A study provides insight into contrasting Sandy recoveries between two areas with notable similarities

DNAinfo caption: "Flooding along the East River waterfront on the Lower East Side as Hurricane Sandy barreled toward New York on Monday, Oct. 29, 2012." (Photo by Chelsia Rose Marcius)

"While both areas have high concentrations of public housing residents and low-income households, the Lower East Side’s pre-existing civic infrastructure of community based organizations and social services fighting against development pressures enabled residents to recover more quickly, according to researchers who spent six months interviewing community groups in the area and 18 months in the Rockaways. "

-- from "Anti-Gentrification Work Helped LES Bounce
Back Faster After Sandy: Study," on DNAinfo New York

Highlights of the Graham-Debucquoy study:

• Urban development paths and dynamics influence the operationalization of resilience.
• Local civic infrastructure is a key condition for community-based resilience capacity.
• Legacies of anti-gentrification activism provide a foundation for resilience work.
• Meeting present socio-economic needs may foreclose pursuing long-term resilience.

by Ken

It's clear that there are all sorts of caveats to be entered regarding the headline on this report -- notably that for all the similarities between Manhattan's Lower East Side and the Rockaways, there are (as noted in the article) important differences, and the ideological tilt of pre-existing activist organizations -- in this case gratifyingly progressive -- many not matter as much as the fact of their pre-existence. What's more, the article focuses on only one of the four report strands noted in the Highlights above.

All that said, even without reading the underlying report,* I get the feeling that there's substance here worth pondering for possible application to other areas and activist struggles.

Anti-Gentrification Work Helped LES Bounce Back Faster After Sandy: Study

By Amy Zimmer
DNAinfo New York | October 24, 2016 7:41am

MANHATTAN — The low-income communities of the Lower East Side and the Rockaways both suffered extensive damage from Superstorm Sandy four years ago.

But advocates on the Lower East Side were able to engage more effectively in post-storm resiliency efforts than their counterparts in Queens because they already had a robust network of community activism in place from years of fighting gentrification, according to a recently published study from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center. [See note below about accessing the source study -- Ed.*]

Researchers focused on the role of community organizations and being able to respond to the “climate change politics” of the city, which is increasingly important as the frequency of storms is expected to rise along with rising sea levels, noted Leigh Graham, John Jay environmental psychology professor and lead author of the study.

While both areas have high concentrations of public housing residents and low-income households, the Lower East Side’s pre-existing civic infrastructure of community based organizations and social services fighting against development pressures enabled residents to recover more quickly, according to researchers who spent six months interviewing community groups in the area and 18 months in the Rockaways.

The Rockaways, on the other hand, were at a disadvantage, not only because the area is more geographically isolated on the far edge of the city, but also because it’s more racially and economically segregated.

There’s a high concentration of poverty along the eastern part of the peninsula where the residents have suffered from decades of economic “malaise,” which in effect weakened and undermined their post-storm response, researchers found.

“The Lower East Side and the Rockaways had similar levels of exposure in terms of storm flooding,” Graham said, “but the Lower East Side groups were basically a partner in a lot of the resiliency efforts after the storm, in part because residents, who live there, have been fighting gentrification for 30 to 40 years and established a level of organization, trust and power, that they were able to get a seat at the table as important stakeholders.”

Community groups on the Rockaways did not have the same level of organization prior to the storm and remain more focused on meeting present economic needs than on pursing long-term resilience planning, she noted.

“They were really dealing with economic stagnation and hardship that only worsened after the storm,” Graham said.

“The Rockaways was in crisis before Sandy hit, it continues to be in crisis, it’s an economic crisis,” one affordable housing advocate said in the report. “And so the resiliency work doesn’t just sort of happen in a vacuum, it sits on top of what’s there already in that community.”

Also, Rockaway residents have long been more aware of their precarious position surrounded by water and may not have been as surprised at being hit so hard by the storm as Lower East Side residents — which also may have affected response efforts.

As a long-term Lower East Side community organizer said in the study: “Many of us have always seen ourselves as an organization that was fighting greedy landlords and luxury developers from taking over our community, we never saw a flood, that we would be fighting the impacts of climate change and sea level rise and storm surges.”

The organizer continued: “But after Sandy, it was clear to us that we couldn’t take these things for granted, so we had to adopt it as an issue and work on it in a long term way.”

Though Graham found that mobilization around resiliency lags in Rockaway as residents struggle with more immediate economic concerns, she is continuing to do research there and has been seeing changes.

The nonprofit Community Voices Heard is focusing on the climate change movement in the area, creating an organizing hub in Rockaway. The city is also investing $91 million into a revitalization plan for the area, and the Citywide Ferry is expected in a year.
Graham is hopeful these dynamics prop up the foundation of resilience work since, she said, storms and flooding will only continue.

“We know this is our new normal,” she said.

*ACCESSING THE SOURCE STUDY

As you'll discover at the link for the Graham-Debucquoy study, only readers with credentials of various sorts can access the full text free.

The site does provide the Highlights cited above as well as this Abstract:

While (urban) resilience has become an increasingly popular concept, especially in the areas of disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change adaptation (CCA), it is often still used as an abstract metaphor, with much debate centered on definitions, differences in approaches, and epistemological considerations. Empirical studies examining how community-based organizations (CBOs) “practice” resilience on the ground and what enables these CBOs to organize and mobilize around resilience are lacking. Moreover, in the growing context of competitive and entrepreneurial urbanism and conflicting priorities about urban (re)development, it is unclear how urban development dynamics influence community-based resilience actions. Through empirical research conducted on the Lower East Side, a gentrifying neighborhood in Manhattan, and in Rockaway, a socio-spatially isolated neighborhood in Queens, we investigate community organizing of low-income residents for (climate) resilience in a post-disaster context. Results show that both the operationalization of resilience – how resilience is “practiced” – and the community capacity to organize for the improved resilience of low-income residents are strongly influenced by pre-existing urban development dynamics and civic infrastructure – the socio-spatial networks of community-based organizations – in each neighborhood. The Lower East Side, with its long history of community activism and awareness of gentrification threats, was better able to mobilize broadly and collectively around resilience needs while the more socio-spatially isolated neighborhoods on the Rockaway peninsula were more constrained.

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It was a dark and stormy night -- or actually not night at all. Happy 4th of July Weekend!

Photo by Mitch Waxman (click to enlarge)

"[S]ome jerk pulling the pin on a dud hand grenade while riding on the 7 train would be sufficient to shut the entire Subway system down for weeks while the Terror Warriors installed metal detectors and biometric sensors on every turnstile."

-- from Mitch's blogpost yesterday, "all signs"

by Ken

I don't know about you, but I need this weekend. I'm not a qualified dreamologist, but after escaping the office, I realized what I had on my mind was this photo my pal Mitch Waxman shared with readers of his Newtown Pentacle blog today. Well, that's not a dream in any case, but maybe waking fixation is even worse. It must mean something, I'm thinking.

