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]

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Looking for good info on swine flu (and other public health subjects?) Try the blog Effect Measure

Richard Besser, acting director

of the Centers for Disease Control

"One big thing to know was emphasized by Acting CDC Director Richard Besser at the White House briefing yesterday: the influenza virus is highly unpredictable and our certain knowledge of it very scant. If you've seen one flu pandemic, you've seen one flu pandemic."

-- from this morning's Effect Measure post on the swine flu situation
(note: the writer is not suggesting that we are in a pandemic)

by Ken

The swine flu outbreak has a lot of us scrambling for information (here's a link to CNN's video of yesterday's White House press briefing at which the Dept. of Health and Human Services declared a national health emergency), and I confess I wouldn't have known where to turn for good public health info. So I'm pleased now to be able to suggest Effect Measure, which describes itself as "a forum for progressive public health discussion and argument as well as a source of public health information from around the Web that interests the editor(s)."

On-site we get some additional explanation:

The Editors of Effect Measure are senior public health scientists and practitioners. Paul Revere was a member of the first local Board of Health in the United States (Boston, 1799). The Editors sign their posts "Revere" to recognize the public service of a professional forerunner better known for other things.

This morning's entry, for example, "Swine flu: what did you expect?," is an invaluable guide to the questions we're actually asking, and should be asking, even for those of us who don't really know what we mean to ask.

Answers are more elusive, but at least Revere explains why. For example:

Another thing that most people and probably most clinicians expect is that we know a lot about influenza. Perhaps because of the increased scientific interest since bird flu (an increased interest which will pay off handsomely in this outbreak, by the way) we do know quite a bit, but we also now know many of the things we thought we knew about flu, like the main ways it is transmitted from person to person, we don't really know.

In the world of the 24-hour news cycle, it often happens that even the best experts (assuming the news cyclists have any clue who they might be) don't know the answers. At this point there are two quite different approaches to "covering" the event:

(a) You can have genuine experts frame the correct question(s) as intelligently as possible and explain what the limits of our present knowledge are and how that is likely to evolve, or --

(b) You can have robo-anchors with functional IQs lower than their pets' speculate mindlessly, or put their empty heads together for some mindless chat-speculation, or find someone who might actually know something and browbeat that poor soul with "would you say that" questions which then provide the basis for sky's-the-limit extrapolative speculation.

I'll leave it to you to guess which approach Effect Measure takes. Another nice thing about the blog is that it appears to be read by smart people who actually know stuff about the subject(s) and can actually add information in the comments.


THIS IS SO DEPRESSING, AND SO TEDIOUS, BUT YET AGAIN ALL
THE FINGERS SEEM TO POINT AT RIGHT-WING SHITHEADISM

In the days, weeks, and months ahead we're going to learn a whole lot more than we knew or wanted to know about swine flu and flu epidemics and emergency preparedness. Already, alas, it appears that a good deal of what we learn is going to target the know-nothing shitheadism of the slash-and-burn loons of the Right.

Environmentalists have been screaming for years about the public-health menace of the multidimensional public health hazard of those giant animal-growing "factories" in which most of our commercial chickens and pigs are now raised, producing not only sicker and sicker animals, which are therefore shot up with larger and larger doses of antibiotics (further contaminating not just the animals but the already-toxic waste they produce), but also massive sites that are unfit for human habitation and humongous problems of toxic sludge entering local water supplies.

The punchline here is that research into the very problems of swine "culture" was one of the things the witty wags of the Right roundly ridiculed. It was right up there with Governor Booby's hilarious send-up of spending money to study -- can you imagine? -- volcanoes!

Food specialists also point out that our "improved" food-producing technology, introduced in the process of converting what used to be our agriculture industry into the megaworld of agribusiness, has in fact created a dual nightmare, as a result of separating animals from agricultural land. Once upon a time the animals' manure went directly into fertilizer for the crops. Once the two became separated, however, the animal wastes turned into an increasingly unmanageable crisis of toxic-waste disposal, and fertilizing crop-growing land required increasing dependence on dangerous chemicals, still further compounding the risk factor of the food that reaches our markets as well as the toxic-waste disposal problem.


IN THE MATTER OF EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS: OF COURSE
RIGHTIES DON'T BELIEVE IN EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS

Then there's the question of how prepared we are to cope with a public-health emergency. On the plus side, at least we no longer have Chimpy the Prez and his team of death-dealing clowns on the job. It is, as we learned during the eight grim years of the Bush regime, with its all-out war on human intelligence in all forms, and above all in the form of science, a root principle of the Loony Right that emergency preparedness is irrelevant to government, and in any event can't be accomplished by government, because government is incompetent. And the Loony Rightists have no trouble proving that government is incompetent when they are the government.

This morning on The Nation's blog The Beat, John Nichols posted an item that begins:

GOP Know-Nothings Fought Pandemic Preparedness
posted by John Nichols on 04/27/2009 @ 08:00am

When House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey, the Wisconsin Democrat who has long championed investment in pandemic preparation, included roughly $900 million for that purpose in this year's emergency stimulus bill, he was ridiculed by conservative operatives and congressional Republicans.

Obey and other advocates for the spending argued, correctly, that a pandemic hitting in the midst of an economic downturn could turn a recession into something far worse -- with workers ordered to remain in their homes, workplaces shuttered to avoid the spread of disease, transportation systems grinding to a halt and demand for emergency services and public health interventions skyrocketing. Indeed, they suggested, pandemic preparation was essential to any responsible plan for renewing the U.S. economy.

But former White House political czar Karl Rove and key congressional Republicans -- led by Maine Senator Susan Collins -- aggressively attacked the notion that there was a connection between pandemic preparation and economic recovery.

Now, as the World Health Organization says a deadly swine flu outbreak that apparently began in Mexico but has spread to the United States has the potential to develop into a pandemic, Obey's attempt to secure the money seems eerily prescient.

And his partisan attacks on his efforts seem not just creepy, but dangerous. . . .

Nichols points out that what we have now is by no means a pandemic. However, does anyone believe that that money devoted to pandemic-preparation wouldn't have come in mighty handy right about now?


POSTSCRIPT: THE SHITHEAD RIGHT STRIKES AGAIN -- WHY
IS IT THAT WE DON'T HAVE AN ACTUAL HHS SECRETARY?

HHS Secretary-in-waiting Kathleen Sebelius

Politico reports that the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) "has launched an online petition criticizing Republicans for delaying the confirmation of a Health and Human Services secretary in the face of a swine flu outbreak."

The union accuses Senate Republicans of delaying the confirmation of nominee Kathleen Sebelius to “curry favor with extremist outside groups” and depriving the department of leadership as the nation confronts a potential flu pandemic.

“This is simply unacceptable,” the union says on its website. “This disease is spreading as we speak, but right now, a Bush-appointed accountant is running the department. We need an HHS secretary NOW. Sign the petition telling the Senate to vote immediately to confirm Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. If we don't act, the swine flu might just turn into another Hurricane Katrina.”

Senate Democrats attempted to fast-track Sebelius during the first week of April, but Republicans raised objections, saying her nomination needed to follow regular order. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) attempted to schedule a vote Wednesday but was again thwarted.

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