Thursday, November 08, 2012
Hurricane Sandy 7
For the past week I've gotten more real information about power failures & power company responses from Mike Francesa's afternoon sports talk show on WFAN than I have from any other sources. Francesa, who doesn't have much of a sense of humor to begin with, has been without power since the night of Hurricane Sandy. He lives in the 'burbs & has partial power from a generator. His kids haven't returned to school yet. His power was out for days after Hurricane Irene & after a blizzard two winters ago. He is very angry. Francesa opens the phones up & people call from all over, reporting if they have power or not, if they've seen repair crews sitting idle with no job assignment or awaiting authorization they never get to begin work at a site. He's had calls from guys claiming to be on repair crews & wasting their time. He has calls from people who have lost everything. Francesa looks at power company websites & calls them out for "cooking" their maps of outage areas. I had to give Governor Christie credit (we shall see how he handles the situation over time), & I have to give Francesa credit for staying with the storm. He correctly says we can't "look back" at the disaster while the storm is still happening to hundreds of thousands of people.
It probably wouldn't have come out, buy I should have tried to take a night photo from a block & 1/2 north on Cherry Street looking toward my corner. Beyond some lit buildings & a working traffic light there wasa black curtain or wall that swallowed anyone walking into it. It was penetrated only by the lights of oncoming cars on the one way street, they had a ghostly quality. There was bright waning moon for several nights last week.
It probably wouldn't have come out, buy I should have tried to take a night photo from a block & 1/2 north on Cherry Street looking toward my corner. Beyond some lit buildings & a working traffic light there wasa black curtain or wall that swallowed anyone walking into it. It was penetrated only by the lights of oncoming cars on the one way street, they had a ghostly quality. There was bright waning moon for several nights last week.
Labels: Elizabeth NJ, media madness, weather
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"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
Bob, people are very ecocentric. I live north of you, near the south shore of Massachusetts, but once your state is out of the news stream, it's likely forgotten by almost everyone in the country. I look to your blog for updates and information about the conditions down there, and you have it. How do we keep this in the national fore front? To say Obama and Christie have done a good job of handling the storm is not enough, because the media moves on, finding other areas of interest. The lives left behind in devastation and despair are gone from the scene.
It's how the news cycle operates. Even 9/11 was bigger news here after a couple of weeks than it was in California. Sometimes I think of Joplin Missouri, flattened by a EF5 tornado in May 2011. Total destruction.
If the weather stays good, FEMA does its job, power comes on most everywhere, the stories here will focus on a few really hard hit area
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If the weather stays good, FEMA does its job, power comes on most everywhere, the stories here will focus on a few really hard hit area
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