We were relatively lucky for New Jersey. 40MPH sustained winds with a few gusts that had to have been in the 60s and 70s. We lost power for 15 hours but got back into the 21st century just before 1pm today. Much of North Jersey is still in the dark and will be for many days. NYC and South Jersey are both disaster areas in comparison. We were very fortunate in that we suffered no damage here whatsoever. Once this crisis is past we will be ordering a generator and transfer switch, which should make these seemingly semi-annual storm-related outages easier to bear. And give me something to use for Field Day to boot!
I don't know how big a generator you want or how much you want to spend, but after last year's Halloween storm and being w/o power for a whole week, I purchased a Generac rated at 20 kW this spring. This is obviously not a portable and it runs on natural gas. It will power the whole house plus my rig and Alpha amplifier. It comes on every Saturday at 3 PM for a few minutes for test purposes. I did not lose power during this storm but we did have an outage a few weeks ago for several hours and I never even knew the town was w/o power until an uncle who lives in the same town told me. I consider it an investment. I don't ever want to go w/o power for a week again and it does add value to the property.
I'm not going to get into the causes, as I'm not really sure what the real answer is, but these storms are becoming more common and more severe, IMO.
I'm glad your big antenna system came through OK, Peter.
73,
Chris/NU1O
