the exercise.

6:43pm Seems like the east side of the island took the brunt of the hurricane-force winds on Bob's way up the Sakonnet, probably what explains all the trees and phone poles on East Main road. I've made it down to Middle road, and even here, there are trees blocking the entire street. But here, people have just driven over and crushed down stretches of them. A reflexive turn-taking protocol has developed: you have to go by in one lane and wave other people through.

True to the predictions, once Bob passed, the sky to the west and south is clear; there are a few straggling outrider clouds, but sunshine past and above them. I'm glad I've got the room at the HoJo's rather than hunkering down in the Park, which promises to be pretty grim this evening.

Coming down West Main, there's a truly tremendous lighting effect by the Stop&Shop. The setting sun has just peeked out from underneath the cloud bank, and off to the east past the airport the rays have lit up the bottom side of the cloud sheet far over the Sakonnet, leaving those last trailing remnant clouds cut out against an absolute pale blue sky.

At Starcase Cinemas, all the letters are gone — all that's sticking to the marquee is "Do tor 3" in Starcase 1.

Hard to believe it, but there are already signs of life: The China Star II restaurant is open.

8:41 This is feeling as close to the experience of something like a major quake as I hope I ever get. Walking around the halls of an American hotel with a flashlight. Waiting in line for a pay phone. All the accoutrements much of the world shrugs off as occasional irritants, brought painfully home.

Still no sign of light. But I think it's time to explore the effect of lack of illumination on Newport. Eerie to stand in a Howard Johnson's parking lot and see only the shadows of trees, lit only by a half moon and these stars, amazing to see this many stars this deep inside what we usually call civilization.

Driving down Broadway. It's patently weird — and, yes, dangerous — driving around these roads designed for streetlights, guided only by a half-moon and passing cars, with the unknown threat of branches and wet leaves across your path. There are a lot of cars, a whole stream, headed north, no doubt from Newport bridge; traffic that was held up by the closure, or people coming back to the the houses they fled last night or this morning. Not so much traffic headed down into Newport.

The Newport Hospital is the only building with lights...the big illuminated sign out front is like a beacon, visible way up Broadway, something that would otherwise fade into background.

And now, it appears that there are lights — yes, light already — down in Newport. The florescents are on at the Cumberland Farm but nobody's home when I stop to check. One guy, looking in the door mutters, "It's a horrible tease."

A line of people, 20 or so, waiting to get into the Store24, which does appear to be open.

It looks almost normal at the top of Thames street, a few leaves blown down, but otherwise it could be mistaken for an average weeknight. Yes, the Newberry's is completely boarded up, but every parking spot in front of the Brick Market is still occupied. Absolutely amazing. But that first block is it for the lights; once you're into the second block where the Burger King is, it's back to darkness and silence. And that's where the National Guard trucks are, with someone at the Y-junction with America's Cup, directing traffic.

Traffic lights, actual blinking traffic lights out here in front of Sunset Field. Down here, it seems like the hurricane was weeks ago. Seeing these traffic lights blinking yellow seems like a bizarre, sacrilegious desecration of the darkness. Plenty of lights on down here by the Bridge, which probably says something about the priorities of Newport Electric...

Now it's full dark, running up East Main road toward the Newport Creamery, pitch black and totally scary, the kind of dark one only associates with country roads, the only visible artifacts are street signs and reflectors popping out every now and then. Just passed the Newport Creamery and didn't even see it, just a shape hulking back in the glint of oncoming headlights. Several Middletown police cruisers are pulled up at Two Mile corner by the Douglas Drug, just sort of confabbing, keeping an eye on Things. It is incredibly dark here. There's now power on in the Acme, almost certainly a generator. They haven't progressed much with clearing East Main; it's still a mess north of the nurseries.

This is the stretch of East Main I couldn't get to before, and it is truly desolate. There are trees down blocking the right hand lanes both north and south bound once you get past Silvania road. Much worse than the West Main; there are whole sections here where the trees haven't been moved. There's one down across the entire southbound side by Trinity Cemetary. Just past Sandy Point, where I'm coming up on the other end of of the blockage I ran into heading south earlier, and there are whole trees down here on both sides of the street. That underlighting of powerlines that one only associates with small rural roads takes on a whole new look and feel when you see car headlights coming up from underneath a curve on the East Main Road. Up ahead, a truck is running slalom, threading among trees. Driving the narrowing lane is spooky, an entire tree down across three lanes, branches reaching out to scrape both sides of the car.

Looks like that's all she wrote, because here the road dead ends into trees. The entire road just stops being a road and it's just trees taking down power lines right across, just complete non-roadness. There's a cop waving motorists back.

