Here’s a video (not a very good one, though) of a few bridges and roads in my hometown in VT after Irene came through:
It should be noted that the two bridges that are still looking good, starting about 1:49, are the two newest bridges in town, built just ~10 years ago after the last big flood from the river…they did a good job, because they’re still there! (Obviously owed more to being built high up enough from the water.) The second bridge of the two is normally almost ten feet above the river…not less than one…
Between 3:00 and 3:15 is Barlett’s Falls, which is generally an actually water fall, about 8-10 feet of vertical drop.
At 3:36 is a shot of a road that was washed out in the last flood…and now that I think about it may have been washed out in a smaller flood between that last large one and this one…my hometown gets too many floods…this is the third major one in 10 years, a combination of a being right up against the side of a mountain, and a river that feeds from several mountains flowing through it…as well as smaller mountain creeks also feeding into that river.
So, the storm no one has experienced !!! was experienced a number of times in flood prone areas in the last decade.
And given that some areas received 12" of rain from the previous round of t-storms, getting 8-12 from another storm (a tropical storm), doesn’t exactly make this tropical storm some historical legend. It merely makes the month infamous for the total am’t of rainfail, most of which came from thunderstorms/showers/fronts. Irene had nothing on the previous round of weather.
Get back to me this fall/winter when Nor 'Easters re-do the geography of the east coast. They always get the same am’t of attention as the flashier hurricanes – yeah, right. Puh-lease.
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<hijack>Could someone please tell me why some people are inserting several blank lines below the last line of their post, and then a single period?</hijack>
Oh, and Philster? There are still people drowning, today, in the floods caused by Irene, and more buildings, bridges, and roads being washed away or destroyed, today, because of the floods caused by Irene. As of tonight, there are half-a-million people without power in New Jersey and in Philadelphia and its suburbs. Some may be without power through the weekend.
Irene may not have been particularly destructive as far as winds go by the time she got to this area, but she should not be dismissed as hype.
Irene was quite tough for us on the south shore of Long Island. A 30 year old tree on my property fell. It could have easily destroyed my house but fortunately fell into the street and did no damage.
We just got power back 4 hours ago. The people across the street from me are still in the dark. My aunt is currently in a hospital which is running on generators. The are still roughly 350,000 people on Long Island without power. A huge number of traffic lights are out.
The laid back approach of the Long Island Power Authority is quite frustrating. They spend days casually “assessing” the damage instead of quickly fixing things. Their only estimate of when power would return was “90% of residents will have power by Friday” which is vague and useless.
I still don’t have cable or internet (except on this crappy netbook) but I am better off than many.
One of the lowlights before the power came on was trying to clean up broken glass on the kitchen floor using only flashlights. Not fun.
Every time I check the news the death toll from this has gone up. Now up to 40. I suspect that will get worse as they figure out exactly how bad things are up in New England and try to account for everybody. For an “overhyped” storm, there sure are a lot of bodies.
Pepco in the DC area actually seems to be doing a reasonable job. They had 200,000 outages yesterday and it’s now down to just 25,000. Looking at the outage map, Montgomery County seems to be faring better than PG County. The cynical side of me says that’s because we have more money and screeched louder last time they screwed up with hearings about their incompetence and stuff, but I guess it’s also because PG County is a bit more south and east and thus probably got hit harder.
Well, Christie is saying that what he’s seeing in NJ is unprecedented, so maybe it was not so “overhyped” after all. That’s some pretty damn damaging hype.
What we saw in the prep stages was of course the legacy of Katrina - whatever may be the range of probabilities, DO NOT tell people it’ll probably be OK, tell them OMG we gonna die run for the hills. Better that you be knocked at three times a year for making the economy stop for 3 days, than be knocked once in your term of office for letting people drown in their houses.
Thing is, people will not run from “really, really, really bad wash-out-your-house rain coming”; they WILL run from “hurricane coming!” even if they mean the same thing.
Of course, I DO have to fault NY media figures for focusing nearly exclusively on how it was going to hit NYC, and especially for giving sighs of relief and acting like it had all been a dud when it failed to directly clobber NYC on Sunday, glossing over the other effects. Down here the direct passage of the center of the storm was the least of our troubles, the 48 hours of torrential rain and ensuing flooding and mudslides were the real issue.
