While we all are glad to have our feet on the ground and be able to say we have “weathered the storm,” there are still many New Yorkers who are a little peeved about all the hoopla which went on at the front side of Hurricane Irene.
Yes, some people died, yes, there was a lot of rain, and yes, the cleanup costs are going to run up very quickly. But with all of that said, how much of these costs could have been avoided on the front end by less jumpy leaders? New Jersey governor Chris Christie seemed to be the first one on the bandwagon; putting all his faith in computer models and evacuating Atlantic City, the Jersey Shore, and hospitals as the storm was still taking shape.
All this led to a populous who felt uneasy. I know myself when I got an email from the Borgata saying they were closing at 6pm on Friday that I thought maybe this storm could have legs to it.
At the end of the day though, the whole thing was just wind and water. One of my friends on Facebook, radio host Marc Germain put up a post defending the prudence of our leaders saying, “21 dead, 4.5 million without power, $7B in damage – Irene was hardly a non-event.”
One of his responses though was just as spirited. Andrew Kent wrote; “I wonder how many people died of heart attacks from all the fear mongering and catastrophizing. Of course it is better to be safe than sorry but although I live on the fifth floor of a storm-proof masonry building in one of Brooklyn’s evacuation zones, I was warned to evacuate as if I had lived in a basement apartment or a beach front bungalow…”
While we all can Monday-Morning-Quarterback all day, it will be interesting to see what the public’s reaction is when the bills come in for things like reviving the subway system and all the lost revenue from closing up shop and heading out of town. I bet those totals will make an already disgruntled region even more mad.