Here's what Mitch had to say about the picture:

Recently, an excursion upon the fabled Newtwon Creek with the Anchor QEA folks (they’re the scientists studying the Creek for the Superfund process) and the Newtown Creek CAG Steering Committee (which I’m a member of) was cut short by threatening weather. Anchor has all sorts of frammistats onboard which warn them of the approach of lightning, and all the gizmos began to go off as a powerful thunderstorm was approaching. The shot above is from roughly 2.5 miles back from the East River, and depicts the DUGABO side of Brooklyn as the storm blew in. We made it back to dock, but not before the first curtain of rain and hail began to pummel the Creek.

[DUBAGO, by the way, is Mitch's Greenpoint Avenue Bridge (over Newtown Creek) extrapolation from the goofy real-estate acronym DUMBO that's come into actual use for the Brooklyn neighborhood that's Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. Mitch has a bridgeload of 'em.]

MITCH, BTW, IS FACING AN INSECURE 4TH

As he explained yesterday in a blogpost called "all signs," he has found himself -- in his Astoria (Queens) neck of the woods -- in supposed security of the homeland variety, even though, as anyone knows who has trod any part of the industrial borderlands of western Queens and Brooklyn, actual everyday security in the area, the site of much vital NYC infrastructure, in alarmingly hit or miss.

[Click to enlarge.]

Like many Queensicans, when it was announced that this year’s July 4th fireworks would be taking place in the East River just off the coast of LIC, a humble narrator grew excited. Then one began to read about frozen zones (pretty much from 11th street to the East River) and homeland security. My enthusiasm for the event began to wane as the Terror Warriors descended from their Manhattan aeries, discussed throwing down cordons, announcing entry checkpoints, and throwing a cage over the entire neighborhood. One “gets it” of course, as our enemies from “east austral Asia” specifically target public events that draw media attention, which is the very definition of what the July 4th fireworks show is.

The thing is, and I’ve been pointing this out for years, is that there is very little actual “homeland security” going on the rest of the year around these parts, and the Terror Warriors spend most of their time in Manhattan offices dreaming up scenarios which could only be accomplished by Nation/States with vast combined weapon system resources and functionally unlimited budgets. If we were at war with the United States or the People’s Republic of China, for instance, I’d be pooping my pants.

One is not so irresponsible to point the actual vulnerabilities out in any detail, as some moron out there might decide to exploit them (do your own research), but if you see graffiti along a train track or in a subway tunnel – that’s called time and opportunity. It should be impossible, literally, to sneak into a train yard or even get close to a moving train nearly two decades into the Terror Wars.

Problem is that our security personnel tend to focus on the outlandish notion that non state actors, who are basically mafiosos, can not only maintain but deploy complicated weapons systems that most nation states cannot even hope to possess. Jackass sappers like the Boston Marathon bombers, whose presence and intentions are THE real threat, just don’t fire the imagination or finger the purse strings of Congress.

It’s all a show, ultimately, designed to assuage the nagging truth that some jerk pulling the pin on a dud hand grenade while riding on the 7 train would be sufficient to shut the entire Subway system down for weeks while the Terror Warriors installed metal detectors and biometric sensors on every turnstile.

[Click to enlarge.]

I think I’m just going to go up on my roof this year on the 4th of July, photographing the fireworks at a distance from almond eyed Astoria. One is not interested in being part of a compacted herd of spectators, who are all potential suspects, in LIC. I’ll be out and about on the 5th of July, and will wager that I won’t see a single cop or security contractor protecting the vital infrastructure found hereabouts. To me, that’s terrifying.

The big show will be over by then, and the Terror Warriors will be worrying about space based laser systems at BBQ’s on Long Island and in Westchester County. They’ll muse whether or not ISIL has perfected a tractor beam that can pull asteroids down on targets (that’s called a mass driver, btw.) or developed a neutron bomb.

MITCH'S UPCOMING WALKING TOURS

Next weekend Mitch is doing his Glittering Realms Tour of Brooklyn's northernmost zone, Greenpoint ("a thriving neighborhood surrounded by environmental catastrophe which has been reborn in the 21st century") for the Newtown Creek Alliance (Sunday, July 12, 10am-12:30pm) -- tour and ticket info at the link.

I've probably already walked all this ground with Mitch, but that was then and now is now; I've already signed up for the Greenpoint walk. But for a schedule conflict I would do the same for the walk coming up in a few weeks: Modern Corridor: A Walking Tour of Long Island City's Hunters Point, for Brooklyn Brainery (Sunday, July 26, 11am-1:30pm).


COMING UP TOMORROW: 
GAIUS PUBLIUS RETURNS

As promised, GP weighs in from his current digs in Europe, and catches up on assorted pending matters -- and the sweltering heat. That's at 7am PT, 10am ET, and some other time on the other side of the pond.

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No, everything is far from all right between "Big Bill" de Blasio and "Boy Andrew" Cuomo

-- cover by Bruce McCall: "Moving Day" [Click to enlarge]

"Keep your friends close and your enemies closer."

-- Sun-tzu

"There's no goniff like a left-wing goniff."

-- Calvin Trillin repertory kibbitzer Harold the Committed

by Ken

Since this is a New York story, I thought it would be a good time to present the February 2 New Yorker cover commemorating the magazine's historic decamping from Times Square to Manhattan's nether regions and the new World Trade Center tower. (We eavesdropped recently on cartoon editor Bob Mankoff's grapplings with the great relocation.)

And we should note that the stately moving procession depicted by great New Yorker artist-writer could not have happened during the Great Storm Traffic 'n' Transit Ban, which has become even more controversial since the portion of the storm that wound up striking the Big Apple turned out to be so much less than the direst weather prognostications had prepared us for. And as I was noting last night, it seems to be Mayor Bill de Blasio rather than Gov. Andrew Cuomo taking the heat for the 11pm Monday transit total shutdown, even though that decision clearly came from the governor. (The MTA, which operates nearly all the transit facilities in the metropolitan area, is a state agency.)

Now we learn that "Big Bill" de B not only had no input into the transit-shutdown decision, but his people got a whopping 15 minutes' notice of the announcement being made by "Boy Andrew" C.

It's not exactly news that Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio aren't best buds, and perhaps not that hard to understand. For one thing, NYS governors and NYC mayors never get along, and the difficulties are often worse, not better, when they're of the same parety. Then, Boy Andrew and Big Bill are wildly difficult sorts of political animals. While we may question the legitimacy of the mayor's progressive credentials, it's probably enough for the governor that he even claims them -- enough, that is, for him to hate the guy. Boy Andrew's approach to government is rather unapologetically "Let's all get along," where the "us" refers to him and the big-money interests.

Still, I don't know that it was generally known just how bad relations between the mayor and the governor are.

During the blanket pre-storm and then actual-storm coverage, it was noted occasionally that the two never appeared together. This might have been attributed to their busy storm-preparedness schedules, but there really didn't seem to be much indication that they or their people were even in especially close contact. It wasn't till the meteorological storm had passed us that we learned about the other storm brewing.

DNAinfo New York
Mayor Got 15 Minutes Notice of Cuomo's Subway Shutdown for Snow

By Jeff Mays and Trevor Kapp


Snow falling on subway tracks as seen from the Gates Avenue J/Z platform on Jan. 26, 2015, as a snowstorm headed for New York City.

MIDTOWN — Mayor Bill de Blasio got just a 15-minute head's up that the governor planned to announce the subway would be completely shut down because of a storm meteorologists predicted would dump 2 feet of snow on the city, an unprecedented snow-related move.