Lessee - Irene wasn’t a Cat 3 after all - just a Cat 1. That’s still winds of at least 74MPH, with higher gusts. And it’s still a lot of rain. And in my county, it was still a bad situation - still is for some. It rained hard and steadily for 18+ hours. The wind was steady and strong long after the rain stopped. Lots of trees fell across power lines, some breaking poles. There was also damage to some substations. Our house was without power for just short of 48 hours.
Yes, it could have been a lot worse had the storm stayed a Cat 3 like some models predicted. That doesn’t mean a Cat 1 is a hype. Yes, some news readers tried to whip up a frenzy - what else is new? “News” is no longer reporting - it’s infotainment and speculation with random facts accidentally mixed in.
I’m pretty sure my neighbor, whose carport is completely crushed under a huge oak tree doesn’t think it was hype. I also expect the person on the parallel road whose car took a huge branch thru the windshield (I bet the car filled with water pretty fast, too) thought it was hype. And down the road a piece where the tree tore up its roots and the exposed section is at least 12’ across - I don’t think that was hype. And for the crews of our electric co-op who have done remarkable repairs on broken poles and downed lines, I’m pretty sure they don’t think it was hype.
Yes, there have been worse storms, and there will be worse storms in the future. That doesn’t mean Irene was little more than a breezy summer shower.
All your points about news outlets NOT hyping are NULL AND VOID because they don’t hype stuff that does just as much destruction, but is much less ‘flashy’.
Again, Nor’ Easters bitch slap the NE, cause BILLIONS in damages and wipe out entire beaches, roads, etc. ** It happens multiple times per year.**
If heavy, soaking rains were coming to the NE, and flooding was a foregone conclusion given the am’t of rain received already, THE NEWS OUTLETS WOULD NOT HAVE SOME FLASHY HURRICANE TO TRACK AND MAKE A MEDIA EVENT OUT OF… BUT THE RESULTS WOULD HAVE BEEN THE SAME.
You’d all be watching the generic stories and photos of the aftermath. More people would have died, because they would not have covered something so intensely, because there was no spinning Irene graphic and media event to have.
I took Irene claims all day yesterday. One woman had 5 feet of floodwater pouring into her mobile home and all her earthly possessions destroyed (except some pictures on the wall). Nothing that evacuating would have prevented, of course, but this is still a tragedy.
Philster, the relevant argument you’re ignoring is that people in the Nor’easter geographic area are perpetually prepared for those events. Nobody in New York is perpetually prepared for a hurricane.
My block escaped much damage except for our property. Four huge trees fell over the course of the morning. One damaged a car. One blocked me in the driveway and brought the utility wires all down on top of my car. Yesterday Parks Dept cut off the part of the tree blocking me in and moved the wires so I could get out. No damage to the house and surprisingly no basement flooding. Still no power though. My DVR is weeping.
Somehow the mailman made it to our doorside mailbox when the only way to get to the door was by climbing over four foot high tree trunks. I guess he deserves a nice holiday card this year!
We hosted a friend couple and their two cats, who were in an evacuation zone. Lots of board game playing and cocktail making. Bought newspapers in lieu of Internet.
My friend never lost power. Grandma got it back yesterday. Mom today. None of their pets were bothered at all.
We’ve been thinking of ideas of what to do with the wood besides making a fire. Some sort of outdoor furniture? A totem pole?
People, in 2009 three rambled through the NE in one month… October… out of season. Those blizzards you see people digging out of… 18" of snow, etc, get overlooked because they don’t have names, and because it’s snow, so an October ass-beating from a Nor’ Easter or a Feb snow storm aren’t lumped together in some Federal D-base under “Nor’ Easter”, listed by names, etc.
You have to dig state by state, again, a consequence of how hurricanes are treated versus how Nor’ Easters are treated. Hurricane info is tidy and glamorous, listed by year and name with some lump some total of 2.3 billion. For Nor’ Easters, you have to go county by county, or state to state…“100 million” + “250 million”, etc.
Nor’ Easters will batter the eastern seaboard this year several times over and rewrite geography books and maps, a prediction that is 1,000 less bold than what the media outlets did with Irene. I can make that prediction because it happens multiple times in most years.
Philster, if we acknowledge that nor’easters are real true serious storms, can we go ahead with discussing the storm named Irene in this thread specifically dedicated to doing so? If that’s what it takes, here you go: Nor’easters bite, and are real live storms, and cause property damage and loss of life, and people should take them seriously. They are serious. Do not mess with nor’easters, yo.
