A report from Irene Central

A friend who blogs from both Westchester and The Abacos (in the Bahamas) has just posted a report on Irene's visit to the Abacos and her imminent arrival in New York.  She has posted a few other reports with some interesting video including Willie Nelson singing a suitable song.  Call me a traditionalist, but if you aren't going for Leadbelly (as recorded by Alan Lomax) the Weavers must be the next choice.

I am taking this opportunity to send wishes for good luck to all on the East Coast of the US and to second Denis's comment (see below) extending concerns to those in Canada.

Here is a radar image for NYC and surrounds at 0353 EDT on 28 August.  The city is close to the middle of the image in the red box, meaning tornado warning.

Here is a National Weather service warning screen for a few minutes later.

To put this in context, the image below shows the evacuation zones for mid-town.  Our apartment in New York was at the blck X.  The yellow - Zone C - area towards the East River is the UN complex: I wouldn't like to be in a subsub basement there if the water rises any higher than expected.

A tip of the hat to the New York Times for keeping their coverage of the hurricane in the free zone.  One memory from our time in New York is that the threat of a big flooding hurricane was one of the disaster scenarios that was talked about as a possibility.  I don't think they expected it so soon.

In the event - or even non-event - there does not seem to have been  a greta problem.  Here are some words closing an NYT article from 29 August (Carwoola time):

"But elsewhere, the storm barely left a trace — or at least nothing that matched the nearly apocalyptic buildup to the storm, which spurred New Yorkers to raid grocery stores for bottled water and D batteries, and prompted city officials to reassure residents that they had learned lessons from Hurricane Katrina.
"In Midtown Manhattan, a small army of construction workers boarded up Bloomingdale’s on Saturday, and Times Square was virtually deserted by late Saturday night. But 12 hours later, the sun had begun to poke through the clouds. Tourists returned to the theater district, some not even carrying umbrellas, though they had few places to go since most stores, restaurants and movie theaters were closed. A large video screen on the Port Authority Bus Terminal that carried an ominous warning about the storm switched back to flashing advertisements for Tropicana orange juice and Fidelity retirement planning."

It seems to depend where you were.  My Westchester correspondent has included a link to the folk from Roosevelt Island's website (Roosevelt Island is the orange strip in the middle of the East River in the map above).  From memory the Lighthouse Park shown under water on that site is normally at least a metre abover high water mark.  Also a friend who lives in Hoboken (just across the Hudson in New Jersey) has commented

"Hoboken is a flood zone and has issues with any heavy rain. The mayor first asked for voluntary evacuation (we really had nowhere to go but a hotel) and then enforced mandatory evacuation for all ground floor apartments. Since we are on the 1st floor on top of the garage, we stayed. I don't think there were evenvery strong winds in our area but the was certainly a lot of flooding, incl. the garage. We had parked both of our cars in a private parking garage on Friday (so the storm cost us $180 for car parking ;-)"