What a lame hurricane – for us at least. I want to be specific about that. For us, 30+ miles from the coast, the impending doom forecasted for days ahead of Irene’s arrival was absolute drummed up garbage. I know that many people closer to the coast felt the lashings of this tropical menace much more so than we, and this post it not intended to marginalize their suffering. My heart goes out to the families who lost property and possessions and most of all, to the families who lost loved ones. Mother Nature can be cruel and no one deserves to feel her wrath.
Now let me tell you about those of us who didn’t suffer. As a dear friend of mine would say, this is a “hot air” post. So bear with me while I vent my spleen about Hurricane coverage. What a load. For days preceding the arrival of Irene every weather man from here to the West Coast and back howled about the coming storm like it might bring a rain of frogs with it. But I figured best to be prepared. And I still feel that way.
We have city water. It would take a full power outage at the water treatment plant and no back-up power for us to find ourselves without water. But to be safe, I bought a couple of flats at Target thinking that if we didn’t need them we could take them to the office. Power was a greater concern. While we’ve never lost power in our house, something that happened every third weekend in our condo, we didn’t know what to expect. But we snagged a couple of extra camping lanterns and batteries for our flashlights just in case. The day before we pulled in everything we could from our deck. The table and chairs, the plants, they all came into the kitchen to ride out the storm. The grill, the stainless steel behemoth that it is, could not be removed, so it was covered and pushed up against the house. We did the same in the front, pulling into the garage anything that could become a flying projectile should the wind predicted come to fruition.
Saturday morning it started to rain. The kind of ceaseless, soaking rain that sinks the world into a torpor, the kind it takes days to shake off. And the rain kept on into Saturday night. But by now the storm coverage had gotten ridiculous, notes of hysteria in the voices of the on-the-ground hurricane teams. We went to bed knowing that Irene would make landfall in the wee hours of Sunday morning, and wondered aloud if we would have power when we awoke.
And then next to nothing happened. This storm, heralded as the worst thing to hit the east coast in years, downed a few small tree branches in our neighborhood. The eight inches of snow we got last winter did more lasting damage, splitting trees in two with its weight. Irene’s rains did soaked everything, leaving standing water in the cul-de-sacs and at the bottom of hills. Our grill moved three inches away from the deck rail. I remember being woken only once, by the sound of a cracking tree branch. If there was howling wind as was reported, it howled elsewhere, because neither B nor I, who sleep fitfully and wake easily, ever heard a thing.
So if anyone is in the market for bottled water or camping lanterns, I have a few extras sitting in the basement waiting for the next time the weather man goes gonzo. Not that I wish we had been hit by a real hurricane. Like I said, Mother Nature can be cruel. But I do wish that someone would tell the weather reporters that fear-mongering is as cruel. And that the gross exaggeration that is the hallmark of hurricane coverage for all but those closest to the coast (again, there were many within a few miles of the coast that felt a battering we didn’t), is the reason why many people choose not to evacuate and why, when, the one time in 100 that their predictions come true, there are still people in their homes who cannot weather the storm. Thanks a lot weather jerks.
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