"Hi"
"Can't get through this way, sir."
"Okay, let me turn around..."

By now, I know the drill. Cut over to West Main. But still, if you hadn't driven this in daylight to give you some vague idea of what was going on, the nature of these shadowy shapes that keep looming up at you, this would be an extremely scary drive. Just passed the Stop&Shop and didn't even see it. The Middletown police are out giving speeding tiickts, and a good idea, too.

Here and there, off to the sides, there is the glint of lights, the thrum of generators.

9:44 Island Park, again Looks like Lake Flo has pretty much drained and evaporated, and Park Ave is drivable. Well, mostly; there's some roadbed buckling in spots. Coming up on Flo's, there is just an enormous tideline of stuff all across the road, glinting tartar sauce packets, chunks of wood, pilings, seaweed, and the most unbelievable, rich, cheesy smell.

There is picturesque moonlighht on the Sakonnet, and the water is absolutely still. It's hard to believe what it looked like a few hours ago. Time to head back to the HoJo and crash.

Without any streetlights, you've just sort of got to know where to turn onto Middle, then Hedly. You'd better have the pattern in the mind, because it just doesn't exist in your visual field. It's a rush, driving on the deserted West Main Road, guided by occasional stabs of moonlight and adrenaline, guessing where the trees lurk, surfing the breakers of the blackout, motorheading into darkness overdriving the headlights by five, ten, twenty miles an hour...

§

4:18 No rain now, hasn't been for about a half-hour, just these low, rapidly moving clouds curling in around from the NW and this Wind, still occasionally rising up into bursts of treebending, but for the most part just a few spare gusts. The sky is much lighter.

5:00pm Patches of blue in between clouds. The sun is out, and I think I'm going to take a run down to Island Park and check things out before it gets dark.

5:08 Well there's a refreshing number of cars out, traffic actually moving along on East Main Road. The clouds here are truly incredible, a low cumulus scudding against blue sky. There's a big tree down across from Sears, just tipped over, ripped up by the roots. Traffic lights are out in Middletown, people following "see and avoid" rules. Kmart and Almacs windows intact, still taped up, driving through a squally rainstorm now as clouds pass. Along East Main, along the sides of the road here, the density of branches down is spectacular.

Looks like about as far as it's possible to go on East Main. Just past Wyatt Square, power lines are down. A whole section knocked over, right before the Vinland winery, junction boxes, wires, lines, everything's down on the side of the road. Big yellow power trucks blocking the entire street, no way to get through up here, have to try the other side of the island.

Driving along the side roads, its like the day after the end of the world. Lots of trees down, only a few cars on the roads, and along the street, people just stirring out of their houses now to assess the damage. Off to the south and southeast, it's blue sky.

Cars are driving around with pieces of trees sticking out from their undercarriage where they've run over, picked them up, dragging them along. A giant fir tree cut down on the road by the airport.

The streets have a feeling like it is after a blizzard, the first few hardy souls wandering out, forging those first few trails, which in this case is no metaphor. Traffic is moving along briskly on West Main road. In front of the Starcase Cinemas, which strikes me as being parallel to the trouble on the other side, there are four poles down, a fifth snapped off near the top and tipped over, hanging by wires. Crews are already on the scene with a giant augur, redigging post holes for the fallen ones. There are plenty of tipped over trees and route number signs bent over. It seems like this higher part of the island must have borne the brunt of the wind. A big orange scoop plow runs along the road, literally plowing the tree parts over to the side.

Into Portsmouth now. I'm amazed at how many utility crews are out here; passing them on both sides. Trees have gone down over the classic stone retaining walls, knocking out sections. More state crews working, reducing West Main to one lane as a front loader works the piles, followed by high speed plow knocking back whatever's left.

Eerie signs of normalcy at the Gulf Station near Stringham, the turnoff for Melville. There are planters full of flowers just sitting there undisturbed, while out in front, on the street, there are these huges green expanses of tree limbs and foliage clotting two, three, and sometimes all four lanes. Moving north, looking down into the reservoir, the surface is choppy, and it's full, running up onto its green banks. Just passed a National Guard Humvee, an unusual sight for West Main road. The way the trees and greenery have gone down on the roads, with the cars running tracks through them, its like some sort of bizarre chromatic reversal of a snowstorm, a bizarro universe with green snow and cars crunching through drifts.

Back at Portsmouth Town Hall, now the flag is blowing east, the pole still bouncing back and forth, but blue skies behind it now. Turning north onto East Main, pretty much the same picture here, a few trees down in people's yards but not a sense of tremendous property damage.

