Here's our reasoning:
We are on the far north end of the zone. Conditions here will be much different than for our immediate south.
Our expected winds probabilities are:
50% chance of tropical storm force winds for longer than a minute
5-10% chance of hurricane force winds for longer than a minute
Our expected tides are only going to put a little water in the road. We can still get in and our with our SUVs if needed.
This storm is predicted to be much better than Isabel.
We don't even expect to lose power at this point.
We have nine people, several pets, livestock, and our homes.
We are extremely well prepared for our family even if we can't get out for weeks. We are well prepared for living without power for weeks. We've done both before.
We do have a hotel room reserved in PA and have our vehicles ready with gas, important documents, a week's worth of food, and our camping gear.
We follow Wxrisk. DT is impatient, sometimes uses crude language to get his point across, and often late on the deadlines he sets for himself, but he is excellent at his job. He has a sense of humor too. We have been relying on him for weather for years, and he has a better track record with long range predictions than the local guys do. It's his job to help companies plan things around the weather weeks away. He uses much more data than the weather ensembles and gives his science based reasoning and any other possible scenarios with it. The local guys usually start out differing with DT in their forecast, but they usually end up exactly or close to the same forecast as his. It just takes them longer to get there.
What he wrote below about that new information appearing on most TV stations is exactly what happened.
