I don’t think the folks in Queens think it was an exaggeration - half of the borough looks like it’s on fire. At least 50 homes have been completely destroyed together in a few square block area, and it’s been raging since about 11:30 pm last night, and they can’t effectively fight it as the area is/was completely flooded.
I’m sure the others who have lost their homes to flooding and such don’t think it’s ridiculous either...
I wonder how many ended up stranded in the rising flood waters, and enclosing fire that acted like the folks who didn’t take the warnings seriously. It’s not just rain. Especially, not in an urban area.
Sorry, but after watching the coverage of the 6-alarm-fire I just watched, I think it was STUPID for people to second-guess the severity of this storm. God bless the FDNY who has been out in boats all night scaling walls to rescue people from FIRES as a result of the hurricane.
People never listen to safety announcements, they always think they know better and stay with possessions.
Exactly. These things are unpredictable. We got off easy it seems (we are 1 hr inland), but the coasts got hammered. NYC is going to wake up to a world of hurt. Whole towns on the shore went underwater. The ocean overran barrier islands and met the bay. And even out here people were killed by blown debris or falling trees. Try telling those people it was “hype”.
Well put. I remember Hurricane Andrew where people immediately the next morning were remarking that it wasn’t so bad. You really won’t know how bad this was for a day or so after it’s over.
The problem is not that people second guessed the severity of this storm; rather, they second-guessed the MSM and govt warnings, which is what happens when these media and govt attention whores over-hype every weather event.
Yes, Sandy's impact on relatively small, but densely populated areas is no doubt severe and epic. But as of Sunday afternoon, the MSM was pimping for viewership by hyping death and destruction for a 900 mile-wide path stretching from Maine to Virginia to the Canadian border. The reality, however, is that when Sandy finally blows out of the area, the vast majority of that 900 mile swath will have suffered a mild to moderate rain event with a few gusts of wind on par with a mid-summer thunderstorm. Many of us will have lost electricity for a few hours or perhaps a few days and some us will have suffered flooded streets and basements, neither of which is all that unusual in July or in January.
To put things in perspective, as a result of the media hype, all the local schools and govt offices where I live in the northern NYC suburbs, decided on Sunday morning (if not earlier) to close on Monday, even though by Sunday afternoon, the models uniformly showed that Sandy would make landfall in southern New Jersey, nearly 200 miles away. Some local governments even declared a state of emergency 24 hours before the first few raindrops and gusts of wind. Workers stayed home, businesses shut down, millions of dollars were sucked out of the local economy. Yet as a storm, Sandy dumped a whopping .31 inches of rain in the area and whipped up a few 60 mph wind gusts. Except for the media hype that shut down the local economy, Sandy's impact was less than a severe summer squall.
This is at least the fifth time in the last three years that the MSM has hyped a weather event that failed to live up tp the hype. Cry wolf often enough and the people stop listening.
Don’t inject reality into the very small brains posting here. Their brains could explode.