Oh boy. St. Anthony's going to have to need a new Mass time sign; it's down and smashed, one of the trees in their yard down. Seems like a lot more trees lost here in the northern end of Portsmouth. Still haven't seen major property damage, though; not one broken plate glass window, even the ones that aren't taped up. Bunch of utility poles down across form the Dairy Mart — flat down to the ground, wires off, the whole nine yards. Not a good sign, re: electricity.

Coming down into the Park. There are a few trees down on Park Ave, blocking off one lane on each side, but luckily there doesn't seem to be damage to the houses. At the foot of the hill, I can see standing water ahead on the street, and a rainbow — a BIG rainbow — over the Sakonnet. A complete, 180-degree Rainbow! From far Sakonnet point to the right over the houses to the left. Quite impressive.

Not going to try driving the car; park it at the base of the hill and take the rest of it on foot.

The beach has been substantially reconfigured, and the water level in the street rapidly increases as you head east. Have to hop up and walk along the top of the seawall. The outflow from one of the storm drains is cutting a deep channel out through the beach right here, against these lampposts. There's a large crowd and what looks to be some emergency trucks up ahead. There are some radical new channels carved here into the beach, right at the concrete where the ice cream truck pulls in.

This is definitely high tide. Walking along the seawall, to my right, on the beach, the water is a little more than ankle deep, while to my left, on the street, it's flooded up almost to the top of the seawall, about two feet. There's a car over there, up to the doors, and a van up to his axles, trying to back out. It's really amazing that there's more water inside than outside. Obviously, it came in over the wall, and it's slowly draining. I can see it running through the cut in the wall and down the steps in front of Flo's Clam Shack, just a gusher of water pouring out, literally cascading down the steps and carving out a new channel, with chunks of Park Ave asphalt washed out over the seawall lying in the sand.

Flo's is major league effed up. The whole front is ripped off the building; you can look straight through into the back. The Flo's refrigerator, along with other stuff from the interior, looks like it came through the wall and fetched up in front of Chesters.

Gonna have to go another block up Park Ave in order to get across. Traffic's backing up here, with people having top turn around and head back, cuz there's no way through unless you've got extremely high ground clearance. Riverside street is dry, but there is water in the backyards, and I can see houses with some erosion and damage here.

Trying to get a fix on our house looking across yards...the chimney's still up, that's a good sign — and my grandfather's antique TV antenna's still on the roof. I was kinda hoping Bob would do me a favor and blow that down, but I guess you can't have everything.

Have to walk a long way down Riverside before you can cut over to the left. Coming down Gormley, things don't look as bad: phone poles are still up, less visible damage to these houses than the first block down by the beach. All the wires going into the house are okay, looks like all the windows are intact. Somebody lost a section of gutter or flashing, ended up in our yard. Out back in the garden, a couple of tomatoes fell off, but the cinderblocks did their job, cages still standing. Inside the house, it's deathly quiet, power off and dark, humid, but no visible signs of water. Everything held.

Heading back to the car. Lake Flo is halfway up the first block of Gormley, and amid the floating debris are bobbing what I suspect are the creosoted chunks of phone pole that Flos's used as their fencing. I'm just hoping that Park Ave has drained enough allow me to get past now, but it's still coming pretty far up all these side streets. Couple of screen doors on Ormerod look a bit the worse for the wear, buit seems like the extent of the visible property damage. Finally make it down at Park Ave and get another look at the damage to Flo's, truly sad and terrifying.

Heading down East Main road by Stub Toe lane; a lot of trees uprooted, and here's a big one leaning over the road in a way that I don't particularly like; drive just a little faster to get past the thing. Can't get down to Union Street — there's a whole row of phone poles flat bang down. Again, up at the high part of the island where the winds weren't restrained. It's the Union street traffic light and the telephone poles on the east side of the street. The second one to go over didn't even bend; the first tilted at 15 angle, second one failed ten feet up, then snapped, popped part of the side off in a greenstick fracture, and took the pole down so that its hanging off right across the double yellow at about six feet off the middle of the street. Past that, the traffic light, dead on the double yellow, and maybe 3-4 more poles flat down on the ends of their crossties over on the broken white on the right hand lane.

Word pictures don't do this scene justice, seeing the middle of East Main road occupied by phone poles lying over on their sides. There is an overpowering smell of green and snapped wood, a fresh, almost sour, mix of scrubbed air and wood resins.

At least I know that West Main road is passable. I double back to try cutting across on Schoolhouse Lane and see how far this gets me... with these narrow side roads, its a crapshoot.

