Sunday, October 28, 2012

Here She Comes...

Hurricane Sandy is slowly making her way our way!

New York has been on hurricane watch for the last couple of days and today it was announced that New York and New Jersey will be feeling the effect of Hurricane Sandy.

The storm is being dubbed 'Frankenstorm', mainly because of it hitting around Halloween but also because it's a mixture of two powerful storms, meeting over New York - we're going to get hurricane scale winds, torrential rain and floods apparently.

All the schools are shut tomorrow, the subways are shutting down in 1 hour, the buses two hours after that, all other public transport will have stopped by 9pm tonight. 

350 thousand people have already been evacuated from Zone A, the areas most vulnerable to flooding. Unlike last year with Irene, the evacuations are mandatory this time, but some people are remembering they hype from last year and the little damage Irene did, and deciding to ride it out. 

It sounds like the storm will start to hit tonight, then gradually get worse through-out the day tomorrow and then get really nasty on Sunday night. They still don't know what it's going to be like on Tuesday, but the storm will keep moving through the week and reach Canada by Friday.

To make it worse, there's a full moon tonight, or tomorrow, so the high tides are higher, then there's a 6-11 feet tidal serge happening and then they're predicting that the waves could get up to 20 feet ON TOP of the serge!?!?!

Perhaps the best thing to come out of all this is that work's closed tomorrow (and maybe Tuesday), so we'll be working from home for the first part of the week. It was all looking very dramatic when I went in to get my laptop this afternoon - Union Square had been taken over by all the electrical service vehicles...

 I think their usual depot is down in lower Manhattan, which is in Zone A, so to avoid getting stuck in the floods they all parked up on Union Square.

I popped into Barnes and Noble to get a better view...

This was just half of them!

I went to get some provisions this afternoon from Brooklyn Fare. Last time all the shops ran out of water, so I was expecting to see some empty shelves, but what I wasn't expecting to see was the crazy number of people shopping!

The queue at Brooklyn Fare is never longer than 15 people, it never really snakes out very far, but today the queue must have had 100 or more people in it and it snaked round the entire shop, almost out the door - people were having to do their shopping from the within the queue, picking up things they wanted as they passed them!

It was madness.

Funnily enough there didn't seem to be much of a shortage of water this time, but they were clean out of rotisserie chickens and running very low on cheese crackers.

So now Abi and I are all stocked up, we've got food to last the next couple of days, candles and matches at the ready and our laptops charged just incase. Hopefully the internet won't cut out and I can keep you updated.

Part of me thinks that the whole thing will blow over in the same way Irene did and not really do any damage or be anything like as bad as they predicted. Then again, all the figures they're giving this time round seem to be almost double those from Irene... so it could get nasty.

It's a good job we can both swim!

No comments:

Post a Comment