Thank you to everyone who has been calling, texting and emailing me to check on how my family and I weathered Hurricane Sandy. We are very fortunate and grateful to say that we are all just fine. The power outages were lengthy as to be expected and thousands of people around us are still going with out it, and worse. Our power was out until last night, a total of 5 days, and we are some of the very lucky ones! LIPA is doing the best that they can, and they are letting everyone know they should be prepared to go another 5 days with out power, and longer for the areas of real damage. The power outage coupled with the cell phone towers being damaged have resulted in all of us here on LI being a bit out of touch. During the past 5 days I was unable to get any of my voice mails on my cell, or call out. Thankfully my texts made it through after 3 or so tries. I hated to think that there were all these voice mails, probably sweet friends, checking on me, that I couldn’t respond to! Oceans of love to you all!
A lot of people have also been asking me how the theater that I”m involved with, The Vail-Leavitt Music Hall, handled the storm. I have to admit I was pretty worried when we saw the footage on News 12 about the Peconic River flooding into the theater’s rear parking lot. We were running on a generator during the height of the storm and the cable hadn’t gone out yet. The images on tv showed some poor souls car almost completely submerged, and huge garbage containers floating around like plastic toy boats in the bath tub. There was no denying that the height of the water was reaching the back, sides and front of the theater. I wasn’t able to reach the theater until Wednesday, and with my power and cell still out I knew my fellow Vail Board members in the same predicament. So we were all unable to communicate. When my daughter arrived we were shocked to see that we could even access the parking lot. The first thing we noticed was a garbage container up on it’s side against a building. And the sound of pumps and wet/dry vacs were everywhere. The lone stranded car that I had seen on tv was gone. But our beloved theater was dry! I wasn’t able to access the basement, and found out that it had flooded only due to the power going out and hence the pump. But it’s been drained since. And aside from some minor roof damage the 131 year old theater seems to have once again stood the test of time and all that mother nature has brought that way so far. I’m so grateful! Long live the Vail-Leavitt Music Hall! Below is a video of Hurricane Sandy’s flooding of the Peconic River at it’s height. Compliments of YouTube.
Take care. My heart goes out to everyone who lost their lives, and who lost everything during the hurricane. We will all band together and do all that we can to help them through this.