§

1:48 71.7W 41.0 N in the HoJo Watching pieces of trees ripped up and lifted across the parking lot, dumped on unsuspecting cars. We're about an hour away from max force winds, and they're saying that we may be the recipients of the main nucleus of 115-mph winds. If that's true, we can expect to see some more things whipping around out here.

It's a thoroughly obscured sky, a few clouds visible, moving, but as a whole the sky completely grayed out. There are bursts of rain sweeping across from east to west. Occasional bursts of hail, rapidfire but brief. There are odd, aperiodic lulls in the rain and wind. The cat is wisely hunkered down under the bed, as far away from the window as he can get. Obviously the more intelligent of the two of us. Stepping out here on the concrete decking in front of the room, taking looks at what's going on out here, and it's not pretty.

"We can slow it down now and put it into motion...grab this color... and we can move this frame-by-frame — you can see how it's climbing up right over the state... two more frames, there you go... the heart of the hurricane now looking like its sitting right on the south coast... 71.7W 41.0 N max winds 100mph"

John Ghiorse calls in from the Nordic Prince, about 150 miles south of Block Island "There has been, of course, a lot of seasickness, and there are people who are just absolutely exhausted from from riding this thing..it has really been quite an experience."

The Eye of Bob, filling in... no sunshine in the center. "Time to go to our Channel Six exclusive live doppler weather radar" We've got now a dull calm, a little breeze, nothing like the last hour's treebending impact. This may be the Eye, here, dropping off into quiet grayness out there, at 2:15 pm. They report hook echoes, but so far no funnels on the doppler radar.

"That of which we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent."
-Ludwig Wittgenstein

§

12:28 in the Howard Johnson's Even the broadcast stations having trouble punching through. Microwave breakup on the live remote from Warwick. "Tell us what the situation is...it looks a little wet right now..." Lisa on the Nanaquaket Pond Bridge in Tiverton. "It's really getting quite alarming out here. Just about a moment before you cut to us a large tree limb snapped off and headed in our direction. I yelled to my photographer Bob Goodell to duck and thankfully it headed the other way....by all means, stay off this bridge."

§

Monday, 11:18... Report that the winds in Warwick, ten miles south, are gusting at 40 mph. Still pretty clear here...not a hard rain, but a persistent one, clouds still surging from the east out of a sky gone completely gray. Video of the scene at one of the auditoriums, kids and families huddled on on cots, "They came by this morning and told us to, 'Get out, get out!'" Now announcing that at 1pm there will be a complete travel ban on all state roads, to be enforced by the State Police. State of emergency. This convinces me. I start making phone calls and locate a room at the Howard Johnson's up in Middletown that will accept one damp refugee and a cat. Gotta be at least a hundred feet above sea level up there.

The feeder bands, those areas of intense winds and gusty rains, are tracked minute by minute by the weatherfolks on their doppler radar. Now they're saying it may scootch a little bit to the east and head up Buzzard's Bay, but that we can still expect tropical force winds anytime now, and hurricane force by one o'clock. The Governor has announced a press conference in the Situation Room up at the statehouse. He made it in to T.F. Green airport before they shut it down; returning from the Governor's conference out on the West Coast. If I could drive and watch TV at the same time, I'd have left already. How else can I cover the event without access to the media of communication central to my culture?

The real leap of Faith. Do you turn off the power, or take the chance that things won't be quite as bad as they're predicting? Perhaps its better not to take the chance. Better err on the side of caution and throw the switch. Officially powered it down at 11:18. Unscrewed all four of the main fuses and flipped the box for the hot water heater, and it looks like just in the nick of time, too. The trees are doing a really funky tree dance-Thing.

There's an eerie sense of calm just right now. As I walked out to the car, a monarch butterfly accompanied me from the rosebushes. And there is a cat who is happy to see me finally make it out to the car. I'll sit here for a minute and see how things progress. Turn the key and go. It's time.

Park Avenue. The roads are strangely desolate. A few cars driving slowly. No one's too worried just yet, but what everyone wants to avoid is being trapped Somewhere, anywhere, so there's people driving the way I am, looking out all the windows, trying to see what's happening. After 1pm, when they shut all the roads, no one will be moving. I'm down near the end of the Park Ave seawall now and can barely see across to Portsmouth Park, so much fog and confusion. All of the houses down here, giant sheets of plywood over the windows, sliding glass doors.

Yeah, I think I timed it just about right, driving down East Main Road seeing lots of leaves knocked down. Not much vehicular traffic, and the car is definitely feeling pushed around by the wind. All the windows of the Dairy Mart are taped up, and the trees are bending dangerously over the power lines. A Portsmouth Water and Fire District truck just passed me, looks like they're driving around keeping an eye on things.

