Is there a hurricane in your neighborhood?
October 29, 2012, 1:32 pm
Posted by Margaret O'Brien Steinfels
New York City is a coastal city. Easy enough to forget until the weather reminds us that high tides (very high tides–full moon) and Category 1 hurricanes can swamp the edges of the city. Otherwise, it’s raining, there are gusts, and the flag across the street has been taken down. No subways, no buses, lots of taxis, and people out walking. The grocery store was open this morning, but completely out of spinach. Spinach! People must be desperate.
How’s the vegetable situation in your neighborhood?
Already there are reports that Long Island has power outages in over 50,000 homes and the repair crews are unable to repair the lines because of dangerous winds. At this point it is worse than Irene and the brunt of the storm will not hit until tonight. This is an historic storm. Only equaled in the 30s. Most of the brunt will be over by midnight with it calming down late Tuesday afternoon. I suspect there will be a lot of heartache before it is over. So far it is just windy here in Yonkers (just north of the city). But we are not near the hudson river where there are problems.
We live along the New England coast, about a mile in from LI Sound. Some moderate rain so far, with thunder storms and lightning expected in a few hours as things ramp up. Wind gusts have increased to about 60 mph. More a matter of when than if as to loss of power. (The other end of our town is already without power.) Family who live closer to the water are now hunkered down with us. But for the inclement weather, it’s been a nice reminder of what it was like to grow up in a household of 12. ;) Our primary outside concern is the trees, especially because, as Bill M. notes, the brunt of the storm will be tonight, and many trees are within striking distance of our home.
As for spinach, we have plenty of it. Harvested the last of our garden crops yesterday in anticipation of the weather, including the spinach, the kale, some remaining beans, and a bumper crop of habaneros. Feel free to stop by for freebies. :)
Those of you who can park your cars somewhere higher than usual do so — that way you can use your cars to recharge your cell phones if there’s minor flooding and the electricity goes out. It’s probably too late to buy one now, but places like Radio Shack sell tiny re-chargers for cell phones.
My thoughts are with you all! I’ll say prayers and eat spinach for the duration.
It’s going to be almost 80 degrees here on the west coast today and sunny. Prayers for you guys.
There’s plenty of spinach here in Todd Akin country, but the produce guy at the store gave me a funny look when I asked for cherries this morning. (Good maraschino cherries are hard/impossible to find, so I’ve decided to make my own. But they’re out of season. Who knew?)
The person in Garden City/Hempstead I’m worrying about still has power.
St. Scholastica is a good intercessor in storms.
Gerelyn.
Interesting links to NYC, etc. area from Anthony DeRosa, Reuters:
https://twitter.com/antderosa
No signs of spinach but offers pictures of broken crane near 157 W. 57th and 6th Sts., said to be poised over Carnegie Hall.
I’m glad that I live less than a mile from the Hayward Fault and close to the San Andreas Fault.
Haven’t had any trouble from them since 1989.
I don’t eat spinach no matter what!
Sent scouts out. Found spinach…mixed in with the Arugula.
For NYC people ConEd has an outage map that shows where the power outages are in the ConEd service area.
ConEd announced it might shut off power in Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan this evening.
My apartment building is also a fallout shelter, so I’m assuming its sturdy.
Beautiful blood red sunset and high winds in lower mid-Michigan. Winds to increase and snow on the way tonight. We’ve been warned to expect power outages. Just like winter camping.
Praying for alla you on the East Coast. Sounds like officials are taking things seriously and trying to keep people safe.
Cooling off and windy in southwest Ohio. Feels like winter.
Funny your electric company is talking about cutting your power ahead of damage. Danger of downed live lines? Is this setting a bad precedent – might they start cutting the power whenever high winds are forecast? Convenient for them – less overtime pay, slower repairs.
It’s not the wind but the salt water. The Mayor/ConEd said they did it to prevent damage to the equipment. They’re shutting down facilities where they expect salt water to get in . They’ve shut off the power in parts of Lower Manhattan (Wall Street goes dark) and they’re probably going to shut down parts of Brooklyn.
http://gothamist.com/2012/10/29/more_than_47k_without_power_con_ed.php
Like it or not, given the place of Wall Street in the world economy, it seems to me that protecting its electrical supply would be a paramount concern.
At the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson has this to say about the politics of the storm:
“And by the way, why is it that we’re having such a huge hurricane make landfall in such an unusual place at such a late date in the season? Is this another of those freakish once-in-a-century weather events that seem to be happening so often these days?
