More on Gaston.

Here's a day-after slide show of the aftermath of the floods Monday. And another.

Further details on my mostly vicarious experiences with the flood: It turns out that six of my twenty co-workers parked their cars down under the I-95 overpass, and only one of them still has his car. The others have been hearing sympathetic and mostly positive things from their insurance companies, but have not been able to go down and look for their cars (or the belongings which may or may not still be in them). It really wasn't until this afternoon that the police were letting insurance agents into the area where the cars are piled atop one another or buried in the silt, in hopes that the agents could identify the cars. One of my co-workers has seen his SUV, on TV, upside-down and on top of another vehicle, but still hasn't seen it in person (which he'd like to do, to get the 75 CDs he has in the car).

Someone else from the office got home to find five feet of water in her basement. It's drained, by now, but I can't imagine it did much good to her washer, dryer, or furnace. Or, for that matter, the house's fuse box, mounted about 4 1/2 feet off the floor. (Needless to say, she also has no electricity.)

Dominion Power is doing its usual fine job in reconnecting people's electricty: Tuesday morning, there were about 35,000 people without power in the Richmond area. By Wednesday morning, that number had decreased to 39,000. Yeah, I don't know, either. Fifteen or twenty thousand of them were serviced by substations that were destroyed in the flood, so that much is understandable.

My commute to the office has gotten back to normal, although Tuesday's drive in was still exciting: a couple of ponds were still overflowing their banks onto the road, although by that hour, it was only 4 - 6 inches deep. Still a bunch of tree limbs down in or near the road; a mudslide had covered up half a lane, slowing traffic. And a couple of dozen cars abandoned on the expressway downtown, where clearly they had run out of gas the night before, trapped in the traffic jam. (They'd been retrieved - or towed away - by this morning.)