It's a serious storm at this point, driving sheets of rain, you can hear it on the roof, not quite opaquing the windshield, but coming pretty darned close. No sign of life in the plaza with the Mac Shop. Already here on East Main Road, there's small limbs knocked down, so the trees arel already feeling the effects, with leaves blowing across the roadway in rainy gusts.

Down at the corner of Turnpike and East Main, picking up a New York news radio station, and now they're announcing that Gorbachev is not out, simply "ill" That sounds to me like there's some back and forthing about who's in control of Tass right now, if not the Soviet Union itself.

As cars are going by in the other direction, they're throwing up roostertails that are whipped across the road at 45 degree angles, and the winds are definitely tropical force level now.

Down at Portsmouth Town Hall the flagpole is deviating from the vertical by a couple of feet, with the flag straight out to the west, the wind perpendicular to the road.

Okay, now we're down just past Oliphant in Middletown and we've got solid sheets of white water coming right across the farms to the left here and into the windshield. To the left, its solid gray sky, and we're definitely into gale force action. The streetlight in front of the Vinland winery is already out, and just went past a crew up on a cherry picker doing some work, so we've obviously got a few power lines down already.

§

"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."
-"Me and Bobbie McGee"

"Bob is. Bob becomes. Bob is Not."
-Sub-Genius Handbook

Monday, 10:29 am 39.6N 72.6W... This is not a preamble, this is the Thing Itself. We've got heavy, driven rain coming down. Folks have appropriately been getting the hell out, and I'm coming to believe that that's what I may have to do. Soon. Most of the other cars are gone now. The neighborhood is quiet. Up and down the street, rows of windows wait taped up with crosshatch test patterns. Down in the bay, whitecaps are running in front of what feels like 20-30 mph wind. A sudden jump in intensity just at 10:31 and the gusts begin moving the trees around, rain coming down at nearly 45 degree angle, in from the east, the Bay only vaguely visible now. This definitely looks like the leading edge of some Activity. When the wind starts making noise, its time to punch out, and the wind has started doing just that. So I think it's time to do a scan on the security of all rooms, and then get the eff out of here. Let's see.. a final check upstairs, all seems to be well. Plastic over everything on the beds...near the windows...and let's shut it down.

"Jamestown Bridge, the Newport Bridge and the Mount Hope Bridge will all be closed in less than a half an hour. At eleven o' clock, they're going to be closed because of the anticipated high winds. And then at 11:30 the Braga Bridge is going to be clolsed."
-WLNE 6News

Oh, man. The Braga Bridge is not a suspension bridge, like those others, it's a a big beastly truss construction, but if the weather is going to close THAT...it's convincing me. The cat's looking at me, got him in the car already, cuz when things get bad they might get bad quickly, and I'll want to be able to move with some degree of rapidity. This must have been what it felt like those last few hours on Atlantis, wondering when the Hammer was going to come down. Well, here it is. Sky low enough now that I can hardly see across to the houses around the curve of the bay, whitecaps running in front of this wind, gain way up, making questionable noises as it whips through the utility poles...whistling windthrash plus a nearly subaural low frequency moaning. Unexpected, not what you associate with trees. A crow just took off from a power line and almost experienced a Colorado Springs Event.

"Tense, but prepared." Those are the words we hear over and over on the news, the rain has cleared up briefly, you can see lower clouds running crazily against the high slow deck. As I look out the back porch door, they're coming almost directly toward me, parallel to the side of the house's east-west axis, which leads me to believe that the back of the house, bathroom and garden, may get the worst of this. There's an almost eerie quiet in the street now, no cars going by, no cars with their Houses. When they turn the water off, as they've promised to do here in the not-too-distant, it's really time to get out.

Another quantum jump in wind intensity at 10:41. Now we have the consistent wire howl and a serious, serious tree movement accompanying it. Bending crowns & top branches some 5 to 10 feet from the vertical. But coming over my head, so I can look down the block and see no signs of human occupancy, quite a barren sight here on Gormley Ave. Again, you can see the lower clouds, darker, outlined against the lighter backdrop. Quite an eerie noise. I'm going to try to wait another few minutes, try and stay on top of the news. They're showing footage form Charleston: smashed McDonald's signs, (cuz everyone knows how they're supposed to look, I guess...) houses with siding sheared off, debris choking the streets. A warning, a semiotic precursor. Gaze into the Crystal Screen. Here is your Future, viewers...

