Just realized no one had really made a thread about this. Right now the Northeast is getting hit pretty hard, and even though it's only a tropical storm, it's probably the strongest/one of the strongest storms I've ever had to experience. We lost about half a tree that just barely missed the house, along with some other limbs we can see ready to fall. I have power right now, but most people I know don't. Anyone else in New York/New England getting this mess? Also, is everyone alright who had to experience it in the south?

I live in PA and was on vacation in the Turks and Caicos islands where it struck hard as well before it made it to the eastern coast. My family just managed to be able to fly to the Philadelphia airport without our flight (like many others in the area) being cancelled. So I guess I will be getting hit by my first hurricane twice. But so far where I am it is just raining on and off with a few short power outages and everybody is fine.

Our area was really not hit that badly, the worst I saw was this lake that appeared overnight in front of our school.

@monopoly THAT- is an impressive picture..
How would you get around shortly after the storm has passed (I hope I don't sound stupid, but) would you use boats? I live in the UK so this kind of thing isn't really known over here.

In any case, I hope you are all alright guys!

Ya really bad over here. Silive.com has tons of flood pics from staten island.
I had to evacuate to my brothers across the island.

Hey, sorry about the flooding, man. The weather have been all over the states this year. El Nino is largely responsible for the weird changes in weather conditions, but for a rare weather condition that once occurred only about once per decade, is now occurring almost every year, could that mean an early warning sign of Global Warming?

I live in Louisiana, though in Shreveport, the northwestern corner of the state, so we live far enough from the coast that we don't have to worry about hurricanes much. The weather all over the continental US has really been so bizarre this year: From the northern states getting torrential rainfall last spring combined with melting snow, causing record-breaking flooding all along the Mississippi River. Here's a photo I took May 16 from the Vickburg visitor's center:
http://stardust4ever.deviantart.com/art/Mississippi-River-Sunset-211037490

Well they opened up the floodgates further downstream along the Morganza spillway, which devistated many people's homes by flooding much of south Louisiana, yet saved New Orleans and Baton Rouge from disaster by keeping the flood waters just low enough not to compromise the levee structure. I guess it's an ethical judgement call: you deliberately sabotage the few in order to spare the many. They did a similar thing in some states further upstream by deliberately dynamiting the levees, so that farmland gets flooded instead of cities. I would have been pretty P.O. if the US Corps of Engineers something like that in my back yard.

Even this summer has been the hottest, driest summer on record for most of Louisiana as well as the majority of the south. 57 days (and still climbing) so far of triple digit temperatures (100+ Fahrenheit, 38+ Celsius); the previous record of 47 days was set in the 1890s! Meanwhile, the northern states have gotten far more rainfall this year than usual. Either way, it wreaks havoc on farmers crops everywhere.

Now the Northeast is getting a hurricane and the gulf coast is high and dry!?!? Send some of that surplus rain down our way; we desperately need it!