The Hurricane was named Sandy. It struck in October and took a path that brought it through northern New Jersey and New York State before the storm petered out over Canada.
This Hurricane Sandy happened in the minds of members of the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) in Westchester County, New York, 15 years ago this month.
The webpages created at the time to war game this imaginary Hurricane Sandy are still online. The main page reads in part: Read More
Mayor Bloomberg’s office has teamed with Google to create Hurricane Sandy: NYC. It’s a handy “crisis” map that links to the latest N.Y.C. Emergency Management alerts, various city-related Twitter accounts and advisories about Hurricane Sandy from the National Hurricane Center.
Residents may be particularly interested in the map’s color-coded evacuation zones–currently Zone A is under a mandatory evacuation order.
Here are Google’s tips on how to best use the map: Read More
With all the angst and frustration over Hurricane Irene, the city actually got off pretty good. At ground zero, precautions to protect the 9/11 memorial actually helped prepare the site for its opening in just over a week. But as Port Authority executive director and big man downtown Chris Ward told the audience at a New York Building Congress forum today, we were inches away from disaster. Read More
When Hurricane Irene finally blew through the city Sunday morning as a mere tropical storm, many New Yorkers were left disappointed. No, not primarily because of the inconvenience of suspended Subway service, the annoyance of a flooded basement or the over zealousness of a few public officials, though there was plenty of that, too. No, these New Yorkers were angry at Mother Nature for not putting up more of a fight.
“I have to say, if we’re going to be stuck inside for 48 hours, I was hoping for at least more excitement,” Carly Frasier Doria said yesterday afternoon, the sun shining from the clear blue sky as she was returning from a Starbucks run at 43rd and Sixth, Frappuccino in hand. “It’s good nobody got killed, I guess. But a little more excitement would have been good. Not so much that anyone died, but enough to keep things interesting.”
“The worst part was that they shut the subways down,” her coworker Emily Turner said, sipping on a grande. “Even though it was boring, there was nothing to do. You couldn’t go visit your friends.”
“All the bars in Dumbo were closed,” corrected Ms. Frasier Doria. “That was the worst part. I really needed a cocktail. And the next morning, there was no coffee.”
Irene was no hurricane. It wasn’t even a tropical storm, it turns out. It was a case of tropical depression. Read More
The Observer has cataloged 25 reasons why Hurricane Irene was good for New York City, and Streetsblog gives us another: burnishing our urban superiority complex. After all, a major storm or disaster like this reminds us of the value of living in dense, transit-rich communities, where you can walk, cab, bike, bus, train or—if you must, if you can—drive to work, to the store, to see friends. Read More
Hard work and luck have paid off at ground zero yet again.
There was the potential for the 9/11 Memorial plaza to be devastated by Hurricane Irene, as one of the site’s marquee features is a grove of hundreds of newly planted Swamp White Oak trees and thousands of granite cobblestones. As the good news from the tropical storm keeps trickling in—no fatalities from the storm, less damage than expected, a city of now fully stocked liquor cabinets—it turns out the memorial has come through remarkably unscathed. Read More
With Hurricane Irene (maybe, possibly, fingers-crossed-it-won’t) headed straight for New York City, almost every precaution is being taken. People are stocking up on supplies like pet raincoats and booze, the M.T.A. is on lockdown and construction sites across the city are closed, with contractors directed to remove or secure everything that could potentially become a projectile in the event of high winds. This includes the biggest construction site in the city, the World Trade Center.
The timing could not be worse, as the hurricane could hit Sunday, exactly two weeks before the 9/11 Memorial is set to open. Read More
Maybe this is common sense, but maybe people who take their lives in their hands every time they ride a bike in New York are short on that—this reporter included.
Still, with the M.T.A. suspending service across the entire transit system, a first in the agency’s 38-year history, The Observer couldn’t help but wonder: Might biking be a viable option to get around town for the majority of New Yorkers who do not own cars? It took less than a minute to disabuse us of this crazy notion. Read More
It’s started raining, and it’s not about to stop until Monday—Brooklyn is Portland!—thanks to the arrival of Hurricane Irene off the East Coast. Hopefully, like Tuesday’s Earthquake, New York won’t be getting it too bad, but just in case, the Bloomberg administration has been preparing the city for possible problems, the greatest of which would be flooding. The mayor’s office just released a map of hurricane zones, to keep New Yorkers aware of where things could be bad.
Not surprisingly, Battery Park City, the Lower East Side, Redhook and Coney Island are all flashpoints, but so too are large swathes of Staten Island and the Upper East Side. The mayor took time out to put the city’s mind at ease with a few jokes in today’s announcement of the preparations: Read More
The Bloomberg administration today announced a rather grim, yet probably necessary competition: design the sort of temporary housing New Yorkers would need following a catastrophe. The competition asks contestants to imagine a fictitious neighborhood called Prospect Shore that's just been hit by a Category 3 hurricane, leaving 38,000 families homeless.
The competition's sponsored by the Read More
