OK—I have a simple policy about hurricanes: I take them all seriously.
Yes, all of them, barring the ones that are clearly too far north of us to have any effect whatsoever. But any storm coming low across the Atlantic? I’m on it.
Maybe I get it from Rose, who in the pre-Internet days would give me big paper maps of the Atlantic and Caribbean, on which we would put coordinates as NOAA announced them every six hours. Then, for five days or so, we would watch the storm coming, and slowly go into storm mode.
Which meant that you bought two gallons of water every day before the storm. This you did because you were on foot, not car, and anyway, if you waited until the government announced the storm? There would be pandemonium in the street, small riots in the stores, huge lines at gas stations, and reports of muggings for bags of ice.
A category three or above? In the early days, we took every picture from the walls, and lifted every rug from the floor. And I should tell you, I live on the second floor, probably 100 feet above sea level, and the walls of the building are three feet thick full of brick and stone.
And so, two years ago, I called to John and Jeanne—my middle brother and his wife—with the news that Hurricane Irene was not making me happy.
“Not a problem,” he said. “It’s just a tropical storm.”
“John, it’s been a hurricane category 2 for three days now….”
This exchange will tell you everything. I’m am in the tropics, worrying and monitoring the storm. John?
On the golf course!
Look, everybody deserves a vacation. And so they were reluctant to move from the house they had rented—a wooden house five streets away from the beach.
“FIVE STREETS!” I am almost shouting at John. “HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT STORM SURGE?
“Well, we’ll go up to the second floor,,,,”
Is it because I’m the youngest? Because I swear—the more adamant I became that John had to leave, the more casual—no, admit it, here’s the word I want to say—cavalier John became. It ended with the promise that John would evacuate if the storm got too bad.
Well, it was a fight—but it ended with no serious hurt feelings. They both swore—they weren’t blowing me off, and the Fire Department had told them the morning of the storm to stay put.
I could have countered: of course the Fire Department is going to say that. But there were several reasons to have evacuated days before. First, you never really know where these storms are going to hit. Second, if you wait until the water is knee high in the streets, and those three mini Austins ahead of you can’t make it through….well? Oh, and the firemen prefer to do their rescues without too many vehicles on the road.
Of course you know what happened--Irene barely touched them, and they were able to call several days later and report that it barely rained. Irene, however, did major damage north of them.
I had been, it seemed, silly, alarmist, absurdly fatalistic. Was I OK—they asked? Was I having anxiety in other areas of my life? Perhaps I should call my therapist….
I learned—my brother blows me off. He had “been” through a hurricane up on Cape Cod—and that was a Category 2. So a Category 1 should have been no problem, right? And what was Marc worrying about, down in Puerto Rico?
A bit more than a year later, Hurricane Sandy blew through the Caribbean and it was obvious—this was going to be a bad storm. But I had learned—John is a big boy. He gets the Times delivered to his door. And if he’s not going to listen, why talk?
So I stayed silent, and then watched—as the rest of the nation did—as New Jersey and Staten island got smashed. When I flew in to the city in early November, they had just had a major snow storm on top of the super storm; I watched the local news of parka-covered rescue workers walking through the dark halls of city housing projects, trying to figure out who was who and what to do with them.
Up on the upper West Side, where John and Jeanne live, nothing again had happened. Sure, some tree branches had been lost. Was was hard to get—but that was the cab driver's problem—not mine or John and Jeanne’s.
“Who would have thought,” I heard Jeanne say to John in the kitchen, “that a storm could cause so much damage?”
Sitting in the living room, I silently raised my hand.
It’s now a year later—I watched the documentary below yesterday about Sandy, and thought about the devastation, and the many miracles among the tragedies there were. How could it be that in the fire that destroyed over 100 homes, not one life was lost?
Have we learned out lessons, the media are asking?
In one important way—no.
I generally like the National Hurricane Center—I can hear them breathing a sigh of relief up there in Miami—but there is one thing that they’ve got to do. We have got to give the public a better perception of how dangerous a storm is. Which means we have to kiss the Saffir-Simpson Scale goodbye.
Sandy, in fact, was not a hurricane when it hit the East coast; here’s what one writer said about it:
The National Hurricane Center was being infamously stubborn during the storm, refusing to issue hurricane warnings for New Jersey and New York City based on the technicality that Sandy would become extratropical (lose its tropical characteristics) before landfall. Sandy had all the effects of a hurricane, but because its structure wasn’t expected to fit the textbook definition of a tropical system by the time of landfall, no tropical storm or hurricane warnings were issued north of the North Carolina coast.
Whether a storm is extratropical or not makes pretty little difference when the water is rising to the second floor. And if all you have done is consider the Saffir-Simpson scale, and chosen to stay home and ride it out because it’s “just” a Category 1, you’ll have missed some other very important factors.
Such as?
How big is the storm? How much water is associated with it? If it hits, will it be at high tide, as it was for Sandy? How fast is it moving? A category 1 hurricane stalled over the house for 36 hours is not fun….
I left New York and took the now-running subway, in which I saw what I had never seen: a fight broke out between a well-dressed Wall Street type and a young black dude. I was quickly broken up, and people went about their day.
I got back and thought about the storms that come, the storms that fizzle. My brother blows me off—but you know what? He’s otherwise a very good brother—a guy who is fiercely protective and loyal to the ones he loves. Oh, and very guarded in a very public way. If you want to hide, the best place is out in the open.
“Not a problem,” he says to me at any ridiculous request I manage to cook up. So he plays golf when he should be evacuating? No big deal.
He gets away with it!
