BY THE time Hurricane Irene was downgraded to a tropical storm yesterday morning, she had claimed at least 15 lives in six states, wreaked billions of dollars in damage and left more than four million homes and businesses without electricity.
Yet the US’s most populated region deemed itself lucky; it could have been far worse.
Most of the deaths were caused by falling trees, including an 11-year-old boy who was killed when a tree crashed through the roof of an apartment building in Virginia. In Salem County, New Jersey, a 20-year-old woman called police at 1.30am yesterday to say she was trapped in her car, with water up to her neck. Her body was found eight hours later on a flooded rural road.
Five people died in North Carolina, where Irene roared onto the continent early Saturday morning. One man died of a heart attack while nailing plywood over his windows. Three others were killed in car accidents.
Despite the deaths, flooding, power cuts and transportation paralysis, many breathed a sigh of relief as Irene lost strength on approaching New England.
“We didn’t get the big storm surge they predicted, because the wind swirled in a counter-clockwise direction, blowing the water out to the bay,” said Ken Aiken from Ballymena, Co Antrim. Mr Aiken lives with his wife Sara on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. “What we have is mostly wind damage, but it was only 40 or 50 miles per hour – not 100 like they predicted.” A large oak tree and an electricity pylon toppled on Mr Aiken’s property.
He and his wife moved onto their dry-docked boat yesterday because it’s equipped with batteries and a generator. Although their regatta was cancelled, the gales did not prevent the Aikens and their friends meeting at the Eastport Yacht Club on Saturday evening. They sealed doors on the bay side of the building with duct tape. “Sailors take a different attitude to all this,” Mr Aiken said. “We put on our foul weather gear and party regardless.” A sales clerk in a Washington liquor store told the New York Times that sales were “like New Year’s Eve”.
New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, ordered more than 370,000 people to leave their homes in low-lying areas of the city – relabelled Zone A – by 5pm on Saturday. “It’s a mandatory evacuation,” Mr Bloomberg announced at the Office of Emergency Management. “Your buildings are shutting down. Your boilers are shutting down. It will be much too dangerous to stay.”
Yet up to 50 per cent of public housing residents in Zone A ignored the order, and some of the shuttle buses sent to evacuate residents departed with only a handful of passengers. Some 9,600 people spent Saturday night in New York city evacuation centres. A similar number of New Jersey residents slept in shelters.
At a press conference yesterday, Mr Bloomberg announced that “the worst is over and we will soon move to restore and return mode”. The mayor said there were no reported deaths or injuries in New York. The hurricane had a dramatic effect on the city’s crime rate; arrests dropped from a normal Saturday night rate of 345 to only 45.
The hurricane led to the unprecedented shutdown of transit systems in Washington, Philadelphia and New York. The New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority said many of its low-lying train yards and bus depots were flooded and parts of the Metro-North Railroad were damaged. The bus system will restart first, MTA’s chief Jay Walder said, but it was “a long road ahead” before water-logged subways would return to normal.
On Friday, an official at the New York Port Authority expressed fears that the Ground Zero site could be flooded in the run-up to the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities. Mr Bloomberg said yesterday that all the cranes on the site were secure and the memorial would open as scheduled.
The New York Stock Exchange said it would open as usual this morning. Amtrak cancelled all train services in the northeast for the duration of the storm, and airlines cancelled thousands of flights. Newark, Kennedy and La Guardia airports are expected to reopen this afternoon.
US authorities appear to have learned the lessons of Hurricane Katrina, as from the scathing criticism of Mr Bloomberg for his handling of winter snowstorms. From the White House down, officials went to great lengths to warn the public of dangers and keep them informed – to such an extent that many accused media and the government of “hyping” the hurricane.
Scientists debate whether the trend towards more intense hurricanes is the result of human-induced global warming.