Posted on 10/30/2012 4:42:33 AM PDT by Kartographer
Hundreds of people are being evacuated after a levee broke in a northern New Jersey town early Tuesday. Bergen County executive chief of staff Jeanne Baratta tells The Record newspaper the entire town of Moonachie is under water and as many as 1,000 people could need to be evacuated.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
And 8 million without power.
Heavy flooing in PA. Severe damage in Long Island and Nantucket Sounds.
Yeah a pretty small area I'd say.
LOL. Wife has been giving me sh1t for years about it. Gave me even more grief last week as a I topped off supplies and checked equipment.
Then she watched the news on Friday and started freaking out. On learning what we had and what we could do she started inviting all her friends over to ride out the storm (c'mon over we have food, water, generators, beds, blankets, games, etc...
I happily endure all of the BS because as Sandy approached, I was calm, cool and collected knowing I could deal with just about anything except the total destruction of my house (and I even have plans and supplies for that)
“a place where most prudent people WOULD NOT live for any reason”
“people who live where nature does not favor their tranquility get what they paid for - trouble”
Indeed. But I have news for you - by your apparent defintion of “nature does not favor”, MOST of this country would be “packed up and shipped out”.
My region in MD is probably the ideal place to live. However, we do OCCASIONALLY suffer major catastrophic flooding from hurricanes (1972), major snowstorms (2010 record-setting event), and other random acts of God. That doesn’t mean we should ignore how marvelously blessed it is 95% of the time and abandon it. NJ hardly suffers from hurricanes more than MD does - although it IS 1 giant flood plain/marsh, indeed, as is our Eastern Shore.
Unfortunately the issue here is not generation but rather transmission. Look up the videos of the major transformer exploding.
Just about every part of the country is prone to some sort of natural disaster; earth quakes, wild fires, mud slides, hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, blizzards, sand storms, etc. For the most part the mid-Atlantic and NE is pretty calm most of the time compared to other parts of the country. I for one could not imagine living in CA or in tornado alley or in Buffalo.
Centralized command, decentralized control.
Evacuating millions of people in a several day period, not knowing which way to go, could also result in as many casualties and deaths as riding out a Tropical Storm when public and private buildings are constructed to withstand greater forces.
PS, would you evacuate if you lived in a blue state, when the news reports indicate the storm would likely lessen to a Tropical Storm by landfall?
When the press is pushing ‘massive’ evacuations of about 100 people from a trailer park, in the Flood Plain, where a broken berm has allowed flooding, which hasn’t crested their trailer floors, but is hip deep in the parking lot,...I do feel compassion for my fellow man, but I also discern between others who experience Class 2-5 hurricanes every 1-3 years with far more at risk.
In the spirit of Sam Kinison,...You are a mobile people, subject to daily commutes and annual moves. If you don’t want to be flooded out,...then move your trailer out of the FLOOD PLAIN!
I believe a large number of the people without power have no power because it was shut off, not because the storm knocked it out. But I’m not sure.
And I am saying it is a small area, relatively speaking. Chicago, LA, Seattle, Phoenix, etc. are not impacted.
I’m not saying it is not a big deal, especially to those in the thick of it. I’m just trying to zero in on the correct perspective from which to take this event in.
MOST of this country would be “packed up and shipped out”.
“Most of this country” is a vast over-statement by a million miles.
You use the term “most” far too liberally - get a map of Maryland and a map of New Jersey; MOST of the land of either is not sitting on the atlantic ocean shore line.
MOST of Maryland and MOST of New Jersey and MOST residents of both states, are not located/residing where the impact of large storms from the coast (they have the largest impact here in the northeast) have the MOST and MOST devastating impact - which is near the shore as opposed to away from it.
MOST of us do not reside where nature intends to constantly unmake and remake our ocean shoreline, in processes that include the major storms, in processes that created them. MOST of us live inland enough, and some even just inland enough that if nature was allowed to do what she has done along our shores for thousands of years, without too much concern from us (because we had not planted ourselves in the way in very large and unnecessary numbers) then we would be far less concerned about these storms, still be of the same size as we are in population, comfortably, obtain far less damages from them, and still be residing in MOST of the land of our states.
And, even when it comes to our rivers, we have begun the steps here in New Jersey to buying out the residents in those places where river flooding occurs most often, creating open green spaces where a river in a storm can expand into and retract from, as needed, instead of all of us paying again and again and again to rescue the property and infrastructure sitting in what should be a natural flood plain.
That’s what the area in Moonachie New Jersey and all around MetLife stadium is - a natural, swampy, wetland, tideland area where the sleepy Hackensack River flowing through there nearly at sea level would be no problem to a population of the present size in northern New Jersey, if it was given the open space nature always left to it.
I am not opposed, in general to people living in places that are perennially endangered places from natural causes. But as long as the rest of us are taxed to bail them out of the consequences of choosing to live there, instead of those who live there and there alone incurring 100% of the costs of always rebuilding, including the infrastructure, then I am more in favor of buying them out so nature’s natural flood plains become public green spaces and yes even if that means some coastlines are multi-mile long ribbon like state parks.