The news came despite Gov. Andrew Cuomo's assurances Monday that his office was "totally coordinated" with the mayor, and was the latest indication that the leaders may not be on the same page.

"We did not get a lot of advance notice," de Blasio said Tuesday at a City Hall press conference.

Cuomo announced about 4:45 p.m. Monday that the subway would stop operating at 11 p.m. The governor and his aides said the move would help protect subway equipment and allow service to be restored more quickly.

City Hall sources say they learned of the plan just 15 minutes beforehand.

City and state officials had been saying throughout the day that subway service would be ramped down in the evening in order to store trains on the express tracks underground. But they had stopped short of suggesting a full subway closure.

Cuomo's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The admission by de Blasio only spurred more questions about a rift between he and Cuomo.

The governor handed de Blasio a defeat over charter school expansion last year and, more recently, Cuomo was said to be considering stepping into the increasingly nasty feud between the mayor and the police unions.

De Blasio, however, did step up to support Cuomo's lieutenant governor candidate Kathy Hochul when polls showed a tighter-than-expected race. Cuomo also recently supported extending mayoral control of schools and agreed to continue funding one of de Blasio's signature initiatives of pre-K expansion.

The two leaders did not appear together publicly before or after the storm, which dropped about 10 inches of snow in the city, falling far short of the 2 feet that meteorologists had predicted.

On Tuesday, de Blasio appeared on CNN and held an afternoon City Hall press conference.

Cuomo held two press conferences Tuesday, one in Midtown and another with Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone, who was highly complimentary of the governor.

Both Cuomo and de Blasio said they had no regrets over shutting down public transportation and enacting a road travel ban.

"To me it was a no-brainer. We had to take precautions to keep people safe," said de Blasio.

"Weather forecasters do the best they can and we respond to the best information we have," Cuomo said Tuesday morning as he lifted road travel restrictions.

"THERE'S NO GONIFF LIKE A LEFT-WING GONIFF"

goniff. (Yiddish) A thief or dishonest person or scoundrel (often used as a general term of abuse) -- The Free Dictionary

The last time I tried to research my recollection of the exact origin of the above Calvin Trillin quote, for a post called "When a left-leaning crook leaves progressive charities teetering on the brink, we have to help," it was December 30, 2008, and the left-leaning goniff smiling out at readers was none other than Bernie Madoff, whose then-crumbled empire had included, it turned out, donations that seemed wildly generous to any number of progressive charities and enterprises that were devastated by the loss of what,in real-world terms, weren't all that regal sums. I came up short in my research, so I'm going to continue going with my recollection that the source of the quote, from among Trillin's circle of legendary kibbitzers, was the unreconstructed Old Leftie Harold the Committed (aka Hal the C).

Perhaps it's a bit fanciful to conjure an Italian-American goniff, and I suppose I can be questioned for imputing left-wingedness to Boy Andrew. But remember how in the last gubernatorial election it became important to Boy Andrew to preempt the left-wing vote, in his drive to run up an attention-getting reelection margin with a view to the 2016 presidential sweepstakes. So I like to think that even the hard-to-satisfy Hal the C might accept him as at least an honorary left-wing goniff.

As to the famous Sun-tzu friends-and-enemies quote, it may be that Boy Andrew hasn't heard it, 'cause he doesn't seem to much care to have his friend-or-enemy Big Bill anywhere near him.


SCHEDULE NOTE: Next post tomorrow at 7am PT/10am ET

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Notes on the blizzard that wasn't -- at least not right where we are

"We'd love to come, but the weather
mongers have paralyzed us with fear."

Well, I stayed up a good part of the night waiting for the blizzard that didn’t come. And then, at about 3 A.M., the forecast was downgraded to overcast with a chance of flurries. The kid in me was disappointed, but the part that passes for an adult was really happy that I didn’t have to shovel my driveway.

I don’t fault de Blasio, Cuomo, or Christie for their abundance of caution, but enough already with the exuberant weathernoia of the television forecasters.

Also, memo to the forecasters in their hermetically sealed TV studios: Next to one of those humongous touch-screen displays, install a window.

-- New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff,
in a blogpost this afternoon, "Blizzard?"

by Ken

Before proceeding, let me look up to that phrase I added after the dash in the post title: "at least not right where we are." As we all know (don't we?), every when the weather folks correctly predict the general path of a storm, they still can't ever predict its exact path, and differences in distance that don't amount to much on the cosmic scale can count for a great deal on the ground. Here in NYC we got something like eight inches of snow -- not nothing, but a heap less than the two feet or more that was bandied about yesterday. However, to the east of us, on the eastern part of Long Island and on into New England, there was nothing "disappointing" about the storm that materialized. This morning, as the weather guy on the NY1 cable-news channel reviewed the situation, he said it wasn't quite true that the brunt of the storm "missed by a mile," that it was more like 23 miles. But they were an enormously significant 23 miles.

That said, you may recall that in my storm post last night, as we here in the Big Apple stood watch for a nor'easter threatening us with two feet of snow, if not more, I included Noah's prognostications, among which the first was:

1. The "Blaming of de Blasio" will begin by 7:00am on Tuesday.

Right on target, as it turned out. The wrinkle here is that what Big Bill stands charged with is overpromising stormwise, or should I say for overpreparing for a storm that just didn't measure up to the conjurings of the "weather mongers" featured in the Bob Mankoff cartoon pictured at the top of this post.

And, strangely (or maybe not so strangely), it seemed to be Big Bill rather than Boy Andrew, the governor of our empirical state, who stood accused of "overreacting," even though the decision to shut down the transit system by 11pm was the governor's and not the mayor's.

All of this, mind you, despite the fact that a regular feature of last night's all-storm coverage was the very near-impossibility of matching the level of storm preparedness to the level of eventual actual storm. How many times did we have the talking heads on the TV droning on about the dilemma of, on the one hand, doing too much to prepare for a storm that delivers too little as against, on the other hand, doing too little to prepare for a storm that delivers too much?

Of course, this was also a prominent feature of our last pre-storm talkathon, the run-up to Superstorm Sandy. And post-storm recriminations were pretty sharp then too, even though the level of damage could hardly have been more impressive or widespread. The storm itself, though, hadn't been the monster we were expecting; why, it hadn't even maintained its hurricane force -- hence, the rechristening from Hurricane to Superstorm Sandy. The damage was mostly caused by the rains in combination with tides.

Last night, as was widely noted, there was no precedent for a transit shutdown in anticipation of a snowstorm -- in part because the only precedent we had for a deliberate shutdown was the one for Sandy, when the shutdown may hardly have prevented damage to the system but assuredly protected an awful lot of transit resources that would surely have been lost otherwise, and also made the restart of the system, as slow as it was, a whole lot faster than it would have been otherwise. (Of course the biggest obstacled to the restart were the electrical-power outages and the devastation of the subway and under-the-river tunnels, in a city that sits almost entirely on islands.)


As NY1 showed us, rush hour on 14th Street wasn't terribly rushy this morning. Drivers who violated the traffic ban in force through this morning were threatened with summonses, but reportedly none were issued.

