The media needs to stop focusing on how overhyped this thing was and get some attention on the fact that about half of Vermont is currently underwater. All I see is “Not that big a deal for NYC!” Well, fabulous. There’s still a lot of damage and 20 (and counting) people are dead. Now I feel like we’re going too far in the other direction on the coverage.
NOW we lose power?! Oh for cryin’ out loud!
I know I should be thankful that no one I know was injured but damn I hate being without power.
Amen to this. Plus it’s making New York look like a city of total wusses. For fuck’s sake, here in Chicago, we don’t shut down the public transit system because a blizzard hits Minneapolis.
Isn’t your subway system above ground and, um, elevated? The concern here was that the tunnels would flood, which is a lot more likely than snow accumulating as high as an elevated track. And besides, you (and a couple of other people here) keep acting as if we knew it was going to go easy on Manhattan. To compare it to a blizzard hitting Minneapolis isn’t fair, because at the time they decided to shut down the transit system, all signs were pointing to a direct hit on Manhattan. I’ll tell you who looks like a bunch of wussies; you people nowhere near the affected area, sitting on your couches playing Monday morning quarterback.
There are some places in the city where the trains are above ground, and the MTA was concerned that the wind would make it dangerous to use those trains. But yes, most of the New York trains are below ground (and subject to flooding) and most of the CTA trains are above ground.
Right. For a long time, the forecasts said the eye of the storm was going to come very close to Manhattan, and if a strong hurricane came near Manhattan, large swaths of the five boroughs were also going to get nailed. Lower Manhattan was seen as a danger zone but most of the evacuated areas were in Brooklyn and Staten Island.
Does anyone here remember the Y2K Disaster, when so many corporate networks choked and stopped in their tracks because their ancient-but-still-in-use programs weren’t able to handle 4-digit dates?
No?
There was a whole lot of hype about that. Tons of stories for a couple of years prior. Some people thought the danger was over-hyped, and crowed how right they were after the millennium turned because nothing happened. But nothing happened because a lot of people spent a lot of time, money, and sweat making *certain *that nothing happened.
I look at the warnings before and during Irene as the same sort of thing: people working hard to be certain that nothing happens. And with a few exceptions that couldn’t really be prevented, nothing much did. And that’s bloody marvelous.
I don’t know who to blame for Time Warner Cable’s supposed excuse for why we have had no internet since Sat Night…“Well, the server’s been down for the whole west coast…” so I shall blame Irene.
Edit…it came up about 6 minutes ago, though still no phone. I STILL blame Irene.
Edit…I’m in CA. 
We still don’t have power; it’s been 11 hours now. The fridge isn’t much colder than the room. Not opening the freezer to find out about that. However, I think my office, two miles away, has power and will be open today – but we don’t have daycare, so I’ll have to use up an “occasional” day (all-purpose sick/vacation/family whatever paid day off).
We’re vacationing in Avon, NC, 20 days from now. At least, we were before Irene. NC12, the only road in and out of Hatteras Island, has been severed at Rodanthe. 900 feet of road just gone. No way they can get it fixed in less that a month or two.
At least we didn’t have the power losses and flooding of millions on the East Coast. I should be thankful.
there is another wave coming behind jose. it is the most active part of the season.
the concern with the subways in nyc was that there would be a flood of salt water in them. they take a lot of water during storms on a regular basis. rain water is a bit more gentle to mechanical systems and electronics than salt water.
Working on day two of no power ‘round Casa de Lightnin’. Boredom is the worst.
I wasn’t expecting to be impacted by Irene here in Toronto but holy hell people are dumb. We’re in the middle of changing some stores from one system to another that requires a long data upload from each store to our data centre during the cutover.
Two stores last night were in either Quebec or the maritime provinces and were experiencing repeated short power outages. As a result the load was interrupted multiple times and had to be manually deleted and reset each time. They persisted in the cutover despite the power issues and finished just before our “OMG change window ending” time of 5am.
yawn Yay.
