Irene

With Saturday post-noon update (below)

It's all new to us, "mandantory evacuation," here in the Greater New York area. Above you see what we now know as Zone A. (The Rockaways are actually Zone B but have been included in the Zone A mandatory evacuation because road and rail access to -- and consequently egress from -- the Rockaway peninsula is so limited.)

by Ken

It's so strange. Here we are, in the Greater New York area, girding for the worse -- while everything outside remains perfectly normal, and isn't suppose to go bonkers for another full day, though the rain is expected to start tomorrow. More importantly, though, tomorrow at noon the region begins turning into a pumpkin, when all public transport goes into shutdown mode.

I figured it was going to be a closer, nail-bitinger call tomorrow. But it makes sense that if you're going to prepare for the worst, you have to actually plan for the worst. You can't tell a quarter of a million people (and that's just in the city itself; obviously there are equally low-lying areas in New Jersey and out on Long Island, and in Connecticut too) to evacuate in an hour. Of course we still don't know what it means to tell New Yorkers -- and other tri-staters -- that they have to evacuate. It's never been done before.

Well, at least I didn't have to go to bed wondering whether I was going to try to catch my 9:52am Metro-North train en route, eventually, to Constitution Island, opposite West Point, where I discovered only today online that it's Reenactment Day tomorrow. Probably I could have made onto that train, and even gotten to Constitution Island, assuming they're going to go ahead with tomorrow's festivities. (I tried calling the office, but there was just a recorded message. Not a recorded message about the present situation; it just related the normal arrangements for the island.) The problem, though, is that by mid-afternoon it was already announced that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which operates not just the city's buses and subways but the Metro-North train I would be taking, prompted by Gov. Andrew Cuomo (the MTA is a state-chartered agency),

will begin an incremental suspension of its subway, bus, and Long Island Rail Road, and Metro-North Railroad service beginning approximately eight hours prior to sustained 39 mph winds reaching the area. Subway and bus lines will begin shutting down after 12 noon tomorrow.

This is another first for New York. As far as I know, there's never been a deliberate shutdown of the transit system.

By Sunday the storm is expected to be upon us, so I guess my scheduled Municipal Art Society walking tour of the Tompkins Park area of the East Village is also kaput. The normal MAS policy is "rain or shine," as we were reflecting a couple of weeks ago when a surprisingly large band of us gathered for a walk through the area between Union Square and Madison Square in Manhattan. By coincidence that was also a tour led by Francis Morrone (it is a coincidence, isn't it, Francis? have you don something to offend the weather gods?), who reflected that way back when somebody at MAS decided on that "rain or shine" policy. He ventured that the decision might be worth reexamining. Nevertheless, we accomplished the tour quite successfully. There's a difference, though, between "rain or shine" and a historic hurricane.

It was also by mid-afternoon that Mayor Bloomberg had announced the mandatory evacuation by 5pm tomorrow of the city's lowest-lying areas, designated "Zone A." The weather folk have warned us that In the event that the storm visits its maximum wrath upon us, bring surges in the six-to-eight-foot range (meaning waves who knows how high?), Zone B areas too will be at risk, but it was a momentous enough decision to order the evacuation of Zone A.

Already today we saw video on TV of hospitals in the Zone A area being evacuated -- not an inspiring sight. On TV this afternoon I saw a genius man-in-the-street saying what a lot of us, I admit, had fleetingly thought: that the ordered evacuations and shutdowns were "a little premature," since the storm hadn't hit yet. But of course you can't wait till then to attempt that kind of evacuation.

If we get anything as serious as they are predicting, it’s likely to be pretty awful. As I've been pointing out a lot lately, in a much different context, New York City is a port city, and the city and its surroundings contain an awful lot of low-lying coastal terrain. And as the meteorologist expert guy on NY1, the local cable news channel, pointed out this morning, this damned storm hasn’t changed track in two days. Of course I saw that same segment, obviously on tape, about three times in the time I had the TV on, which didn’t exactly inspire confidence in its up-to-the-minute-ness.

In all the time my mother lived in Florida, I got to participate vicariously in hurricane watches — down there EVERY time a storm is approaching everything else goes off the TV and nobody talks about anything else. (You’d think they would have gotten used to it, but apparently this is how you “get used to” living season in, season out in the playground of tropical storms and hurricanes.) And as you say, you just never know. Sometimes they forecast the worst and not much happens, and sometimes they’re fairly casual in anticipation and dreadful stuff happens. What you discover is that the response is usually based on what happened LAST. So if the forecasters OVER-predicted, people tend to assume the new storm will be no big deal, whereas if they UNDER-predicted, people tend to assume it will be the end of the world. Unfortunately, the storms have no memory of the last one, and so do what they like.

Nevertheless, this thing is still headed straight at us, and I don’t know that there’s much between it and us to throw it off course. It just strikes me as kind of weird to thing that whatever’s going to happen, by Monday it will have happened.

A colleague at work recalled her sister's experience living through Hurricane Andrew in Florida in 1992. (I looked it up.) My mother never forgot Andrew. She was in an area close enough to the water to be subject to mandatory evacuation, but she didn’t evacuate, and you could see when she talked about it how she was affected by the memory of the SOUND of the storm passing over her area. (I don’t think she was that near the center of the storm, but of course hurricanes are very big storms, and some part of it did pass right over her area.)

The thing is, when she talked about it, it was never quite clear what the “lesson” of Andrew was for her. That she should have evacuated? I don’t think so, because I don’t think she was prepared to evacuate even WITH the memory of Andrew. But she sure lived in dread of living through something like that again. Alas, with stuff like hurricanes, you never find out till afterward what the correct response should have been!

On the way home this evening I stopped in the supermarket to pick up some stuff. The place was busy but not mobbed. I thought about getting milk but decided the amount I have on hand should be enough for the weekend, but on the way home I questioned the decision. And then it occurred to me that I still have time tomorrow to shop -- though I don't know how much milk they'll still have. Nevertheless, it's a reminder of how long we still have to wait, probably a full day yet, for whatever's going to happen to happen.

And then the weird thing is that, whatever's going to happen, by Monday it will almost certainly have happened.

Be safe, everyone.


SATURDAY POST-NOON UPDATE

Well, the first-ever transit shutdown has been in progress for about half an hour. Buses and subways are carrying passengers only as they make their way to the end of their final trip and/or to their designated hibernation site. New York Transit officials already began yesterday moving trains and buses from yards and garages that fall within the flood-prone zone, and no doubt many of those finishing up their pre-storm travels will also be headed for unexpected shelters.

NYT officials also caution that the shut-down system will take a minimum of eight hours to restart once they're given the "all clear," which throws the Monday morning commute into doubt.

For the record, I did venture back to the supermarket this morning for those items I regretted not buying last night, but I was lazy about it and waited till after 11, and while there was certainly a healthy crowd, under the circumstances it was manageable. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the shelves had indeed been restocked since last night and I was able to snag not just my milk but a number of this week's sale items.

As I hit the sidewalk on the way out this morning, about 11:25, the rain was just beginning, and by the time I walked the block and a half to the store it was coming down -- though I assume not a patch on the way it's going to be coming down.

[courtesy of Howie]

#