In addition to the transit shutdown, last night there was an equally unprecedented 13-county ban on non-emergency road traffic. So one thing we didn't see in NY1's endless on-location reports from reporters who were stationed at various points around the metropolitan area was traffic struggling along clogged roads. For that you need traffic and clogged roads. Instead we had pictures of locations around the metropolitan area that were traffic-free to an extent that probably nobody as seen since the invention of the automobile. Well, no, even farther back. Before there were motor vehicles, there were horse-drawn carriages and the like to clog those roads.

Times Square with no New Year's Eve revelers and also no traffic, anyone?

I SUPPOSE IT'S JUST HUMAN NATURE

You just about can't win. Get people prepared for a level of mayhem that doesn't materialize and it's all your fault. Contrarily, fail to prepare for the actual level of mayhem and it's also all your fault.

What's more, as Noah was intimating last night, if you're Mayor Big Bill, you walk the city with a target on your big back. The odds are pretty good that whatever happens, it's going to be all your fault.

By morning we had known for hours that here in Gotham we weren't getting "historic storm" quantities of snow. By 9am word was that the subways were gradually being restarted, and by noon they should be running on a "Sunday schedule," meaning markedly lower levels of service than a normal "weekday" or even a "Saturday" schedule. I didn't know this yet, though, because about 7am I ended my overnight vigil in order to get some sleep, having no idea that this time the subways could be restarted so quickly, relatively speaking. (The NYC Transit people had planned this, apparently running trains all night to make sure the tracks were clear and the equipment was ready to roll when called upon.) Once I was up to speed, a couple of hours later, I decided I would give it a shot -- getting to work, that is -- still not really knowing what conditions I might encounter, not knowing even whether my office building would be up and running. I was all set to go, more or less, when my resolve failed me. Yeah, there's stuff I should have been doing at the office. We have publication schedules we're answerable to, and forcibly yanking a day out of the schedule isn't consequence-free. Oh well. It'll all be there for us tomorrow.


A QUICK NOTE FROM HOWIE

He thanks everyone for all their good wishes, and of course hopes to be back in harness soon. The doctors don't seem able to tell him much, though, and don't seem to much of a grasp of, or interest in, the concept of a "blogging chair."


SCHEDULE NOTE: Next post tomorrow at 7am PT/10am ET

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Stormy weather

Noah sent along this reminder of four young men who didn't let a little snow get them down.

by Ken

Here in the Northeast today has been sort of like a shorter version of the weekend we spent back when waiting for Hurricane Sandy to bear down on us. We knew it was coming, and it was likely to be bad, but in the meantime the weather, while hardly salutary, shouldn't by itself have prevented life from proceeding normally. Except that there's nothing normal when the weather gnomes are talking about two feet of snow starting to descend on us late tonight, with maybe 6-8 inches by morning and the rest continuing to amass.

The word for the day was:



Not surprisingly, the news and the e-mailbox are overflowing with announcements of cancellations of stuff scheduled for today, as the city gradually shut down. By mid-afternoon, for example, there ws word that the scheduled home games of both the New York Knicks and the Brooklyn Nets are off. As for tomorrow, it's looking like fuhgeddaboutit! (I think it's safe to say that there won't be any trip to Brooklyn for the New York Transit Museum's scheduled program celebrating the triumphant reconstruction of the Montague Street subway tunnel under the East River, which suffered the heaviest damage of the East River tunnels from the ravages of Sandy, and just reopened in September after being closed for 14½ months.)

Meanwhile, with an entire day to prepare for the grim night and beyond, it has been a big hoarding shopping day:



With the expectation that tomorrow will look more like:



A little after 4pm Noah filed this Manhattan storm report:

Snow-maggeddon! The great sacking of the grocery store! I was in a Food Emporium and they had all the registers going with plenty of people to help. The carts were all in use, though. I saw one grown woman with one of those little shopping carts for the 4 year olds! I went to the post office to pick up a couple of packages and they had closed at 1:00 claiming "due to the severe weather." Whatever happened to neither rain, nor sleet, nor snow...? It was in no way severe at 1:00 and it still isn't, but I wouldn't want to be out once it gets dark.

To everyone who's in the path of this storm, or one of your own: Stay warm, dry, and above all safe. I'm rather surprised to be quoting my corporate HR chief (who's perched in one of our California offices):

Safety is the number one priority. People should not endanger themselves in any way and if that means leaving early or not coming in during a storm then that’s what needs to happen.

And to all those who aren't in a storm path -- well, as you were. You've probably got  troubles of your own.


YOUR STORM BONUS: NOAH PROGNOSTICATES

My storm predictions:

1. The "Blaming of de Blasio" will begin by 7:00am on Tuesday.
2. The goons on FOX will offer the storm as "proof there is no global warming."
3. Any food shortages on Wednesday will be blamed on "Teamster union truckers."
4. "Gay Marriage" caused the storm. God is angry!

DWT SCHEDULE NOTE: Next post tomorrow morning at 7am PT/10am ET

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For the Sandy anniversary, those within reach of the afflicted NY-NJ-CT coastal area are invited to "Light up the shore!"

Blacked-out lower Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, looking northeast, with the tower of the Empire State Building poking up in the background

by Ken

It's an anniversary that has been looming ominously for, well, going on a year.

As it happened, yesterday I was in New Jersey's "Mile-Square City" of Hoboken, on the mostly flatland lip of land below the southern end of the bluffs that rise above the state's Hudson River shoreline, on a wonderful 5½-hour Wolfe Walkers walking tour with the incomparable Justin Ferate, and wherever we went -- at least until we finally reached the high ground overlooking the river where the Stevens Institute of Technology was built, with those spectacular vistas across to Manhattan and up and down the river, and on to the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge -- there were tales of the horrendous flooding from Superstorm Sandy.

In many cases, happily, the flooding stories were accompanied by subsequent stories of gradual restoration and/or rebuilding and reopening. But there were also the cases of not-yet-restored, including the very start of our Hoboken excursion, where the beautiful Erie-Lackawanna Railroad and Ferry Terminal designed by Kenneth Murchison, where connection was once made between trains running to the west and the ferry link to Manhattan. The terminal, which now connects NJ Transit's light-rail lines with the nearby Hoboken station of the PATH (Port Authority Trans-Hudson) subway line, remains largely closed, including the famous vaulted Waiting Room.

As Justin pointed out in the course of the walk, big storms plowing the Northest tend, for reasons of local geography, to pass over the stretch of coast surrounding New York Harbor, producing the double whammy of a storm like Sandy -- inflicting damage, yes, but not of a kind we're accustomed to.

This scene of course plays out all through the New Jersey-New York-Connecticut coastal region, and of course with special severity in the unprotected shore areas that took the hardest hits, where loss of life was highest and rebuilding has been a maybe-yes, maybe-no proposition, with the prospect of permanent changes in land use and lifestyles.

I thought of sharing some of my memories of the storm days and the aftermath weeks, but they're so much milder than the fates suffered by the hardest-hit folks that somehow they don't seem appropriate. So I was pleased to see an e-mail this morning from the Municipal Art Society with information about a remembrance tomorrow which is called either "Light the Shore" or "Light Up the Shore," depending where you look.

Join Sandy-Impacted Communities to Light Up the Shore!