They're just marveling, the weatherfolk, over the technology, these GOES satellite images every half-hour, enabling even the one-lungest of local stations to put together a little flip-book animation of Approaching Doom. Baudrillard was right. The hurricane has ceased to exist; what we experience now is its simulation. We are disappointed at the views outside our windows, the vews from the mobile Broncos. We want to see a hurricane-shaped phenomenon, not all this boring rain at the windows. Why doesn't it look like that cool view from space, the swirling, almost galactic whirpool of white?

§

"Long ago when the Great Rains came
and the Sea rose up on the Land
We stood on the shores like dinosaurs
with crystals in our hands..."
-The Reptiles, Mother Atlantis

"We are all Tasaday."
-Jean Baudrillard, Simulations

Jean Baudrillard, one of those marginally comprehensible French semioticians, wrote this book called Simulations, in which he argues that the logic of late-stage consumer capitalism (to intertextually tag Fred Jameson) is, unsurprisingly, simulation. Now by simulation, I believe that he means the possibility, indeed, the propensity, for cultures such as ours to reproduce objects until they become an infinity of mirrors wherein the authenticity (and even the existence) of the "original" becomes not so much doubtful as irrelevant. Put simply: Everyone knows that watching a football game is better on television: is more of a spectacle, is more up-close and personal, is made more interesting by its verbal annotation from a couple of friendly sports-geeks in the booth and slo-mo replay with paintbox circles and arrows. Football, the game, has been remade in the image of television, the archetechnology of simulation. When we used to have to read about the game, the day after, in the newspaper, we never had the illusion that we "were there." And yet, ask anyone on Tuesday morning if they "saw the game" last night, and, by gosh, they did. But they didn't, you see. They saw a pattern of several million colored dots per second interlacing around on their screen. That's the reality now. The "real" game has no running color commentary.

Bau(drillard) knows football. And when he sez "We are all Tasaday," he means that we, like that unfortunate pre-literate tribe, live now in the haunting age of "having been discovered," having been "allowed to return to our natural habitats," by kindly social scientists, and that we all now Pretend that Things Are As They Were Before, that we just live, exist, and Be, when in fact we all really know that everything is carefully forecast, plotted and maximized, and that every step we take in our concrete forest, we've been sold the shoes (Gotta be the Shoes!) we wear as well as the road we walk on. (All the miles of Alamo country.) Everything is, has already been, simulated. As Baudrillard points out, nothing is clearer proof of this than Disneyland, an enormous "artificial" habitat whose true function is to convince us of the Reality of the everyday life we spend watching television, trading Merc index futures, and electing cowboy actors.

Cut loose from any moorings in reality, such a culture drifts becalmed in a sea of doubly dereferenced signs.

We do experience this as a social tension: the desire to establish requirements for "social literacy," the reactionary insistence on the canon in literature, the not-so-subtle critiques from the right of "political correctness" as a tool of leftist repression. We long for the "Family Values" that Norman Rockwell simulated and Ronald Reagan homilized: women in labor and minorities off-screen.

There's a joke I heard a Russian commentator tell some years ago, probably on Nightline, that went something like this: When the Soviets want to change history, they imprison the intellectuals and change the textbooks; when Americans want to change history, they make a mini-series. Simulation has taken command when people flock to pseudohistory like The Civil War, when actual crimes are referred to by their filmic antecedents, and when each new scene of tragedy or horror is crowded, not only with attorneys, but with producers trying to buy the rights to the Event. In his own homespun American way, Chayefsky tried to warn us about all this in 1975, with words that hold the grim prescience of the unheeded:

"We spin illusions. We'll tell you any goddamned thing you want to hear. We'll tell you that Kojak always gets his man, and that nobody gets cancer in Archie Bunker's house...you eat like the Tube, you dress like the Tube, you even think like the Tube. This is madness. You maniacs. My god, we're the illusion...you're the Reality..."
-Howard Beal, Network

The only time television is real and necessary is in times of crisis; it is at its best when unscripted, at its worst when pretending to be at its "best" — the "highbrow" crap like the Ring cycle on PBS that many may tape, but nobody watches. But pure, raw television, on those few occasions when the mask slips... oh, that is a heady thing indeed. Special reports almost always have that character: a poorly prepared newsperson jerked in front of a camera, mispronouncing things. Live, unedited footage. Remember the first feed from the Sadat assasination, where you saw that guy whose arm had been blown off? Dan Rather winced audibly, a breath-catching grunt, and the mike was live. You and Dan were seeing this for the first time; no pre-packaging, no preconceptions. I do not make the claim that when cameras point at something that they are transmitting "it," but only that mediated virtual presence posesses degrees of simulation. The first time we saw the Challenger explode, it was immediate. The seventy-fifth time, with the slomo closeup on the SRB rotating into the tank, was, to put it charitably, mediated. And by the time they did the "made for TV movie" we didn't even need to see it. Cut to Peggy Noonan's poetic, noetic masterpiece of spin.

