Was it a bust?

Apparently, Irene was a failure, as viewed from the exalted perch of media anchors, because they themselves are still alive and Wall Street is negotiable by taxi instead of boat.

Bullshit.

In the first place, the death toll is somewhere in the twenties*. Katrina was in a class by itself and warps our sensibilities. Irene's harvest is in the medium range of casualties from tropical storms. The New York media, with their city's limited experience of tropical storms, seem not to appreciate this.

Then there's the physical damage. It may not be impressive to the anchorfolk, but it is if you're in Bennington, Brattleboro, or Woodstock, Vermont, or Campton, NH, Westport, MA, or East Haven, CT, or any similar number of places further south. I mention these because I've been in them and can appreciate the damage. Many of them haven't seen tropical storm damage in over 70 years.

Here in New England, we also have an experience that is becoming normal during and after storms. Hundreds of thousands of customers of private power providers have lost electrical power, and are being told they won't get it back for days, maybe weeks.

By contrast, I live in a town with its own municipal light department. They buy most of our power in good times, but are capable when necessary of generating electricity. Public entity it may be, it has an eye on the bottom line. That may influence the speed with which the local light department responds to outages. The longest outage I can remember in the last 20 years was three hours. Granted, the light department's customer base is a tenth or less the size of that of a private power companies. But shouldn't the private companies' outages be in proportion? If it takes our guys an hour to bring a grid back on line, it should perhaps take private enterprise ten or twelve hours, not ten to twelve days.

So much for the efficiencies of capitalism.

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*As I published this, I heard the toll had risen to 38. No, it's not a bust, especially if you knew one of the victims.

Storm day

There are only two parts of today's storm I haven't enjoyed.

1) Speculating on which part of our lot will be splattered by our neighbour's oversized Norway maple should it decide to fall. In a tropical cyclone, odds are that it will fall this way if it does. The chief question here is where to park my car to avoid the tree.

2) Microwaves have one crowning virtue: their ability to reheat leftover coffee without having it taste like, well, reheated coffee.

The crowning (pun intended) moment of our obligatory storm walk to check out the beach was the tree that fell just over a block in front of us. At first I thought the noise came from behind us, so I whirled around. My wife was walking without glasses (and so could see more than ten feet away) and spotted the tree. It sounded exactly like an auto collision.

Our town's position relative to the storm should spare us northeast winds. The harbour is only open in that direction, so the brunt of the weather is landing on the beach. Surf's definitely up, but some spoilsports with blue lights are out there keeping everyone--surfers included--off the beach.

It's too bad more Americans aren't educated in the Beaufort scale of winds, because it's perfectly suited to a day like this, with variable velocity. When we took our walk, it was about Force 8. Typically, it takes Force 10 to uproot trees, and since trees have definitely been uprooted we may have had Force 10 gusts.
It seems to be a little stronger now, but the rain's stopped.

Enough. Pause now in case we lose power again.

Ghoulish meterology

Some years back, I took a weather course. The instructor had a good friend with the NWS, then in Boston. He arranged a tour of the facility, showed us the synoptic charts tracing the development of the Perfect Storm, then our latest and greatest weather disaster. The best moment was when he looked at that day's synoptic chart, showed us how it could presage a blizzard and how it probably wouldn't. Then he got a purely evil look and said "but I LOVE it when things fuck up!"

So do I.

It is much easier to view weather disasters with equanimity when one grew up with electricity and running water as seasonal luxuries. In this house, we keep a fair supply of food around, gas lanterns, batteries, etc., because hurricanes are just one of the amusements Mother Nature throws at us on the coast. The only thing that makes me sullen is that I can't find the kerosene lamps, which are in the proverbial safe place. Bad idea, that.

Hurricane Irene has as its best feature that it's smacking New York and Washington around. Let's recall that Manhattan, which has been destroyed on film a couple of dozen times, has experienced just four (or is it five?) hurricanes in the last 160 (or is it 200?) years. In that time Gotham has become the media capital of the universe. Now the disaster is--potentially at least--on the medias' doorstep. This makes a difference in the quantity (if not the quality) of coverage.

The odds of an evacuation order here are vanishingly slim, but we ain't going in any case. There's too much to see, for one thing. For another, Miss Annie, at age 23, has made it very clear already that she's not going. We can't leave the old lady behind.

Once upon a time, local boaters exercised an admirable freemasonry in the face of disaster. According to reliable (but single-sourced) report, that is no more. Yesterday's report was that boaters stacked up at the town's sole state-of-the-art launching ramp were fighting over who had what priority to haul out. This is what happens when you put the price tag of your toy ahead of the goodwill of your aquatic neighbours.

Stay tuned. We wait for the fun.