Tuesday, October 30, 2012

As bad as expected

There are times when the weather people get it wrong, they predict bad weather and then it doesn’t happen. This time though, they were spot on. Sandy has turned out to be as devastating as we were told it would be.

Pam and I watched the American news channels last night as Sandy made landfall on the Eastern seaboard of America. We saw the rising waters flood Atlantic City and later the water rise in Battery Park.

In numbers, so far there are at least 16 people who have died and there may be more to come, at least 6.2m people are without power and could remain without power for a week and the storm surge reached 13 feet made worse by a high tide.

In New York it all started to happen at about 8pm, earlier than expected because Sandy had picked up speed. The combination of a sea surge, a high tide, winds of up to 80mph and torrential rain have caused untold damage there and along the coast and will continue to do so for awhile yet.

1 comment:

Charles Smythe said...

Poor Americans? Reputedly the richest country on the planet.

Of course we are all saddened by the devastaion which has caused their 'poor' country... but what about the likes of Haiti for example, one of the many countries to have been affected severely by the same hurricane?

"On Monday, the scale of damage in Haiti from Hurricane Sandy became evident. Even though the storm’s center skirted the country, more than 20 inches of rain fell on Haiti’s south and southwest over four days last week, causing at least 52 deaths, tearing out crops and destroying houses.

“We are facing a major crisis,” Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe said this weekend after he flew over the regions that had been hit by the storm.

"The (Haitian) government said that the homes of as many as 200,000 people had been damaged — on top of almost 400,000 people still homeless from the January 2010 earthquake. “We have a lot of work ahead of us in terms of the aid that we will need to deliver in the days, weeks and months to come,” Mr. Lamothe said. “It won’t be easy because there are many roads and bridges that have been cut off.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/world/americas/yet-another-blow-to-haiti-from-hurricane-sandy.html