"Shall I project a world?"
-Oedipa Maas,
The Crying of Lot 49

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Monday 9:19 am. 39.2 N 72.9 W... Just got a call from my Uncle Art, who was suitably reassuring. Even in 1938, the water only just came up to the house. Okay, it came thigh high up to the house, but what do you want? It's got two stories. The houses down closer to the beach suffered the dislocation and damage from the storm surge, and that was (as we already know...) at high tide, so in all likelihood the precautions I've taken: moving all the books up to the second floor; packing up the Mac and hard disk and loading them into the car; prepping the house for an immediate Evacuation Procedure, all these may not be necessary, but again, we probably won't know that until we go mano-a-mano con el urugamo...

As if the hurricane wasn't bad enough, sez the news, now there's a tornado watch in effect. Those feeder bands moving in the vanguard of Bob may be strong enough to spawn some of the nasty, twisty little critters. What's that old Greek saying..."One thing never happens?" And now, this...Ted Koppel, who I guess had been on vacation, is back, buttoned-down as always, talking with correspondents fresh from an audio-only Q&A with George Bush who managed not to say much of anything except he was concerned about reports of the coup and we'll see what happens. Oh, and here's Dan Rather, with a stupid fresh Haircut & Coloring, yammering, "The key question is: 'What is going to happen on Wall Street this morning?'" Oh, right, how could I forget, that's the key question. Just ignore those hook echoes on the doppler radar.

The Town of Portsmouth Police just drove by doing that Bwoop! Bwooop! thing on the electronic siren. They're here to enforce the Lieutenant Governor's Executive Order: "Public water will be shut off during the hurricane. Evacuate the area immediately."

"You heading out, sir?"
"Looks like I better."
"Okay. As soon as you can."
"What time should I be out by?"
"As soon as possible."
"As soon as possible?"
"We'd like it by ten, but get out as soon as you can."
"I'm packing up."

There's a world of difference between 'Roger' and 'Wilco' as wily old Bob Heinlein said somewhere.

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"Today, we are all Jewish."
-Elie Weisel, panel discussion following
The Day After

I had a hard time falling asleep Sunday night. The weather outside was clear and calm, but for some reason that only made things worse. Island Park is a quiet place; any outside noise is enought to prod you into wakefulness, and surfacing through sleep, I could hear people working: the near or distant pounding of hammers, car doors and the hubbub of vehicle loading, the occasional rip of a power saw. It felt like the Day Before the End of the World.

I kept flashing back to Hurricane Gloria in 1985. It hit on a Friday, late in the season, when the ocean was already cooling off. I was back in Brooklyn. Despite the best efforts of the New York news media to frighten the city into paralysis, Gloria slipped by the Big Apple entirely. I had taken a nap after taping up windows and clearing the basement, and when I woke up, it was brilliant blue sky and mild breezes. The Big Pineapple was not so lucky; Gloria expended much of her wind's fury on New England, battering Newport with gale force winds and leaving folks without power for nine days.

The connection I kept making, though, was with the semiotics of disaster. 1985 was the year of the Mexico City quake. We had been renormed by such ripped-from-the-headlines classics as Special Bulletin and The Day After. Something kept gnawing at me about the desire of Americans (or the news media, anyway, which really amounts to the same thing) to see, to have a virtual presence at disasters of magnitude. Can it be explained away with the cavalier "there but for the grace..." defense, or is there something deeper, more darkly resonant in our preoccupation with Watching Ourselves Die?

The Eighties were the decade that saw the tech noir disaster film come into its own. The churning, societal epics of the Seventies (Earthquake, Airport, Poseidon Adventure, Towering Inferno ) were not so much about disaster — or even the Four Elements — as they were about the fallout, the ripples of change propagating through culture from the Sixties: Defrocked priests & the agony of Belief, divorce & unmarried pregnancy, the new mores, the (re)discovery of corruption. All told in a style more reminiscent of the broad brush of Katherine Anne Porter or Wilder's Bridge at San Luis Rey. But one of the few lessons that movies learned from television is the power of focussing on the beauty — or horror — of the everyday. It was a lesson that Paddy Chayefsky taught the Tube back during the Golden Age, and it really is the intelligent exploration of personal disaster that characterizes the films of the Eighties.

