Everyone Ready For Irene???

[Wee67]

Just watched the waters pick up a small 2-story lifeguard house and smash it into the boardwalk on Long Beach, Long Island. The reporter was doing a live hit from the boardwalk there.

[AJ Collector]

Basement flooded again....Winds about 60 mph

[WannabeMego]

Not that many branches on the ground...all are pretty small and trees are still standing.

Water in the Basement, but not much...the ground is saturated and the water has no where to go, so that was to be expected in this old house.

Sump Pump is working overtime...wish I could give the poor thing a reward for all it's hard work.

[The Bat]

Not in the least worried about Hurricane Irene. I have a dry basement with a positive drain. I have a switch panel that allows me to select which things I want to power. So I just start up my generator and I all set.

[Nostalgiabuff]

downgraded to a tropical storm when it made landfall in NYC at 9am. moving pretty quickly so hopefully will pass over faster and give some relief. the eye of the storm should be hitting my area in the next hour or so.

[Blue Meanie]

Everything is OK here on the South Shore of Long Island. Never lost power or cable/Fios. Still some wind gusts, but nothing like earlier this morning. I think NYC got hit harder then we did here on LI.

[kerowack]

I'm in Patchogue, Long Island and our block is branch city. I didnt lose power, but some people on the block did. My next door neighbors car is also trapped under a 40 foot tree and the back windshield is in the back seat...

[MicromanZone]

Basically 100% just like Gloria in 1985: Hits NJ, slows down in NYC, bad storm but not life shattering. Flooding and trees down in areas where that would happen in a normal storn and that is about it. Blah. The panic and hoarding caused me more stress than this did.

[Nostalgiabuff]

storm has passed her now too. my house appears to have escaped unscathed but I know people in town have flooded basements and some lost power
a lot of flooding in various areas of the mid hudson valley

[Bill]

The panic and hoarding caused me more stress than this did.

That's great news when the build up is worse than the storm, glad to hear everyone is okay so far.

[Mikey]

Seems like a lot of newscasters wont admit it wasn't as bad as they expected.

They seem to be going out of their way trying convince people how bad it was.

[Nostalgiabuff]

one of the newscasters on the local news network actually said he was disappointed that after all the hoopla the storm had been downgraded to a tropical storm by the time it hit NYC......really??? you jackass people were getting killed by this storm

[MicromanZone]

That's great news when the build up is worse than the storm, glad to hear everyone is okay so far.

Well, in this case it’s pretty clear there was a tad over-reaction. For example, hoarding. No disrespect to anyone in real problem areas of NYC, but 90% of this city will not fall apart to the degree that cartloads of water and food need to be hoarded. If this really would have caused damaged maybe 1 or 2 days of minor inconvenience. Nothing else. The hoarding and panic was really over-reaction. And like I said before, areas that always get flooded already know how to prepare.

What we have now are stores and buildings in areas that will simply NEVER get winds strong enough to pop windows boarded up and tons of people putting tape on MODERN WINDOWS that would not shatter anyway in the way that taping would help; that technique was valid in the 1950s and such when there was no such thing as coated glass or breakaway glass.

So I’m not against preparing for the worse, but the preparations here were SO, SO, SO overblown it’s beyond belief.

Bloomberg is on the radio now. Just shut up already. He’s overreacting to this in direct opposition to his complete under-reaction to the blizzards this past winter. A good chunk of this is purely face-saving political nonsense. Take a nap Bloomberg, we know you are a “hero” now…

[MegoMark71]

I hope everyone is safe.

[Type3Toys]

I guess if you are one of the lucky folks who does not have a basement full of water, or have your car parked on a street that is now a river, or you dodged one of the tornados that rolled through SJ, it was not that bad. Me, yup, it was that bad. I have a basement with water in it and a back yard full of branches. It was the huge media coverage that helped keep the loss of life to a minimum. We have a lot of wind here now due to the wrap around effect caused by the storm leaving. I was driving down my street at 3pm and watched a 25 ft tall tree snap off like a twig.