Baby Brooklyn Erhlund and baby Finley Hazel Cameron, both born in September, may share a milestone with a few other children born last month.

In fact, quite a few other children.

The delivery rooms at Providence Seaside Hospital and Columbia Memorial hospitals are quieter now than they were in September, when both hospitals experienced a baby boom.

Nine months after the storm in December, when the county had power outages for several days and roads were impassable, nearly twice as many babies were born than usually are born in September.

Hospital personnel started to notice the potential in late August and began making arrangements.

“We had an onset in August,” said Steve Buckelew, director of marketing for Columbia Memorial Hospital in Astoria.

While the average number of babies born in a month is 25 or 30, “we were scheduled for 50,” Buckelew said. Although the hospital didn’t reach quite 50, “we approached that number,” he added.

At Seaside Providence, Tonya Case, obstetrics supervisor, geared up for twice as many babies as August.

“Last month, we had eight deliveries; this month we doubled it,” Case said toward the end of September.

“Every year around the same time we have an outage or a storm,” she added. “September is a busy month. We have never really planned for it before.”

But, Case said, the results of last December’s storm proved that “maybe we should plan for a busy September.”

Case, herself, is a foster mother of a “storm” baby that was due Sept. 10 but was born five weeks prematurely. “She’s a beautiful baby,” Case said.

Among the mothers at Providence was Jennifer Tarabochia, 26, of Astoria, who gave birth to Brooklyn Erhlund at 1:50 p.m. Sept. 24. The baby weighed six pounds and stretched 19.5 inches long.

Tarabochia wasn’t sure that Brooklyn was a “storm” baby.

“We were having fun,” she recalls. “We didn’t go out. But no one could get out.”

Although Sonora Cameron’s baby, Finley, was born at Columbia Memorial on Sept. 12, almost exactly nine months after the storm, she doesn’t believe it was conceived then.

“It’s more of a Christmas baby,” Cameron said.

She and her husband, Greg, had gone to her parents’ house in Astoria when the storm struck. The family lives at River Point on Oregon Highway 202, where fallen power lines and trees had obstructed the road.

“We were there for two or three days. My sister lives nearby, and she came over. We played cards,” Cameron recalled. “We had a wind-up radio; we listened to the news a lot.”

Three days later, the Camerons managed to get home. A day later, they traveled to Portland.

She remembers when she delivered her baby that the nurses at Columbia Memorial talked about the increased number of births occurring in September.

That same conversation was going on at Seaside Providence, too, said Nancy Mazzarella-Tisch, an obstetrics nurse there. They kept two rooms set up for “overflow” deliveries busy during the month. The nine obstetrics nurses were put on alert to come in at a moment’s notice.

But while the nurses were talking about the frantic pace at times, the mothers weren’t in the mood for discussion, Mazzarella-Tisch said.

“They were so very busy. They weren’t in a reflective mood, especially not about what was causing this pain.”