Westbrook among many on this thread are probably hurricane virgins so the first time is so special to them...LOL
Having lived though an Andrew and several CAT 3 storms in Florida I'm sort of chuckling at all this Irene drama.
Go though a Andrew and every other hurricane is a walk in the park...
> Westbrook among many on this thread are probably hurricane virgins
Nope.
Hurricanes Carol, Diane, Hazel, Gloria, Bob, are at the top of my memory.
We’ve had many unnamed blizzards, floods, and ice storms where the power was off for weeks. During the 2005 flood here in western NH, many folks in their homes and cars were swept away when a dam burst, never to be seen again, bridges were completely washed out never to be rebuilt again.
Almost every winter we get cut off from civilization for at least a few days at a time when we get a nasty ice storm or snow storm. Our friends in upstate Western New York usually get hammered even worse than we do in the winters, but if you don’t read their papers, you’d never know about it.
We hear a lot about tornadoes, hurricanes, wild fires, and floods in other parts of the country, though. We never minimize or dismiss the awfulness of those things, and we’re always ready to lend a hand in whatever way we can, rather than to poke fun at someone else’s tragedy.
PBS had a documentary from their American Experience’ series on Friday night about the truly huge and horrific hurricane that struck Long Island, Connecticut and Rhode Island in late September 1938. People in the NE ought to get hold of that, note the damaqe in it (Galveston-type damage), then pull up the ‘damage scenes’ currently showing on TV. I suspect there won’t be much comparison.
Here in NC, we had Irene blow through at Cat 1. I saw the damage pix from the outer islands, such as Okracoke, Kill Devil and Atlantic Beach. Yeah, some buildings were torn up, street signs pulled down, trees uprooted. But, bad as it was it wasn’t anything like what the tornados did in my very town of Sanford last April (two dead in our county besides those killed elsewhere in NC). And the damage Friday wasn’t a patch on what Wilma did a few years ago when she bounced off our coast two or three times.
I am sorry for those whose property was damaged and most sorry for those who lost family. But I tuned out of the coverage Saturday morning because the hysteria was painful to watch. If I’m going to watch people make fools of themselves, I’ll switch to subjects that are already and intentionally fictional. Seeing them doing it about what can be checked and is actually happening is just sad.
Having lived though an Andrew and several CAT 3 storms in Florida I’m sort of chuckling at all this Irene drama.
Go though a Andrew and every other hurricane is a walk in the park...
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I agree. I evacuated and didn’t go through Andrew but I came back to what the most unimaginable things I had ever seen. I will never forget it. Irene, bah, like a bad summer tropical thunderstorm.