I could one person with stored water who lives on LI. Haven’t heard from them in a couple of days. Figure he’s OK though because he’s clueful. Even then he’s not ‘allowed’ to have personal protection. That, for me, is a deal breaker in a SHTF scenario. All your preps essentially amount to zero if you can’t protect yourself.
I think the problem is a lot of people didn’t KNOW they could flood. They were a mile from the north shore or 6 blocks from the east river. And, in yankeelandia, there isn’t a subliminal cultural memory of hurricane surges. Most of them still thought the floods came from rain (and this storm wasn’t predicted to drop a lot on the northern side) and wind. And since it was ONLY cat 1 winds they weren’t concerned. The NHC didn’t help with the drastic underprediction of flooding.
While there isn’t a vast coastal plain that goes on and on, there WERE *very* dense areas that even with 3ft extra flooding meant hundreds of thousands of people MORE that were affected that got a really ugly surprise. I’m sure if the people in Jersey city had known they’d flood they’d have parked their cars on boulevard east and kennedy boulevard at 5pm and paid the parking fine later...Ditto much of brooklyn and queens that flooded by surprise.
The idiots on the barrier islands? Not so much with the rescue sympathy. Although I DO blame some of their normalcy bias on the LACK of katrina surge coverage by the MSM. They thought hurricane surge was what happened in NO and was some gentle water they could just wade through to safety. As kids WE all had to watch ‘a lady called camille’ or whatever that movie name was. What happened in NO, bad as it was, had nothing on what happened on the MS coast in the morning of the landfall. I tried to argue this with a friend up there. I mentioned katrina slabbed 3 or 4 BLOCKS in from the ocean. SLABBED. WIPED THEM CLEAN. He argued that he had SEEN all the intact but flooded houses in NO, so clearly that was wrong. Again, I blame the MSM.
Maybe NOW they understand hurricane surge. Like shep (PBOM) said. the wind’ll scare you, the water’ll kill you.
My sister and parents both flooded — badly — in NOLA. That cleanup and rebuild was no picnic. But what happened on the MS coast was just awful. The slab scrapes in Waveland and Pass Christian went back even more than you say. The diamonds that went into my wife’s wedding ring spent their Katrina in a jeweler’s safe under 30 feet of the GOM.
Perhaps some of the FReepers who to this day say crummy things about New Orleans in Katrina will ponder the fiendish complexity and logistical difficulty of planning for a major storm, and discover some regret for the shabby, shameful things they said.
I doubt it.
Yes, my feelings are still raw about the whole thing.
I saw many pictures of the destruction on the MS coast right here on FR, not widespread in the MSM. I knew the predictions for this storm w/the surge were going to result in similar situations.
I was less worried about the wind, but I do know that it caused a lot of down lines, damaged homes, etc.
My parent’s basement partially flooded a few years ago and that took a big effort to clean up. I can’t even imagine a whole city.