Open Thread Mondays: How'd The City Handle The Storm?

Now that Hurricane Irene has moved up to Canada where there’s nothing of value to destroy, no one seems to care.*

But before it hit the Earth’s only valuable metropolis, New York City, everyone was all a panic.

“OMG the storm surgezzz!! We gonna DIE!!!” proved itself to be the battle call – via Twitter – of our generation.

Or something.

Okay, okay. So it came and went and there was a lot of wind and water, flooding and… bluster. For all the buildup, the storm wasn’t much of anything.

But perhaps that’s because of all the preparation the city took? They might have scared the bejesus out of us, but the city was also arguably on point. Shutting down the subway system and redeploying proved to be the right thing to do. Calling an early order of evacuation allowed those that chose to leave to do so in an orderly way – indeed, roads were nearly empty for many hours before the storm because people had already gotten out. And, had those calls not been made to evacuate, who knows how much worse things could’ve been? New York City’s most vulnerable citizens, afterall, were far out of the evacuation zone a day before the storm arrived – and considering there were power outages and delays in emergency response times, this hurricane could’ve had a lot more casualties.

Or maybe not? Some think the city overreacted, spurred panic throughout its residents, and bungled the response in a totally opposite way to that of the December 26 blizzard response.

What do you think? How’d the city handle the hurricane? Was the order to evacuate the right or wrong decision? And, judging from the response to this storm, how prepared are we for a massive disaster – natural or otherwise?

Also – how’d Sheepshead Bites do in covering it?

*Yes, I know there no longer is a Hurricane Irene. But, damnit, I wanted to make fun of Canada.