This taught me that the rules for hurricane strength are different for the northeast and for the florida/gulf region. Jersey and New York did get clobbered, and there is a lot of destruction from what I grew up thinking of as a minor hurricane. So storms of this intensity do need to be considered dangerous when they hit those northern states.
It also taught me the magnitude of the lunacy of some of the building practices in new jersey, in particular. I was shocked to see how heavily developed spits of sand scarcely above normal sea level were. That was stupid, they should have known better, and now you and I get to pay for it.
I looked for youtubes of cities I'm familiar with, like along the Delaware and Maryland coast. Tose places fared much better, but then, their building practices have for the most part been more sensible. More sensible, in this case, being stretched to incredulity because there are plenty of houses in the Ocean City MD are that are built on dirt that was trucked in and dumped into the water to form little islands.
It shows the vulnerability of New York City, and its ability to respond to things like this. All things considered they handled it well.
Another thing is that we have a lot of people who insist on reading tea leaves more closely than they should be, and opining that this is the kind of disaster we should become accustomed to. People familiar with storms will take this with a grain of salt. During the 1960s I was in Miami and we had hurricanes as a common event. One year there were two, about a month apart. Imagine the hoopla if that were to happen today. Then there were no hurricanes for over twenty years, and then the devastating Andrew. That's the way these things work.
Finally, I wonder what the striper fishing was like on Montauk just before the storm. Must have been some big ones coming inshore.
