Talking to Dee about being in Hurricane Irene

While we were coming back to class after morning tea, Mrs Vincent told us that we were going to
be talking on line (by messaging) to a woman called Dee from the other side of the world in U.S.A. She lives on the border of New Hampshire and Maine, in an area affected by Hurricane Irene. We asked her where she was when the hurricane hit. She was at home on a Sunday

She told us that some of her friends close to the affected area have no power, and one of her friends from New Jersey had been hit badly. Four hundred thousand people had no electricity.

One of our questions we asked was “What is the time where you are?” It was 07:10 p.m. on Monday and we were 11:10 a.m. on Tuesday - making her 16 hours behind us. We had a little laugh because she said, “ What were the lotto numbers haha?” We worked out that it is summer and very soon will be autumn in the U.S.A.

Dee said there were 35 people dead from the hurricane but there are now about 40 people to date died.

One of our other questions was, “ How were you affected?”
Dee said, “ Not too badly. They down-graded it to a tropical storm and a few branches fell on her roof.

We asked her on a scale to one to ten how scary was the hurricane. Her answer was “ About an 8 when a branch hit her house but 4 for the rest of the time because she was prepared. There had been plenty of warning and people had removed any loose objects from their yards so they wouldn't fly around and cause damage in the wind.

When we asked her if she felt the recent earthquake near New York, Dee said she had, and that it sounded like a big truck going past - for a long time. She was familiar with earthquakes after she lived in Taranaki for a while. We told her about Geonet so she can keep track of earthquakes in NZ as well as U.S.A.

Dee also said that while she was living in New York, the first winter that they experienced included a free ice storm and power-cut for 6 days ."It was like I was in Narnia,” she quoted.

We are going to try to keep in contact with Dee to ask her questions about current events in the U.S.A .

By Hunter and Sarah J.