On Tuesday October 29th -- the anniversary of Superstorm Sandy -- groups from across the region will be lighting up the coastline to acknowledge the impact of the storm and the on-going resilience challenges we collectively face. Groups in Staten Island, Red Hook, Lower East Side, in Connecticut and all down the Jersey shore will join together with flashlights and candles along the coast. The goal is to have the entire Sandy-impacted coastline illuminated!

All communities are welcome to join their friends and neighbors and line the coast in solidarity for a resilient future!  Information about specific community meeting spots and times are shown below:

MANHATTAN, LOWER EAST SIDE

Time: 6:45pm to 8:15pm

Where: East River Park
• 10th Street (GOLES) will be meeting at 10th Street and Avenue D at 6:45pm to walk to the East River.
• 6th Street (Henry St.) will be meeting at BGR on 6th between FDR and D to walk over at 7ish to the East River.
• Houston Street (FEGS) will meet at Houston and Avenue D at 6:45pm to walk over.

BROOKLYN

Time: Meeting at 6:30pm, candle-lighting at 7:45pm

Where:
• Brighton Beach: Shorefront Y, 3300 Coney Island Ave.
• Canarsie: Canarsie Park 84th & Seaview (6:30pm -- interfaith service; performance by local elementary school and gospel talent; 7:45pm -- candle-lighting)
• Coney Island: West 8th Street & Riegelman Boardwalk (by NY Aquarium, on boardwalk side). Contact: OHEL / Project Hope Rachel Heller,  rlh290@yahoo.com
• Coney Island (2): Stillwell Avenue & Riegelman Boardwalk Point
• Coney Island (3): Coney Island Pier, W. 21st Street & Riegelman Boardwalk
• Coney Island (4): Kaiser Park Pier, W. 33rd St. & Bayview Ave
• Dumbo: corner of Main Street & Plymouth @ entrance to Brooklyn Bridge Park. Point of contact: Alexandria Sica Email: alexandria@dumbonyc.org
• Gerritsen Beach: Meet at 7pm at the end of Gerritsen Avenue, on the Shell Bank Creek shoreline. Candle-lighting at 7:45pm
• Red Hook: Coffey Park, Verona St. between Richard St. and Dwight St.
• Red Hook (2): IKEA, 1 Beard Street (join Portside and friends at the water’s edge)
• Sea Gate: Sea Gate Association Beach 42 and Surf Avenue. Contact: 917-586-7006 or merrie5017@gmail.com
• Sheepshead Bay: 2801 Emmons Avenue

STATEN ISLAND

Time: 7:45pm

Where: Light a candle with your neighbor in the closest waterfront to your community in Staten Island.

[See the link for information about an earlier Walk Along the Boardwalk, Community Supper, and Interfaith Servic of Remembrance.]

LIGHT UP NEW JERSEY

Time: 6:00pm

Where:
• Raritan Bay Waterfront Park, 1 Kennan Way, South Amboy (NJ 101.5 with Raritan Bay Federal Credit Union)
• Keansburg (NJ 101.5)
• Asbury Park Boardwalk: Keansburg 9/11 Memorial , Main Street and Beachway (NJ 101.5 with CentraState and First Atlantic Federal Credit Union)
• Jenkinson’s in Point Pleasant, 300 Ocean Ave. Point Pleasant Beach (94.3 The Point with United Teletech Financial and Zarrilli Homes)
• Bradley Beach, 900 Ocean Ave. (94.3 The Point)
• Seaside Heights, 800 Ocean Terrace (105.7 The Hawk with NJ Outboards and Walters Homes)
• Chef Mike’s ABG in Seaside Park, Island Beach Motor Lodge, 24th and Central Ave, South Seaside Park (92.7 WOBM with Chef Mike’s ABG, Jersey Shore Crawlspace Enhancement, Classic Kitchens,Island Beach Mortor Lodge, Marine Max and DelPrete Construction)
• Mud City Crabhouse, Long Beach Island, Manahawkin, 1185 East Bay Ave. (105.7 The Hawk with Modular Factory Homes Direct)
• Lucy the Elephant, Margate, 9200 Atlantic Ave. (Lite Rock 96.9)
• Ocean City Music Pier, Moorlyn Terrace (Cat Country 107.3 with South Jersey Gas)
• Trump Plaza in Atlantic City, 2500 Boardwalk (97.3 ESPN / WPG 1450 with Atlantic City Electric and Xfinity)
• Laguna Grill & Rum Bar in Brigantine, 1400 Ocean Ave., Brigantine (SoJO 104.9 with Prudential Fox & Roach Real Estate, the "LePera Team"

(Note: No information is provided about Connecticut events, and with a quick search I couldn't find any. But whose to say that Nutmeg Staters can't follow the same prescription as Staten Islanders? "Light a candle with your neighbor in the closest waterfront to your community.")

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"The church seems to be going out of its way to hide its real treasure" (E. J. Dionne Jr.)

Thanksgiving dinner at St. Francis de Sales Parish
in Belle Harbor, in New York's ravaged Rockaways

"The fallout [from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' recent meeting in Baltimore]: disarray in the Bishops' Conference. This is actually good news. One person’s disarray is another’s openness. There is now new space for debate and a rethinking of the church’s tilt rightward over the past several years. . . .

"Politics divides Catholics. The works of mercy bring us together and also show the world what the power of faith can achieve."

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his WaPo column,
"Hiding the church's treasure"

by Ken

As regular readers know, I am an immoderate admirer of the calm-voiced but powerfully eloquent Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne Jr., not least for the deep humanity he draws from his Catholic faith, which he seems never to find in any way inconsistent with his human liberal views. The only problem he has, to his credit, is with the primitive, often anti-Christian specimens who run the church.

In his column today, "Hiding the church's treasure," E.J. passes on reports of "disarray" within the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops at their conference in Baltimore, following an election in which "many bishops, though by no means all, seemed to enlist firmly on one side."

E.J. cites in particular the case of Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput, "who was about as clear as he could be short of putting a Romney-Ryan sticker on his car," telling the National Catholic Reporter, "I certainly can't vote for somebody who's either pro-choice or pro-abortion," while giving his blessing to anti-tax right-wingers: "You can't say that somebody's not Christian because they want to limit taxation." E.J. addes, "No doubt Paul Ryan smiled."

"For such bishops," E.J. writes, "the election came as a shock."

I'm told by people who attended the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops post-election meeting this month in Baltimore that many of them had been convinced Romney would win. Yet Romney not only lost; he also narrowly lost the Catholic vote, partly because of overwhelming support for Obama among Latinos, the fastest-growing group in the church.

The fallout: disarray in the Bishops' Conference. This is actually good news. One person’s disarray is another’s openness. There is now new space for debate and a rethinking of the church’s tilt rightward over the past several years.

One surprising result in Baltimore was the refusal to endorse a vague statement on the economy after the document came under attack from more progressive bishops for failing to deal adequately with inequality, the rights of unions and poverty. Rarely does a document reach the floor of the conference and then fail to win the two-thirds majority necessary for approval. Something is stirring.

As it happens, I've jumped over the human heart of the story in this column, to its religio-political heart. I certainly can't tell this story better than E.J. does, so I think we need to hear it in his own voice.

To say that the Belle Harbor neighborhood on New York City’s Rockaway Peninsula was slammed by Hurricane Sandy understates the case. Like many other parts of the region, it has suffered the kind of devastation we usually associate with wars.