“I know it’s impossible to definitively blame any one storm on human-induced atmospheric warming. But I’m sorry, these off-the-charts phenomena are becoming awfully commonplace. By the time scientists definitively establish what’s happening, it will be too late.
“As has been noted, the words “climate change” were not spoken during the presidential debates. Hurricane Sandy wants to know why”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eugene-robinson-romney-would-pass-the-buck-on-disasters/2012/10/29/c1dbbdca-21f2-11e2-ac85-e669876c6a24_story.html?hpid=z4
The flooding along the shores of New York looks bad and New Jersey may be worse. Hope all is well with those still in the path of Sandy (what a choice of names!!).
From a public wi-fi with laptop charged in my car…. North of NYC, we have no power, no lights, no heat, no internet or phone. We have hot water and gas stove. The power lines are still connected to our house, so it must have been further down the street.
A 60 foot pine tree between our houses crashed into neighbor’s back yard after the lights went out, only took out a fence. If it had hit a house, it would have been a really bad day for anyone underneath.
I’ve heard the wind roar high in the trees before, but never have the winds been felt like this on the house. The gusts sounded like ocean waves breaking over the house for minutes at a time.
PS The jury is still out on whether we get more hurricanes with global warming. But if the ocean waters hadn’t been so much warmer than normal due to global warming, Sandy would not have been strong enough long enough to get the rejuvinating kick from the jet stream.
Except for the shoreline flooding around the bays, sounds, and inlets, it seems hard to explain the random hits of the storm. It appears our neighborhood uptown in Manhattan is largely unscathed. Some tree branches down, lots of leaves, no newspapers! We have electricity and water (happy to share!) and a houseful of evacuees from downtown. Food stores are open with random kinds of food, and as long as the bridges are closed that will probably mean curtailed deliveries. So far kids are getting a three-day holiday from school.
I say this, not to trivialize what is happening on the East Coast, but to illustrate how long Sandy’s reach is … in Chicago, which is 800 miles west of NY, the same storm system is generating 60 mph gusts today, and waves along the Lake Michigan shore are expected to reach crests of 25 feet – an extraordinary thing around here. All this while it is still ravaging NY and dumping two feet of snow in the mountains of West Virginia.
There was talk early on of the two storms converging, Sandy from the East and a Cold Front from the West. That sounds like what is happening in the Appalachians and west. Meanwhile, Jersey sounds like a disaster area along with Long Island. The surge seemed to have both of them hard. Buses are due to come back to NYC at 5 pm today, but the subways are likely to be out longer.
Scouts just back report that the neighborhood is full of people doing what New Yorkers love to do: eating out! Long lines at restaurants. But downtown everything out according to a friend who stayed home: no electricity, no phones, no stores open, and no stop lights..
The stories and photos coming out of NY today look almost unbelievable, as do those from Connecticut and New Jersey. How long is it going to take to get things back to normal again?
Up here in central Vermont, the predicted 70-80 mph winds never happened, at least down in the valleys, and we never lost power, though south of here there were power cuts. And the state is still trying to deal with the enormous damage caused last year by Irene.
I have family in Philadelphia — they too, were lucky, and never lost power, though much of the city did; and in Cambridge, MA, which again seems to have come through better than many other places.
As much as meteorology has improved since computers, hurricanes are still unpredictable on a micro-level. So the old saw “plan for the worst, hope for the best” is still the best advice. Nate Silver’s book about predictions has a lot to say about natural disasters.
From what you all are saying it looks like FEMA has turned a corner, at least in the East. So far I haven’t heard of any awful foul-ups on CNN. Communications seem to be working well. The houses burning in Queens must have been awful, but fire is always a bad hazard in hurricanes. One of my doctors lost his house in a fancy neighborhood because the firemen couldn’t get to it after Katrina.
I wonder how JAK’s chickens did. And Ms. S,’s fireflies.
You can’t beat Mother Nature. She offers lessons to those who wish to learn how to live with her. One lesson may be, not how to handle Sandy better the next time Sandy comes (unlikely), but how to handle the next one we haven’t seen before. Future weather extremes are one of the widely accepted prospects among those who understand that part of nature. Other plausible anomalies deserve some careful thought along with Sandy as the enormous, long task of recovery begins this week.
Jack B. –
The scary thing is that Sandy is probably not an anomaly. No, we can’t be sure it wasn’t a one-offf. But the facts, according to most scientists, including Nobel prize winners, is that the laws of physics and chemistry will continue to hold, and so long as we continue to throw up into the atmosphere the amount of CO2 we have been throwing up, the weather will continue to get hotter, the seas will get hotter, there will be more hurricanes and larger ones. Further, the glaciers will melt away thus raising sea-levell appreciably, wiping away coastlines and some flat countries like Bangladesh — and south Louisiana. It is already happening here. We lose land the size of Delaware every year now. Even our super-conservative Republican governor Bobby Jindal can see it disappearing before his eyes.
