Hurricane Sandy

Yes I expect there will be money raised tomorrow.
But it is dawning on the mayor that 30-40k people in NY alone are effectively homeless with the bitter winter weather coming on.
I think I am going to go and start or re-start a thread on the election.

Apparently some runners are running anyway, in Central Park. Probably raising money for charity too.

Never say die.

nanaej I couldn't agree more. Places ike Haiti hadn't recovered from last year, Cuba likewise was devastated and no doubt other areas I have not even heard of, and while the shock effect of seeing parts of NY reduced to a post-nuclear landscape was immense, I also heard a new Yorker say that they have the resources to recover and people are not going to starve or die of hypothermiaa or disease. So "Superstorm Sandy" is not just about New York or even the US.

Yes, quite, absent and bags I guess the ones I would feel sorry for are the more professional runners who had booked to come from E Africa etc.

If I had been booked to run in that marathon, I think I might have been expecting a cancellation, even though whoever had to do the cancelling was a bit slow off the mark. I suspect, therefore, that quite a lot of those 47,000 had similar thoughts. If they didn't, then they should have done. It's not as if they won't have known about Sandy and the devastation. So I feel for the disappointed runners, but I expect most of them have just bowed to the inevitable and moved on.

Of course the marathon should have been called off much sooner. I think Blomberg and whoever else was responsible got carried away and thought they were living in a feel-good Hollywood movie in which everyone triumphs over adversity. To squander resources on a sporting event when people's homes have been destroyed and much infrastructure has been damaged would be stupid and wrong.

47,000 people were booked to run the marathon

I agree re marathon - why they did not call it off on Wednesday I have no idea. At least the hotel rooms could have been freed up and folk could have cancelled their journeys.
An excess of positivity and optimism I guess. But just because you say things are going to be fine in no time flat, does not mean they will be.

It's odd really - whenever I see a payphone I always think how lonely they look. You never see anyone queuing for a phone these days. We have a lot of foreign students here and they appear to be the main users of pay phones.
My son is furious that the NY marathon was cancelled at such short notice.
However, it has to be marshalled and policed. People travel big distances to partake in the race. I think the Mayor decided thst is just wasn't feasible this year.

It's a shame they didn't cancel the marathon straight away. I know it's not important in the scheme of things, but people will have travelled quite long distances, and paid their fares.

I believe payphones are fast disappearing in British towns. They are still quite common in France. Before I got free calls via the internet, I found the cheapest way to phone England was to buy a card from a tabac and use it in a payphone. Much cheaper than mobile phones.

Pay phones came into their own after Sandy. Thank goodness for payphones.

I think what frustrates me is that when tragedy makes the poorest or more vulnerable (e.g those in Haiti) even worse off it does not appear to the media to be as great a tragedy as when comparatively wealthy peoples lives are dreadfully disrupted or damaged by disasters. US has greater resources to tackle the disaster than a less wealthy place. Individual tragedy is the same wherever it takes place; a parent who loses a child will hurt in the same way wherever they live.

I have seen a lot of pictures of the devastation and I felt they were necessary to convey the full horror of the flooding. No doubt the newspapers are loving having such a colourful story, but they could hardly have ignored those scenes.
I see that one stupid Brazilian model has chosen to pose on various bits of wreckage, and have some doctored shots of herself purporting to show her at the scene of an atomic bomb, etc. Her opportunism has backfired and she has been mocked and criticised.
I think I have mentioned before how very impessed I was by the way the people in the twin towers coped with the knowledge of their impending death, sending loving messages to their family. It changed my view of Americans. I am sure most will respond in the same way to this new tragedy.

Steady, bags, with those adjectives or you will fall into trap of pot calling kettle black.
New Scientist editorial today, while admitting that NY will pick itself up and dust itself down, says: "Things will not get back to normal soon. Much of the infrastructure... isn't working, and won't be for a while." In an article they explain that subway will take about four days to pump out and then the electrical engineers will have to go in and start repairing all the equipment - signals etc - which will be badly affected by sea water. And that applies to lots of other things as well.

The natural world copes better than we do. Look how the trees rejuvenated after the hurricane.

Don't be silly, jess, nobody said it was jolly. We'll never cope completely with what Nature in her angrier moments can throw at us, but in 'advanced'/developed parts of the world, we do cope a darn sight better than in the less developed places. That's all Nelson was saying. And he's right.

Yes. They reckon it might have benefitted President Obama. Some other politician who usually bats for the other side (that's not rude is it?), embraced him. Chris somebody, and they think he may have gained that area. A high price though. Too high.

No matter how much-needed financial help is given to the poor people who have lost homes and "stuff", the likes of the mother whose small children were swept from her arms, will never rebuild their lives. I thought that one of the most poignant images was of the twisted tangle of metal that once represented a fun fair. Everything changes. The people, humbled by the power of nature, will rally and they will survive this ghastly event.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-20177276
Not such jolly news really, with 45% of NJ still without power.
NY Mayor endorses Obama as he is only the candidate that takes climate change seriously.
Against this backdrop, next week will be the most memorable presidential week ever.
Will the "president doing the right thing in a crisis" factor still hold when people realise that it is going to take weeks rather than days to restore normal services to the whole region?

Easy to sit in his office in the Telegraph and pontificate about resilience, neighbourliness and adaptation bags.
What is the use of friendly neighbours if you are a lone mum, stuck in a shelter with your kids with nowhere to go.
I'm not sure he convinced me that the whole of the eastern seaboard of the US will be able to prevent another such occurrence if they should become more frequent.
Seems to me he is just using the news of people's misfortune to try to preach a point of view about "adaptation" to climate change.

What really got my goat was how the beeb got together headline clips from over the States and put them together with zip-ish noises in between each. Was all about presentation.

Optimistic, and realistic I think, review of Hurricane Sandy's effect on New Yorkers. Silver linings and all that. And no, it's not belittling the worry and the bad stuff, but as Fraser Nelson says, it would have been far worse in many other places.

It's the aftermath that is so harrowing, even for those whose homes are relatively intact. My cousin on Long Island has now moved to stay with relatives in Chicago because their power has gone and food has run out. They wanted to stay as they have been helping with the clean-up, but they have two small grandchildren who have also been moved out of town and they are going to look after them. Such awful, life-changing experiences for millions of people.

Obviously, this has been a very worrying time for anyone with family and friends in the parts of the US affected by Hurricane Sandy and it is good that so many of you have heard from your loved ones. However, I do feel that some of the news coverage in this country has had a mixture of schadenfreude and that same ghoulish voyeurism that makes people slow down to view a particularly horrific traffic accident.