Hurricane Irene

I've been doing lots of storm coverage and long days...so no, I did not blog during the storm... pretty much if I was not working, I was sleeping....

But now that things are calming down... I figured I will post a picture-filled blog to wrap up Irene....

Here's NYC the morning the storm was arriving (Before the eye)



I will say, this was the easiest drive I have ever had through NY... no traffic is nice and since I am a Florida girl, a couple hurricane winds aren't going to bother me! It was smooth sailing all through the city.


Post Storm, I started doing damage coverage. Here is Hoboken NJ on Sunday. Hoboken is interesting. You would think with the water like this it would be right down on a swollen river... not so. The river is actually quite a ways downhill from here, but the drive downhill is full of smaller hills and in between those hills is where the water was collecting, creating large lakes of water throughout the city, with no where for it to drain....

Monday I went to Milburn, NJ, which was shoveling out muck from the floods.... Many, many businesses are just destroyed....I can't even describe how horrible the smell was as well... think sewage mixed with rotting plants and you're in the right ball park....






As you pass many stores the outsides are just piled with EVERYTHING they had... it's all lost.... much the same outside many homes I passed... it was very sad... I really felt for the people who have weeks and weeks of clean up ahead of them as they try to get their lives back

Tuesday, I went to Paterson NJ.

Paterson was different than the other areas that had flooded during the storm. Paterson flooded after the storm. The Passaic River started flooding on Monday. I talked to people who had gone to work Monday morning and thought they had weathered the storm just fine... then came home to find out their home was underwater and they could not go back. Others were told they would probably be ok, and when Tuesday came and the waters were still rising they were given minutes to a few hours to get out.

Some had to be rescued by boat....



These people I really felt for! Most of the people I met lost everything they had... they were low-income to begin with, often with a lot of members of a family living in a home... didn't have insurance...and again.... many didn't even get a lot of notice to get out because it was not a 'during Irene evacuation' It all happened days after the storm...

I went back on Thursday and the water was going down, but very slowly.... Pretty much everyone I met has to completely start from scratch..with little to nothing... I can't even imagine....

The President is set to visit tomorrow...and the residents are hoping he will give them some help. To be honest, I would say they should all look to somewhere else to rebuild. The Passaic has flooded three times in the past year in that area (of course this was the worst) but I just can't see going back to a space where this could happen again....

I do have a couple of side stories here to make you smile....

#1 - Sweet Boots. It seems I have style even in muck and mud. As I was interviewing a member of the Urban Search and Rescue team one of the other guys looked over and said - Hey - sweet boots! To which I of course said 'I was going to stylish disaster coverage' and got a thumbs up :) Here are those 'sweet boots'

And what good is a blog post without squirrels... Shortly, you will see what the squirrels learned about hurricane coverage, but during my reporting in Paterson, they made it into an interview... and no... I did not do it. Tony Aiello of CBS TV New York knew about the squirrels and popped his camera, microphone and question in as I was talking to Scott Evans with Urban Search and Rescue about the people and animals they have rescued from the rising flood waters.....

Hear the Audio Here

And he went right on after that with his next serious questions....I also love that Scott, probably too used to the media and our odd questions, did not even flinch at the question....

Tony was also nice enough to snap a shot of me working, so I have proof, I really do my job :)



And speaking of the squirrels, they were able to find the silver lining in the hurricane.... acorns... the storm shook trees dropping branches and many of those filled with acorns...so I went and collected a lot of them. That made for a pair of happy squirrels.

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Susie also enjoyed some 'I survived the hurricane' yogurt


and Amelia was thankful she got new branches that the storm has knocked down to chew on...