Why is it that people pay attention to doctors and pharmacists when they say some action is dangerous, but they won’t listen to meteorologists and chemists and physicists? Do thy think the physical scientists are liars? Or that their science is less sure than medical science? Actually, the laws of physics and chemistry are very, very well established, much better than the biological laws..
Here’s a Huffington Post report on how Romney has answered questions about what he would do about FEMA. (He refused to answer all the questions put to him!)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/30/mitt-romney-fema_n_2044213.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular
Our building has open fronts on three sides: east, south, west. Last evening my neighbors who face east report that the wind howled all night on Monday. We face west, and I spent the night wondering when the hurricane would strike, heard almost no wind and saw little rain. So the hurricane left different impression depending on the direction you face. Perhaps no surprise. But in general “normal” storms seem to affect everyone’s perspective in the same way. Not this hurricane.
For Halloween, I’d like to find a neighborhood with power and go door-to-door asking for batteries and if I can use their wi-fi :)
(Posted from a shopping mall parking lot with my cable co’s wi fi.)
Sounds a bit desperate. What if they gave you chocolate kisses instead of batteries. Would you take them?
You can come down to Manhattan (three people in the car, according to Mayor B), and use our light bulbs and wi-fi.
We have power back after 25 hours. Feels like the resurrection. We could not sit outside the way we did in the famous blackout which was in the summer. More conversation than a long time. What deprivation from things that we do not need but must have! Structural changes will be made. There is now no choice. And how about Christie and Obama hobnobbing. Christie went up a notch in my book.
Check out William Kristof’s column today (written by candle-light). It’s called “Will Climate Get Some Respect Now?”.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/01/opinion/kristof-will-climate-get-some-respect-now.html?ref=global-home
Oops — should be: Nicholas D.
A friend who runs a nonprofit in Staten Island would welcome donations if anyone is looking for a place to help. Her agency, Project Hospitality, assists the hungry and homeless nd a lot of other people in Staten Island, which has been very hard hit by the hurricane.
Project Hospitality’s warehouse got 4 feet of water and all of its supplies are lost. PH posted that there is a big need is new towels, new socks, new underwear for the sheltered families from the beach areas of Staten Island.
They also need C and D batteries, LED lanterns, blankets, sweat shirts, generators, gas cans, canned food, GENERATORS, cleaning supplies, gloves, WATER
I saw on my friend’s facebook page that volunteers are coming down from St Margaret Mary Church in Wisconsin Rapids to help. It’s just so wonderful how generous people around the country are in times of trouble.
I am sending Project Hospitality a check, since I can’t easily get to Staten Island with supplies.
Irene, Do you have contact info for anyone who wants to help or to send a contribution?
Thanks, Margaret, the contact is:
Project Hospitality
100 Park Avenue
Staten Island, NY 10302
The agency has no phone or internet now, the Executive Director, Rev.Terry Troia, said in her last post:
” Priority Items: Socks and new underwear:men, women, children. Towels. Went to see if stores were open in jersey. Nothing open. Curfews in Bayonne & Jersey City. Police turned us back. Lines for gas 5 hours long. Pathmark opened. Not a lot on the shelves. I think along with gas we will experience food shortage ahead.
SEND NEW SOCKS AND UNDERWEAR. THANKS.”
I wonder if the New Yorkers who often comment but have been silent this week are still out of power. Grant Gallicho? Rita Ferrone? Fr Komonchak? Michael Peppard? Peter Steinfels?
I can attest that Peter Steinfels is connected, but not connecting (to the internet, etc). He’s reading a book.
Our power came back on last night, and today our internet, phone and cable access returned.
Thank you to all of our friends, some new, who offered a warm place to stay and thanks for your prayers.
We were very lucky and did not have any damage. We had full tanks of gas before the storm and haven’t needed to line up for gas. We did get a fill-up in Connecticut when we visited our son-in-law at Yale. And we stayed at a B&B for a night with a warm room, as inside temperatures dropped to the low 50s and falling.
Thank God we could do that – we pray for those who have little or nothing.
New storm predicted for Wednesday – cold and windy – if the jet stream branches phase together, we can get gusts to 40 mph, which may rattle loose limbs.
Thanks for letting us know. Great that lights, heat, communications are back. Yes, mid-week storm looks like it might do in some loose wires, limbs, etc.