Hurricane Irene

well no one back home has power and there's a lot of flooding but everyone is safe and that's all i care about.

bloomberg said all power should be back by tuesday

mass transit is a crapshoot atm (for tomorrow morning)

neilybabes86 wrote:

bloomberg said all power should be back by tuesday

mass transit is a crapshoot atm (for tomorrow morning)

At least you have $290 worth of food to eat

sounds like some more winds outside my house in queens.

comebackgirl wrote:

Glad that turned out to be much less intense than they predicted. We have a couple of down trees and the stream across the street flooded, but no damage for us. Luckily we never lost power. A few of my neighbors have leaks and my parents and brother's yards flooded, but no damage to their houses. A lot of the local roads are flooded, so travel today could be tricky, but overall made out pretty well.

I'm sooo happy all your shoes made through!!!

Not too bad here in Providence.

The power went out briefly 4 times. Lots of branches - some pretty large - in the yard. But overall, no harm done.

Sounds like other parts of RI didn't fair quite as well, but certainly nothing like other states.

Stay safe everyone!

rick1zoo2 wrote:

Here comes the sun! finally. and the wind has died down. I think we are finally out of it.

Still pretty breezy here in PA, but sunny and no clouds and most importantly, the power is back!!

stupid media....
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... print.html
A Hurricane of Hype
Irene fell far short of the media’s dire warnings even before it was downgraded. Howard Kurtz on the scaremongering by television and local officials.
by Howard Kurtz | August 28, 2011 11:15 AM EDT


It was raining in Manhattan on Sunday morning, and the dogged correspondents in their brightly colored windbreakers were getting wet.

But the apocalypse that cable television had been trumpeting had failed to materialize. And at 9 a.m., you could almost hear the air come out of the media’s hot-air balloon of constant coverage when Hurricane Irene was downgraded to a tropical storm.

Not everyone was willing to accept this turn of events. When the Weather Channel’s Brian Norcross told MSNBC that forecasters had been expecting the first hurricane to make landfall in New York City since 1893—“and it didn’t happen”—anchor Alex Witt was openly skeptical.

“Really, Brian?” she asked. Hadn’t Irene technically still been a hurricane when it came ashore in New York an hour earlier? “Can’t we still go with that?”

No, Norcross said.

With not much to report on the island of Manhattan, the cable news channels switched to places like Long Beach, Long Island, where such correspondents as NBC’s Al Roker and CNN’s John King delivered their wind-whipped reports. “It looks pretty hurricane-ish to me,” Fox anchor Shep Smith said as reporter Jonathan Hunt, British and breathless, showed a hotel parking lot under a foot and a half of water.

Long Beach, it should be noted, is a narrow barrier island three feet above sea level and prone to flooding.
hurricane irene media hype

Meteorologist Jim Cantore of the Weather Channel reporting from Battery Park in New York City on Saturday, Jonathan Saruk, The Weather Channel / Getty Images

Someone has to say it: cable news was utterly swept away by the notion that Irene would turn out to be Armageddon. National news organizations morphed into local eyewitness-news operations, going wall to wall for days with dire warnings about what would turn out to be a Category 1 hurricane, the lowest possible ranking. “Cable news is scaring the crap out of me, and I WORK in cable news,” Bloomberg correspondent Lizzie O’Leary tweeted.

I say this with all due respect to the millions who were left without power, to those communities facing flooding problems, and of course to the families of the 11 people (at last count) who lost their lives in storm-related accidents.

And I take nothing away from the journalists who worked around the clock, many braving the elements, to cover a hurricane that was sweeping its way from North Carolina to New England.

But the tsunami of hype on this story was relentless, a Category 5 performance that was driven in large measure by ratings. Every producer knew that to abandon the coverage even briefly—say, to cover the continued fighting in Libya—was to risk driving viewers elsewhere. Websites, too, were running dramatic headlines even as it became apparent that the storm wasn’t as powerful as advertised.

The fact that New York, home to the nation’s top news outlets, was directly in the storm’s path clearly fed this story-on-steroids. Does anyone seriously believe the hurricane would have drawn the same level of coverage if it had been bearing down on, say, Ft. Lauderdale?

The symbiotic relationship between television and local officials played a huge role. Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor who was all over television on Sunday morning, had drawn saturation coverage with his blunt warnings to “get the hell off the beach.” New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who ordered evacuations of low-lying areas, has been a constant presence. President Obama and FEMA officials made sure to generate their share of news as well.

Cable news was utterly swept away by the notion that Irene would turn out to be Armageddon.

These officials have a responsibility to plan for worst-case scenarios, of course, but something more blatantly political is at work. Mayors and governors need to be seen as on top of the crisis, which means being visible on the tube. No one wants to be the next Ray Nagin or Heckuva Job Brownie, looking disorganized after Katrina. A badly handled snowstorm has contributed to more than one mayor’s defeat.

The blizzard of press conferences, in turn, enable the networks to keep their "Breaking News" banners up and furnished a sense of drama for a story that otherwise consisted of reporters on streets where the hurricane was expected to strike and weather experts with their maps in climate-controlled studios.

Given the localized nature of storm coverage, it was hardly surprising that cable news kept switching to feeds from local stations. “Live Rescue in New York,” said the CNN banner, picking up a WABC-TV report on an elderly man in Westchester County being helped from rising waters. But it was hardly rare—the kind of submersion we routinely see in flooded Mississippi River towns.

Fox switched to a WNYW-TV report on rising water near a group of homes in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. Smith joked that he didn’t want the local reporter to fall in the calf-high water, even though “it would make good television.” News alert from someone who grew up there: it’s a waterfront neighborhood with fishing boats on a large bay that feeds into the Atlantic. This stuff happens.

As the storm weakened, a tone of reality crept into the live reports. After heading to Battery Park, on the low-lying southern tip of Manhattan, CNN’s Anderson Cooper said: “There has been some flooding—not a huge amount of flooding, and some of the water is already starting to recede … It’s actually not bad at all.”

But there is always the prospect that something bad might happen soon. “Is Wall Street going to open tomorrow?” business correspondent Bob Pisani asked on MSNBC, the towers of the financial district behind him.

Hurricanes are unpredictable, and it’s a great relief that the prophets of doom were wrong about Hurricane Irene. But don’t expect the cable networks to downgrade their coverage the next time a tropical storm gathers strength.

All the parks near my house are flooded. Fortunately my street is clear, just can't get very far beyond that

http://collingswood.patch.com/articles/ ... to-7536072

SPEEDY MCCREADY wrote:

peacegirl wrote:

My power went out last night around 6pm and hasn't come back yet. Called this morning and they said it will be this afternoon or evening...guess that's better than days or weeks...my sis is only about a mile away and still had power last night so I can go over there if need be

Went to bed around 9:30 cause I was bored..woke up around 1:30 but went right back to sleep...worst part was to hit us overnight but I guess I slept right through it!

Other than losing power I've been safe..Hope everyone else has been too

Kind of funny....3 million people without power....

And YOU called to see when it will be turned on??? hehehehehe

Hope everyone is doing ok out East.....

I know, I even felt kind of silly calling but it looked like all my neighbors still had their power so I wanted to make sure it was reported for my street

It came back on sometime this afternoon...I went to a friends house around noon and hung out there til about 5..power was back on when I got home