I think it’s because people simply don’t trust the MSM to be honest, and assumed they were making political hay out of it - crying wolf, so to speak.
That was the day I put all of my guns and ammunition in the duck blind with me. I was getting a charcoal fire ready to cook some hot dogs, lighting the fire with gasoline of course, the gasoline flared set the brush on the duck blind on fire and ended up burning me the dog and the duck blind , We were lucky to escape with our lives, but all of my guns and ammunition were destroyed.
That’s my story and I am sticking to it. So there is no sense in Obama’s UN Gestapo coming around looking for my guns after they get them outlawed.
“People who live where nature does not favor.”
Where does it favor? The west coast? The west coast? I think not, while far from any hurricane, it has its earthquakes. The mid west? It has its tornadoes. Then there is the Madrid fault, not to mention the Yellowstone super volcano. Nature can get unfavorable anywhere.
“And Obama does nothing....”
Another failure, and unfulfilled promise of the Obama administration! Didn’t he tell us the “seas would stop rising” when he became POTUS!
* Burned Building
* Flooded Streets
* Hospital Evacuated
* Dangling Crane
* Transformer Explosion
I saw the dangling crane and transformer explosion and thought I could hear the derisive laughter from New Orleans!
From North Carolina to Canada and from the East Coast to Chicago does not qualify as a large are to you?
“Where does it favor? The west coast? The west coast? I think not, while far from any hurricane, it has its earthquakes. The mid west? It has its tornadoes. Then there is the Madrid fault, not to mention the Yellowstone super volcano. Nature can get unfavorable anywhere.”
(1) The earthquake prone areas on the west coast (a) do not extend much above San Francisco (not a big concern in Oregon and Washington) (b) are found to be in, and more active in land closer to the coast than away from the coast with the exception of the San Andreas fault which veers in a NorthWest/Southeast slant to about 70 miles east of L.A., and (c) produces only occasional quakes that cuase damage and only rarely quakes of any major impact. Of greater and more frequent cost concern to California residents is the (a) constant bailing out of homesites and infrastructure built on coastal hills made of mostly sand and soil with great coastal views and great and constant losses from storms that erode the sandy hills under the homes, as well as homes and infratructure demanding location surrounded by mountain forests threatened by fire every year. No, there are plent of places in California that are tranquil the vast majority of the time, and those places still have plenty of room for the people in California who chose to live where EVERY YEAR their property has a greater than not chance of being at risk.
The same kinds of alternatives exist in every region of the country.
If you have listened to anything I have said you know I am not talking about the once in hundreds of years “what ifs” like the New Madrid fault or the Yellowstone super valcano.
We here in New Jersey have been bailing out New Jersey shore residents for some event nearly every year in the last twenty years, because a fraction of the population insists on living where they can see the shore out their window; and then when everyone else in the state wants to get to the shore, the locals want to charge you for the privilege. THEIR privilege would disappear and they’d move inland a bit - where most New Jersey residents live - if the rest of us didn’t keep rebuilding THEIR beaches for them.
Give the shoreline back to everyone in the state and our winter storm damages would be drastically cut, and the state could still host as many residents as it does now.
If not, then everyone needs to become 100% Libertarian and pay 100% of their own life expenses and that would include coastal towns buying - on the local tax money - their own “storm damage” insurance policies to pay 100% of their own recovery costs.
As far as I know it was only lower Manhattan that had the power deliberately cut (500K people). The other 7.5 million are due to storm damage. Which is the largest ever for storm damage.
Yes, because all the reporting has been by and about those narcissistic journos in New York, you may have missed this: the Delmarva Peninsula has been devastated. People in New York City have been inconvenienced, but in eastern Maryland and Delaware, whole towns have been demolished, businesses destroyed, houses washed away or undermined,islands in the Chesapeake submerged. Salisbury, Maryland is under water, Ocean City has been badly damaged. There will be great hardship. And no, not all the places were built on the ocean, not by any means; the storm just swept across the peninsula.
There's so much wrong with your post I don't know where to start:
1) The Cascadia subduction zone extends off all of California north of San Franciaco, Oregon, and Washington, and is capable of an earthquake and tsunami equivalent to Indian Ocean 2004 or the Japanese quake. Seattle itself is underlain by numerous large additional faults capable of earthquakes larger than the one that destroyed Port au Prince, Haiti or that killed 6,000 people in Kobe, Japan - and also generating massive tsunamis within Puget Sound.
In the next 30 years, there will be earthquakes in the San Franscisco Bay area, Los Angeles, or both, that will make Sandy, Katrina, and 9/11 look like a joke both in terms of damage and of deaths.
California has been absurdly lucky in terms of earthquakes since 1906, when the population really exploded. That luck will run out.
Honestly it's a fluke that the highest dollar value of damage, and of deaths, for natural disasters in the US has been from hurricanes. Long term, the top spots are going to be taken over by earthquakes.
You implied that the very indeed flat land of NJ - hardly ever subject to hurricanes/TS, mind you - is 1 of those places “you should never live”.
Thus did I respond to you, that most places in the US would be “uninhabitable” by those very strict standards.
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