In these circumstances, people turn to government, yes, but they look first to trusted friends and to neighborhood institutions that combine deep local knowledge with a degree of empathy that arises only from a long connection with residents of a particular place.

Two of my brothers-in-law who have been washed out of their homes are involved in one such group, the Graybeards, a local nonprofit recently featured on the “NBC Nightly News.” They immediately took up the task of restoring the city blocks they love.

And at the heart of the relief effort is the Roman Catholic parish of St. Francis de Sales, the epicenter of so many practical works of mercy that it has received a mountain of earned media attention. The Post published a photo last week of a big Thanksgiving dinner organized in the parish gym where I once watched my nephews and my niece compete fiercely on the basketball court. Last week, for a moment anyway, competition gave way to fellowship.

I intend to come back again to the determined struggle of this neighborhood to rebuild. But I also hope that the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops contemplating the future of the church’s public and political engagement notice how the witness of this parish has inspired people far beyond the confines of Catholicism.

It's only then that E.J. turns his attention to the "thinking" of the U.S. bishops. Eventually he returns to his subject.

[A]bove all, the bishops need to learn what I'll call the St. Francis de Sales lesson. A church looking to halt defections among so many younger Catholics should understand that casting itself as a militantly right-wing political organization -- which, face it, is what some of the bishops are doing -- clouds its Christian message. Worse, the church seems to be going out of its way to hide its real treasure: the extraordinary examples of generosity and social reconstruction visible every day in parishes such as St. Francis and in the homeless shelters, schools, hospices and countless other Catholic entities all over the nation.

Politics divides Catholics. The works of mercy bring us together and also show the world what the power of faith can achieve.

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Want to live where it's always 56° and NASDAQ is always eyeing FB warily? Come into my elevators

In the cocoon of our elevators, there's a
world outside that's always 56 degrees.

by Ken

You probably have these in the elevators of your commercial buildings too: little video screens on which nuggets of "news" can be flashed for the purpose of being interspersed with advertising. If you don't have them, count yourself lucky. For more than a century eople have found ways to occupy their minds during the journey between the ground floor and their destination floor without requiring force-feeding of tiny tidbits of newslike, er, stuff.

At least in my building, the displays also include time and temperature information, and I've learned that the two come from clearly different sources. How do I know? Because the time is current and correct, whereas the temperature . . . ah, the temperature is always a not-quite-balmy but not unpleasant 56 degrees. It's 56 when we arrive in the morning, 56 when we go out in the afternoon (if we go out; since in my building I have to go through airport-style security every time I enter, I try to keep those entrances to a minimum), 56 when we decamp in the evening, and 56 any other damn time we happen to be in those elevators. And the "news" is all, well, whatever it was at, presumably, the last moment before the storm hit the fan. (Ironically, or perhaps cruelly, every now and then you'll see an item indicating growing concern about this troublemaking storm, Hurricane Sandy).

I'm surely not the only one who's had fantasies of what passes for the "news" being replaced by a steady stable of predigested factoids. Why go to all the trouble of manufacturing new news when the old stuff is approximately as pertinent to our lives. I mean, just now I saw some item about NASDAQ looking into some FB dealings or other; is that not a head that would be as good a year from now as it was a year ago? And all the items that pop up relating to the World Series -- if you have to be locked into a moment in time, wouldn't the time of the Fall Classic be near the top of your list? As long as there are stock-closing highlights from yesterday, does anyone care all that much if they're not actually the real yesterday's?

Even that eerily perpetual 56-degree reading -- it's uncanny how you could always wish it were just a few degrees warmer, and yet you're relieved it isn't any colder. Of course those temperature readings have nothing to do with the actual tempeature outside the building. But even when it's fairly frigid outside, as it has been at times since the hurricane Superstorm Sandy came calling, somehow coming in out of the cold and finding out that it's at least theoretically 56 out there creates just the tiniest sensation of warming.

STEP OUT OF THE BUILDING, THOUGH . . .

And the illusion of the 56-degree world fades. Actually, in our immediately surrounding blocks, life has returned to something like normal. And while I mentioned recently that a few short blocks to the west is the Holland Tunnel entrance that was so famously and extensively shown fully flooded in the wake of the storm but is now returned to normal (and even the no. 1 train is now running downtown that far, to the Rector Street station, while reconstruction of the decimated South Ferry station to the south continues), a few short blocks to the east, at what I think of as the fortress-like boulevard of Water Street, now all too appropriately named, I discovered Sunday on a walking tour that took us along it that it's fairly devastated -- blocks of ground level business are darkened rubble.

Then this afternoon I ventured just a long block on Broad Street to the south of my 56-degree building to the ATM I normally use, but apparently haven't used since the storm, and discovered that both it and the Duane Reade next to it on the corner of Beaver Street are closed.

I look forward to reading more tomorrow morning about the World Series and NASDAQ's wary eye on FB. My forecast calls for temperature in the 56-degree range.

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Frankenstorm shutdown -- what a difference a year (well, 14 months) makes

-- from NY1.com

by Ken

What a strange afternnoon it was here in NYC, as we NY-ers went our more or less normal Sunday-afternoon way -- on an admittedly heavily overcast day, with increasingly sharp wind gusts -- counting down to the announced 7pm shutdown of the city's subways, with the buses to follow at 9pm, and in their wake other chunks of metropolitan infrastructure, structure, and superstructure announcing their shutdown plans. Without mass transit, the city doesn't function. (Mayor Mike has also ordered "mandatory" evacuation for resident's of the city's lowest-lying coastal areas.)

Of course, we're not even expecting to see anything of Hurricane Sandy until tomorrow, very likely late-ish tomorrow -- they're still saying that the time frame for real concern is Monday going into Tuesday. But as we learned last year with Hurricane Irene bearing down on us, you can't just shut the subways and buses down on a dime. NYC Transit, we learned back then, needs a day from the time the plug is pulled on service to actually get the system put to bed in a way that will keep it (a) safe from storm damage, or at least as safe as it can be made, and (b) ready to be restarted ASAP -- meaning yet another day -- once the "all clear" is sounded.

Last time none of us really understood this. Nobody involved -- either inside the transit system, or in government, or in the riding public -- had any experience of a planned shutdown of our mass transit. And so it was a weird new idea that the call had to be made 24 hours in advance of when the system would actually need protecting, or it would be too late to provide such protection as can be provided against a storm whose actual impact won't be known until it impacts.

By odd chance, I was about half an hour into a NY Transit Museum tour -- a terrific one, "Second Avenue Elevated and the East River -- 70 Years Later" -- when tour leader Andy Sparberger (a retired longtime manager with the Long Island Rail Road, part of the MTA, which his the parent org of NYC Transit) passed on the news from his cell phone that the 7pm shutdown that had been talked about as a possibility since the night before was now officially in place. I thought we would be biting our nails down to the 7pm witching hour. Instead we had the rest of the morning and all afternoon and early evening to go about our business before the beginning of the shutdown, itself a fully day before the need for it would arrive.