Consider Alien. This transitional film, released in 1979, is right on the cusp. The 'bomber crew' cast typical of the Seventies is gradually devoured by H.R. Geiger's insectile horror. Kubrick's monolith has come to life, and it ain't just a squeal in yer headsets, space cadets. By the end of the film, Ripley is alone, in a tiny escape pod, where she will remain for the following decade. She will reappear as Sarah Connor in Terminator. In James Cameron's thematic couplet of Aliens and Terminator 2 she returns, sublimating the horror of mortality through childrearing. Ripley, believe it or not, even manifests herself in the wisecracking hairbreadth bravado of John McClane in Die Hard/er. For unlike the 'terrors' of earlier days, where the plot would elaborate our harmatia, by the Eighties we realized that the One True Fear was the random evil that could Just Happen To Us. Woman crushed by a crane; kid killed by a stray bullet in his living room; young woman working in a fast food restaurant gets a nail gun fired into her head, someone walks into a Post Office or a McDonald's and starts shooting. The Western necrotechnopolis had become a giant machine operating at insane speed with no safety nets or OSHA protective gear. And the very ordinary people it produced: terrorists, serial killers, mass murderers, stoned freight train engineers, NASA administrators, US Presidents...well...if they didn't scare you, you must really believe it's only a movie...

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Monday, August 19, 7:56 am 38.8N 73.1W...The first squall, the first outlier of Hurricane Bob has just passed through. A brief shower as I was out buying cat litter and batteries, the irreplaceable essentials. The conveniece stores are crowded, people grabbing armloads of bread and water, candles and cigarettes, enough to last them the couple of days they may be out of contact with the Pipeline of Civilization. Word is that Bob will be making landfall early this afternoon, and the local news has been preempting since seven a.m.

The neighbors are all out with circular saws and plywood covering up windows. I've had to make do with masking tape and positive thinking. Most important thing was the tomato plants. I staked them up and packed around the cages with cinderblocks, and we'll just have to hope they survive the onslaught.

Now the news is saying that the State of Rhode Island has just ordered the evacuation of all low-lying coastal areas, which of course, this is. The storm surge is predicted in the 10-15 foot range. Bad News if this puppy comes right up Narragansett Bay which, true to form, is what Bob Sheets at the National Hurricane Center in Florida is now predicting..."a 50 mile wide eye...sustained winds of 115 mph..." The only good news is that they're still calling for it to make landfall around two this afternoon, beating the high tide by two hours...

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Of course, by the time I finished debriefing Dottie and her husband, the eleven was over. I contented myself with leaving the TV on, volume down, and hunting around on the radio dial for some info. Rhode Island has a great many attractive natural features, but an all-news radio station is not one of them. Then I looked over at the little black and white screen. A special report? Now why would a network break into one of those?

Sunday 11:55 pm... Oh my freaking god...Coup in Moscow? VP Gennady Yanayev ousts Gorby? KGB involvement? The feeling—the zero bone—of Fear. The Wall came down, but now the Hammer has fallen and it's Real: a leaderless nuclear power rattling around in the centrifugal throes of secessionist frenzy. Should I call people? Wake them up? Tell them to flee the cities? Uh-uh. Where would they go?

Eff it. I sit back to watch Quincy.

"I...I can explain..."
-Dr. Frank N. Furter

"Make it good. They shot you last week."
-The Audience

This particular 9" cheap plastic TV, made by some knockoff low-rent electronics concern with the spooky monicker of "Arvin," seems always to inflict a nasty Greek choral tone to the News whenever it can con me into letting it pretend to inform me. It's probably just that time of year I seem to, in it, behold. Usually I'm up here by early August, just in time to see the bell ringing at the Genbaku Domu-mae, or folks gathering around the cenotaph in Nagasaki's Peace Park on Today's Japan.

And it was...what...two years ago...when I managed to get up here early in the summer, end of May, and I sat watching this footage of The Goddess in the Square brought down.

I could even forgive all that, if it wasn't for the plane crashes. Since I started coming up here in the mid-Eighties, not a summer has gone by without at least one low-rez crash site. August 2, 1985: Dallas-Fort Worth; 137 killed. September 6, 1985: Milwaukee; 31. August 31, 1986: Cerritos, CA, mid-air collision; 82. August 16, 1987: Detroit Metro; 156. August 31, 1988: DFW takeoff; 13. July 19, 1989: Sioux City; 112. The horror at the Ramstein airshow followed a couple of days later. Six of the worst air disasters in US history.

Last year, just into August and getting twitchy, I watched with increasing horror as Special Reports fragmented the overnight infomercials with slices of an invasion by an unknown character named Saddam Hussein.

Not that I'm superstitious, but I've begun to be afraid of looking at this particular television late at night, anymore...

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