I hope most of the homeless people made use of the shelters for a day or two at least. I think most of the known deaths are people who either drowned in their homes or had trees fall on their houses.
Any comparison between Gloria and Sandy is bizarre. During Gloria it rained a lot. That’s about the only similarity I saw.
Is it just me, or has ‘Sandy ain’t nothin’’ the current Republican talking point?
Maybe there is a God that exacts revenge. This God saw what Snookie and friends had done and decided, “this is how you really do it.”
Yeah, but that’s what I’m saying - if most of the “known” deaths are people who were in houses and homes, and had people who check up on them or who would have seen something big like a tree falling on their house, what about the people that nobody notices? Is the death toll actually worse than it sounds on paper, because until bodies are found (if they haven’t been washed out to sea), nobody cares for or looks for the homeless people who may have been killed as well?
By comparison, you actually somehow manage to make Clothahump look like an insightful, thoughtful poster.
Was that your intent?
You make a good point. “Counts” can be very inaccurate. I’ve often wondered about the Katrina death count. The very sad thing is that there are thousands of homeless in NYC that are military veterans. It is difficult sometimes as to what you can attribute a death to. You can estimate but you cannot really make an accurate count. History is what scholars have agreed upon, not what actually may have happened.
Agnes…
The Long Island Express. Almost 70 years later and people still remember it. So it isn’t short memories that has buried poor, poor Gloria.
Well, you’re understanding of the homeless situation seems to be entirely based on fictional portrayals, so you may not know that the correlation between “street person/beggar” and “homeless” is not very direct. Many of those beggars are definitely not homeless, they just have housing that most people would consider not very nice, like single-rooms with a shared hallway bathroom. Moreover, about 75% of NYC’s homeless are members of a cohesive family (adults and children). People might not look out for themselves, but they usually look out for their partners and kids.
The Police emptied the subway system and arrested people who wouldn’t go. It wasn’t a very cold storm nor was it very rainy - I think it would be impossible for this storm to have killed a homeless person of average skill at living on the street via exposure. Accident, sure. But there was only a small area of NYC that was underwater enough for a body to float away.
So, I don’t think there is a large undiscovered dead homeless population
As I mentioned Tuesday on a FB thread with old school buddies, “I was thinking of Gloria too. I think we all were. It’s kinda the standard I judge all storms against. And it looks like Sandy just kicked Gloria’s ass and raped her children.”
Seriously, I remember the damage in my town from Gloria. I have images of the trees down blocking nearly every other street. But, from the pictures I’ve seen in the last couple days, there are friggin’ boats lining the streets a block away from my parent’s home! The marina was destroyed and many many boats washed into the neighborhood. This is new in my lifetime.
I was going to say that I expect the police probably rousted a lot of homeless people before the storm, which Hello Again confirms- if conditions were so dangerous that the subways and tunnels had to be shut down almost a full day before the brunt of the storm hit, the city was not going to allow people to sleep on the streets. And of course that’s assuming these people would have wanted to stay on the streets in this kind of weather to begin with. I don’t see too many people out on the street in regular bad weather (which speaks in part to the question of how many of them are really homeless), nevermind severe downpours with high winds and a risk of flooding. Is it possible for some people to disappear if no one was looking for them in the first place? Yes. I don’t think that’s going to be a large number of people if there are any.
How about those “mole people” we occasionally hear about, like in this column by Cecil, the homeless who live in tunnels? Would they have been cleared out?
Oh, wait, the follow-up column makes me suspect that they don’t really exist in any serious quantities. That’s a relief.
Is the entire tunnel system completely flooded, or just parts of it?
No, it’s not the whole subway system or all of the tunnels.
I think I speak for most of the Mid-Atlantic when I say shut the fuck up, you insensitive douchebag.
Was that the situation?
Midwest too. Nothing worse in the aftermath of a bad storm than the inevitable, “Ugh, this was nothing. I remember the Storm of Whatever. Now that was a real storm. You people are just whiny crybabies.”
Well, okay, not having electricity or a usable house, or being dead, would be worse. But that doesn’t make the OP any less of a fucking douchebag.
Indeed, I have a homeless friend who couldn’t get OUT of a shelter on that day.
Normally they kick people out for the day, and don’t let them back in until 4ish. They go there via bus, over a rickety bridge across the harbor. That day they didn’t want to risk people’s lives, so they kept them in all day.
My friend said she actually had a good day.
I was reminded of this thread when tuning into my daily lunch-time wing-nut hour (AM radio), and Rush Limbaugh – after last week going on about how the media was making much more of this storm than was warranted – today going on about how utterly devastated the East Coast is and how the media is playing down the situation in order to make Obama’s handling of it look better.
I’ve never heard him more desperate. It’s almost sad. I mean, you know, if it weren’t so frickin’ hilarious.
My work here is done. ‘sigh’…