Late Friday afternoon, with the storm timetable more or less in place as it's remained, I had already received e-word of the cancellation of my scheduled Municipal Arts Society tours for Saturday and Sunday afternoons, and of an already-rescheduled walk in Fort Tryon Park by that unique geologist and educator Sidney Horenstein. It all worked out pretty well for me. I was able to slot in a Greenwich Village "ghost" walk with one of my favorite tour leaders, Justin Ferate, which I'd previously passed on because of the conflict with my MAS tour of four public schools in Brownsville (Brooklyn) designed by that master NYC school-builder of the C.B.J. Snyder, who was the Board of Ed's superintendent of school buildings from 1891 to 1923), led by Snyder schools scholar Jean Arrington. Also, I had worried about being able to get from the Second Avenue El tour, scheduled to end around 2pm, all the way uptown to Fort Tryon Park in time for Sid Horenstein's 3pm walk. Now instead I had been able to book a comp ticket for a 3pm organ recital at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola on the Upper East Side -- on Park Avenue at 84th Street, which I must have passed zillions of times.

So there I was, finishing up the Transit Museum tour on the East Side, within easy striking distance of St. Ignatius (I actually had to kill some time), knowing that the organ recital would let out around 4:30, leaving plenty of time to get home, up to Manhattan's far northern reaches, long before the subway shutdown. The organ recital, by Thomas Murray, a longtime Yale faculty member, was in fact quite terrific. Not only did I get to see the inside of the church for the first time, but I got to hear the organ custom-built for it and installed in 1993, and it's a blockbuster, which a veteran organist like Thomas Murray knows how to show off to the max in this wondefully chosen program. The organ is, to put it mildly, not my bailiwick, but I've never enjoyed an organ recital more.

Then afterwards, just as on any normal Sunday afternoon, it was walking up to 86th Street to catch a crosstown bus to catch the uptown no. 1 train. On the walk from the subway I looked in on a number of stores where there were things I might have shopped for, but luckily there wasn't anything I really needed -- I say "luckily" because those stores had humongous lines of a kind I've never seen.

When I got home, there was a message on my answering machine from my company's HR VP, from early this afternoon, saying that while the office would be technically open tomorrow, given the weather and transit realities we weren't expected to try to get to work. It was, I thought, an exceptionally thoughty action, that phone call, which I really appreciated -- so much so that I imposed on her time to return the call (via the miracle of Caller ID) to thank her. She stressed that the company doesn't want us to put ourselves in danger. Pretty darned classy, I thought.

As I write now, subway service is presumably kaput until such time as it's safe to resume and NYC Transit has done all the things it has to do to restart the system, including a visual inspection of every bit of subway track. (Did I mention that the biggest worry regarding the subways is flooding of the tunnels? Obviously, being underground, they're highly vulnerable, and every subway entrance offers flood waters an opportunity to get at them.)

And now we wait. Wherever you are, if you're in the storm path, I hope you're taking all the necessary precautions. Stay dry, and stay safe!

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Annals of Anonymity: We can hardly expect a gov't official to talk on the record about kinfolk of a tyrant who faces a "delicate future"

Plus a final note of apology re. Hurricane Irene

From the HuffPost World report: "With its panoramic views and opulent furniture, the seaside home of Hannibal Gaddafi more closely resembles a luxury resort than a private residence. But a closer inspection of the home following Libyan rebels' ransacking has now revealed some of the unspeakable horrors to have allegedly taken place on its premises -- even among those trusted to take care of the colonel's grandchildren."

by Ken

Sometimes, faced with a tempting link of a NYT e-newsletter, I find myself trying to establish criteria for clickworthiness sort of the way Elaine on Seinfeld, faced with the impossibility any more than her current supply of her preferred contraceptive sponge, took to evaluating prospective male companions for "spongeworthiness." Worse still are the times I forget and impetuously click through without taking time for a proper evaluation of clickworthiness. (Luckily, the stakes are less portentous than those Elaine faced.)

So I can't really say that my interest level in the story reached true clickworthiness, but you can't take back a click once delivered, and there I was this afternoon looking at the story, "Qadaffi's Wife and 3 of His Children Flee to Algeria." No doubt I was primed from having earlier read an AOL-highlighted piece about the Ethiopian nanny of Colonel Qaddafi's son Hannibal's children, "whose wounds appeared to be in desperate need of medical attention" even as she whined about having been tortured by Aline (Mrs. Hannibal) Qaddafi for refusing to beat one of the young uns -- and, oh yes, having worked for a full year in family's seaside home, "with its panoramic views and opulent furniture," which "more closely resembles a luxury resort than a private residence," without being paid a cent.

As it turns out, the "3 of His Children" admitted into Algeria ("admitted through one of the more southerly crossing in the Sahara desert, arriving in a Mercedes and a bus" -- imagine Qaddafis reduced to fleeing the country by bus!) includes, as announced by the Algerian Foreign Ministry and confirmed by Algeria's U.N. ambassador, not just Colonel Q's daughter Aisha and two of his sons, Mohammed and the aforementioned Hannibal, but also their spouses and children! Oh, were you too thinking of the "children" in that headline as being, you know, children?

Oh, there were children packed on that bus -- "many children," according to Algerian U.N. Ambassador Mourad Benmehidi. But they're Colonel Q's grandchildren, not children. Presumably among the party were Mrs. Hannibal and their insufficiently beaten offspring. One can only hope that their new Algerian hosts will be able to provide referrals for a new nanny, though it may not be easy to find one who works as cheap as her predecessor.

Now this may or may not be of interest to you, but none of this is why I bring it all up. Well, not exactly. We have sort of grazed up against the delicate question of why exactly the Qadaffi party's Mercedes and bus were allowed into Algeria, and their occupants apparently given refuge in Algiers. In case you were wondering, the NYT report reports:

An Algerian Foreign Ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of Colonel Qaddafi's future, said the members of his family who came to Algeria were all in Algiers, the capital. The official noted that none of them had been named in warrants issued by the International Criminal Court for possible war crimes charges, unlike Colonel Qaddafi himself, his son Seif al-Islam and his former intelligence chief. [Emphasis added.]

The person I associate most with the War on Anonymous Sources is Salon's Glenn Greenwald, and we've occasionally eavesdropped on some of his righteous screeds on the subject -- with which, let me say, I couldn't agree more. As Glenn has had far too frequent occasion to point out, the new habit among classier outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post of explaining why an anonynous source was granted anonymity hasn't so much curbed the practice as given it some fancy new window dressing. The Times policy appears to be that we won't grant you anonymity unless you can come up with a really entertaining reason, while the Post's policy appears to be that we won't grant you anonymity unless you ask.

But even by these, er, relaxed standards, my eyes underwent some major popping confronted with this specimen. Let's run this through one more time. The Algerian Foreign Ministry official was --

speaking on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of (deposed Libyan dictator) Colonel Qaddafi's future.

Um, er, huh? "Because of the delicacy of Colonel Qaddafi's future"? What does that mean? (Suggestion to NYT Foreign Desk: Couldn't you have given us something more solid, like, say, "speaking on condition of anonymity on account of how it's a month without an 'R' in it"?)


FINAL NOTE OF APOLOGY TO THOSE WHO WERE
PEEVED BY ALL THE ATTENTION PAID TO IRENE

Downtown Brattleboro, Vermont -- as the state suffers perhaps its worst flooding in 100 years. But gee, it's only Vermont, and in truth it's probably less than 100 years.

