New york - Hurricane Irene
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Hurricane Irene had threatened New York City mightily but, in the end, she did not deliver her worst.
Despite days of dire warnings from Mayor Michael Bloomberg and from cable news channels that the island of Manhattan might face heavy flooding and power cuts, Irene had weakened sufficiently by the time it made its way up the east coast from North Carolina that it passed the city without catastrophe.
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"It never got its eye back and it never got its mojo back," said Chad Myers, CNN's "weather anchor", sounding slightly disappointed when asked by Anderson Cooper, the CNN presenter who made his name with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005, why it had been less powerful than feared.
It was mid-morning and Mr Cooper stood on dry land in Battery Park City in Manhattan as the wind died away. Minor street floods at the lower tip of the island and parts of Brooklyn facing New York Harbour were receding as Irene made its way north towards Connecticut.
The storm - a category three hurricane at its height which was downgraded to a tropical storm as it arrived in New York - caused severe damage to houses and beaches in North Carolina and Philadelphia and extensive flooding in Virginia. The total death toll stood at 15 by Sunday morning.
New Yorkers had experienced a night of high winds and torrential rain across the five boroughs and were sheltering inside, some with their windows taped up to stop glass flying across rooms. But by the time many woke, anticipating a nerve-racking day, there was little cause for panic.
The eye of the storm passed across Long Island to the east and, in the city, the wind was not strong enough to threaten high-rise buildings and skyscrapers. Some trees and branches were blown down in Brooklyn and Queens but the damage was less severe than during a tornado last year.
That led both to relief and to questions about whether preparations had been overblown. Many people had stocked drinking water, candles and batteries in case of disaster, and Mr Bloomberg ordered a mandatory evacuation of some low-lying areas. Public transport and airports were closed.
New York does not experience many hurricanes because it is hard for those forming in the Caribbean to make it so far north. It is also shielded in a nook at the western end of Long Island that makes it hard for storms to execute the needed sharp left turn off the Atlantic. |
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By :
Marcelino Trent
Submitted
2011-08-28 13:25:38 |
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