A Crazy Bitch Named Sandy

            Despite hopes that Hurricane Sandy would be a dud to New York like last year’s Hurricane Irene, New York was struck hard by the hurricane. Many parts of the city experienced intense flooding unlike the city has ever seen in its history.

           

            The wife and I are among the extremely lucky ones to have undisturbed power, cable and Internet throughout the hurricane. The most stress we faced was when we had to pause a streaming Netflix movie to tape up our windows during a very windy time. It’s been shocking to see images online of areas one is familiar with sitting under several feet of water. It is a luxury to have power and an Internet connection right now. I am very lucky to have a job where I can work at home. I am very lucky to even have a job at all right now.

            Eight people dying in a storm is terrible. But considering wide swaths of the city were flooded, hundreds of homes destroyed and hospitals evacuated, it’s damn impressive the body count is so low.

The weather kicked our city’s ass, but we don’t sit around feeling sorry for ourselves; we get back to work. People are already making plans and trying to figure out how to get things done without subways, which is no easy task. The MTA, never one for punctuality and particularly bad at dealing with the weather, will take a few days to get back up and running.

In New York, it is only a matter of time before things are back to business as usual. The city is too busy to be too sentimental for too long. New York runs on a constant buzz and bustle, and it takes major disasters or terrorist attacks to knock it off kilter, and then never for very long. 

Franken-Prepared

New York is in the midst of a mild “Frankenstorm” fever. Approaching storm fronts may dump  multitudes of rain and/or snow on our metropolis in a day or two, and New Yorkers are waiting to see what gets canceled when and what the latest forecast might reveal.

The panic that gripped New York prior to hurricane Irene last year has yet to grip us in the specter of the Frankenstorm. The supermarkets were not running out of bread and bottled water, though governors of New York and New Jersey have already declared states of emergency. While the disaster preparations by the government are the same, this has not seized on the consciousness of the citizenry in the same way, at least not yet, despite having the cool cache of the “Frankenstorm” moniker.

There’s a resignation to these kinds of disruptions in New York, though we are not normally subjected to the disasters that they have in hurricane alley or on the more volatile Gulf of Mexico shoreline. New York is geologically very lucky.

So now we run through a multitude of “what if…” scenarios in our minds. What if the subways are shut down Monday? What if they only close off the area where I work? What if power is knocked out? I’m hoping that no closures or suspension of mass transit is necessary, because I don’t want to have to work from home. It’s too much of a pain in the ass to try to reconfigure my home computer setup for my work needs. I can do it if I have too, though, and working from home during a storm beats being unemployed during a storm.

One interesting phenomenon that many might be unprepared for: During times of emergencies, cell phones may not be working. Too many calls overload the cell phone towers and most cell phones become useless. We saw this in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and a few years later during the East Coast blackout of August 2003. Many people are now without home phone lines because they use their cell phones more often than home phone lines. That’s something to keep in mind and an interesting phenomenon during a time of great technological transition: that some with superior means of technology will be worse off because of it in this rare instance.

I have enough weapons and Diet Pepsi to survive a Frankenstorm and a half. See you when it’s over.  

Hurricane Blue Balls Thanks to Irene

Our soggy city is both frustrated and thankful after the recent passing through town of a storm named Irene.

New York City was not thrown into a panic, but we were braced for a huge hurricane and got only a tropical storm. Rapid-fire announcements on Friday of closures and cancellations in preparation of the hurricane ruined most everyone’s weekend plans.

The biggest horror most New Yorkers will face is tomorrow morning, when several million people attempt to go to work with limited or no public transportation. After the disastrously slow and inept response to the early snow blizzard this past winter, the Bloomberg administration was eager not to get caught being unprepared again. If anything, authorities overreacted in shutting down mass transit to the extent that they did. And it wouldn’t surprise me to find they had some kind of ulterior motive for it, perhaps doing a system-wide security scan in preparation for the tenth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

There were several things that New York City did right. It opened more shelters than it needed and helped the elderly and infirm get to them. It allowed drivers to use the bridges and tunnels that were open without paying tolls. Sandbags surrounded sensitive transit and power gratings in downtown Manhattan as early as Friday afternoon. The city identified and evacuated the most flood-prone areas quickly.

The Internet was alight with people’s criticism of Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s (dubbed “El Bloombergo”) speaking Spanish at his press conferences. I understand we have a large Spanish-speaking population here, but they have numerous media outlets where they can get information from people who speak the language fluently. And besides, he is the mayor of New York City, not Mexico City.

But New Yorkers are thankful that things were not worse. The storm claimed several lives on the East Coast. Friends of mine in New England are without power and may be without power for several days. And having an over-prepared mayor fumbling his way through pidgin Spanish is better than an unprepared city with a high death toll.