First, to those outside Irene's path, forced to put up with all our yammering: So sorry! I realize how tedious are impending natural disasters that may permanently change the lives of other people. And then when they turn out to be not such a big deal, well, jeez! (Though don't tell that to the folks in Vermont and upstate New York, suffering "Worst Flooding in 100 Years," but what's 100 years really? And heck, they didn't even get a hurricane, just a ratty tropical storm!)

And speaking of the hurricane turning out to be less big a deal than the worst-case scenarios, to those inside Irene's path who were dissatisfied by the outcome: Again, so sorry! What's the point of planning for those worst-case scenarios if they don't happen? This group, by the way, includes people who are offended by official "overreaction," like shutting down New York's transit system, which -- to add insult to injury -- then took hours and hours to begin to restart. Just because these folks are too stupid or too lazy to try to understand (a) why it was thought appropriate to shut the system down (and never mind all the damage that was done by the "disappointing" storm, or what would have happened if, say, populated subway trains had been trapped in flooded tunnels, or populated buses had been struck by some of those 600-plus trees that fell), (b), why the shutdown had to be announced so early and put into effect so long before the brunt of the storm was expected, and/or (c) why the system took so long to reboot (including, for example, the tiresome requirement that every foot of subway track be walked before the trains could be restarted), well, I truly am sorry.

Sorry, folks, next time we'll try to arrange a disaster that lives up to your exacting specifications -- and then just keep it to ourselves. So sorry!

ONE LAST NOTE: You may remember the expedition to Constitution Island, in the Hudson River opposite West Point, I was planning for Saturday but aborted thinking I could get up there as scheduled before the noon Metro-North shutdown but would have no way of getting back to the city from. It turns out that the great Reenactment Day festivities were canceled. The tour leader has called to my attention that there's still one more weekend opportunity to visit Constitution Island this season, on Saturday, September 24. I've got my Municipal Arts Society "Starchitecture" tour that day. I thought I might be able to slip up there in time for the tail end of the Constitution Island day, but as I read the schedules (hastily!), the earliest train I could catch would arrive at 3:02, two minutes after the last bus pickup from the station parking lot!

Oh well, as they say, wait till next year.

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Storm diary (continued)

Sure, it's a matter of appearance rather than reality, but Governor Cuomo conveys the appearance of a mealy-mouthed bureaucrat. (He's surrounded here by National Guardsmen because he was announcing a doubling of the Guard presence this weekend to deal with . . . well, whatever.)

by Ken

Apologies for not mustering a more reasonable type of post. I understand better now, now that I'm going through it, how/why Floridians go into all-storm all-the-time mode from the time a big storm begins to take aim on the mainland, even when for the foreseeable future there's no new "news" and nothing more to be done in anticipation, at least nothing that we haven't already been informed about a few zillion times in the days before.


As I pointed out last night, even then we were a full 24 hours, if not more, away from the arrival of the brunt of the storm in the tri-state Greater New York area. Today we've watched Irene attack the Carolinas, and as I write, the New Jersey coast is beginning to feel Irene's presence more directly. We've been told that the storm winds have lowered noticeably, and don't seem likely to pick up again, but we've also been told that the size of the expected storm surge is "locked in." (Apparently storm surges don't have the flexibility of, say, slimy pols who can be coaxed to a more "reasonable" point of view with a modest infusion of cash. Okay, maybe not so modest if it's, say, an influential senator or a House committee or important subcommittee chairman you're buying.)

Now in New York City it's being estimated that the worst of Irene is likely to hit us between midnight and 3am, setting up the worst conditions on the ground for later Sunday morning, 8am-ish. The winds may proves less ferocious than they were yesterday but are still pretty hefty, and are being talked about in turns of even scarier "gust" numbers. And even if in the city itself we get "only" 5-10 inches of rain, that's still a lot of rain, in an area that's already saturated from a very wet August, meaning that the ground isn't likely to be able to absorb much new water. Also, as I saw one TV talking head protest to her Expert Meteorologist Guy, there's quite a difference between five inches of rain and ten inches -- though I think at that point she was talking about the difference between six and 12 inches. Indeed there is, but EMG assured her that no, there are too many variables for us to have any idea where within that range we're going to fall until the rain finishes falling.

So here we all still are on a day that outwardly has all the hallmarks of a perfectly normal rainy Saturday in the city -- except of course that nothing is "normal." There hasn't been any public transport for a third of a day now, so those of us who depend on public transport to get us anywhere beyond walking range clearly aren't going anywhere. And of course much of the talk on the tube is still of the mandatory evacuations in the city and coastal localities from New Jersey to Connecticut. From what I've seen on TV, some people in the areas subject to "mandatory" evacuation evacuated and some didn't. As officials point out when pressed by the TV talking heads, there really isn't any way that they can force people to leave.

ONE OBVIOUS NOTE TO BE APPLIED TO THE NEXT BIG STORM

One obvious note, in line with what I wrote last night about storm preparedness normally developing in reaction to the rightness or wrongness of the response to the last big storm: If it turns out that the preparations ordered by our government leaders, based on the worst-case scenarios, was disproportionate to what the storm actually delivers, you can expect that the next time we're presented with such a drastic prospect, even fewer people will take the threat seriously. And there's nothing to be done about it. How can you blame those leaders for planning for the totally realistic prospect of those worst-case scenarios? And the fact is that they're clearly influenced by the city's drastic underanticipation of last December's blizzard.

MEANWHILE, THERE'S SOMETHING TO BE SAID FOR ENFORCED INACTIVITY

It's a luxury for me, since these days I find my time so heavily overscheduled. Finally I'm making dents in the pile-up on my DVR -- finally sorting out, for example, which still-unwatched In Plain Sight and Law & Order: Criminal Intent episodes are stored there and which ones I'll have to try to track down online. Armed with that information, I've begun attacking the backlog, and have enjoyed beginning to catch up with the recently completed In Plain Sight season. At some point I'll probably have something to say about all this.

POSSIBLY FINAL SATURDAY-NIGHT STORM NOTES

(1) I just double-checked the MAS website and the "tour hotline" ("in case of severe weather") to see if there's news of my scheduled walking tour of the Tompkins Square neighborhood of the East Village tomorrow afternoon, and found no news. Perhaps tomorrow? I guess it's academic, since with the subways and buses idled, there's no way I could get there anyway. (For that matter, tour leader Francis Morrone would normally be taking the subway into Manhattan from Park Slope, Brooklyn.)

(2) I caught some of Governor Cuomo's public appearance today, and boy, does he not inspire leaderly confidence. This is almost a totally matter of perception rather than reality. Then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, for example, oozed authoritativeness in those crisis situations, and I never felt that that authority corresponded with reality. Mayor Mike too commands a certain amount of authority. Governor Andrew, by contrast, even while taking ownership of yesterday's decision to shut down our public transport system today at noon, sounded like a mealy-mouthed bureaucrat.


SUNDAY UPDATE: FROM THE HORSE'S MOUTH --
TODAY'S MAS TOMPKINS SQUARE TOUR IS POSTPONED

I just noticed that tour leader Francis Morrone offered the above info in a comment this morning. Thanks, Francis!

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