My wife and I apparently possess the power to remotely knock out people’s electricity via phone call. Yesterday morning I called my parents in upstate NY to see how they were doing. Ten minutes into the conversation the call got cut off because their power went out. Eight hours later my wife called her parents in upstate NY and a few minutes into the conversation THAT call got cut off because their power went out. It wasn’t like the power had been going off and on all day or anything either. In both cases that was the first sign of trouble.
A lot of what I hear and read about this storm reminds me of the 40 years I lived in Florida. We had many hurricanes slam into the state, which, face it, looks like a piñata dangling out into the crossroads of the most probable path a hurricane would follow from the Atlantic, the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico.
Predicting the future is fraught with uncertainty, and anticipating the path a hurricane will take has many poorly-understood variables. The best that can reasonably be done is to calculate the “most probable” path, and allow for a margin of error on either side, as well as allowing for changes in speed.
It often happens that some people found themselves directly in the most likely path the storm would take, and followed all the preparedness instructions and braced themselves for the onslaught, only to have the storm veer at the last minute. They got hit with gale force winds and rain from a feeder band and said, in essence, “That’s IT?” There was none of the destruction they were led to believe they would experience.
Comes the next time (in Florida, there’s always a next time) a hurricane has them in its sights, they blow it off with, “They aren’t so bad. We hardly got hit the last time.”
So now, a category-5 storm with 140-mph winds slams directly into their house on the beach, with 15-foot storm surge, and all those people who refused to evacuate become statistics, and the government has to explain why the loss of life was so high.
That’s why the authorities take this stuff seriously. They know most people who have been ordered to evacuate will not have any problems. But, there is no way to know, in advance, who.
We got hit with six inches of water in the basement here in northern NJ and no power for 24 hours so this was not a meh storm for us. One of our neighbors has a tree with huge split branch that looks like it might fall on someone’s head or house at any moment so the entire street is blocked off from traffic.
I’m grateful it wasn’t worse. I talked to a police officer yesterday. He told me that they had no power, telephones or electricity at police HQ. He also told me that the power company had essentially told the police to just be grateful it wasn’t worse and it could be up to five days before power was restored.
A coupla propane tanks and one of those large heavy duty turkey fryer pots will save ya. Boil your water, cook your food on the gas grille.
Sucks about the a.c… Richmond is a swamp in the summertime. Red Cross able to get ice to her and her family? Potable water?
This was a damned big deal for some parts of Vermont and not-NYC NY.
Margaretville, Phoenecia, Fleischmann’s, teeny towns in the Catskills that most people haven’t heard of have been drowned. As they are not rich places to begin with, this is going to be just devastating for them.
This is true, of course.
But you’re overlooking the damage done to all those millions(?) of people who DO evacuate unnecessarily.
Okay, for some people evacuation simply means driving 50 miles and spending the night at Aunt Cathy’s house. But with current mobile lifestyles in USA an awful lot of people DON’T have places like that to go. They’ll have to drive much farther, or stay in hotels, spending money that they really can’t easily afford.
They’ll have to make hard choices on what to do with pets. Leave them to face what the government is calling an eminent disaster? Take them with you, and hope to find a motel that allows them? Because emergency shelters don’t allow pets.
They’ll risk having no one at the house who could keep a small problem (like a broken window) into a huge amount of damage (like ruined rugs, falling ceilings.)
The real problem, I think, is we’re into a negative feedback loop.
The media over-hype the absolute ‘worst case’ aspects that could happen. The worst case doesn’t happen. Next time people compare the ‘threat that didn’t happen’ with the current ‘threat that might happen’ and discount it. So the government makes more exaggerated predictions/warnings/evacuation orders AND the media over-hype those.
And around it goes. You cannot cry wolf all the time.
The government needs to become more conservative AND somehow the media must be made to stop trying to foment fear and hysteria. After a cycle or two people might just start giving credence to the realistic warnings once again.
Many of the emergency shelters set up do, in fact, now take pets. I think in response to the fact that so many people stayed in the path of other disasters because they wouldn’t abandon their pets.