History > 2011 > USA > Weather / Nature / Environment (IV)

Billy Stinson comforts his daughter Erin Stinson

as they sit on the steps where their cottage once stood

on August 28, 2011 in Nags Head, N.C.

The cottage,

built in 1903 and destroyed by Hurricane Irene,

was one of the first vacation cottages

built on Albemarle Sound in Nags Head.

Stinson has owned the home,

which is listed in the National Register of Historic Places,

since 1963.

"We were pretending, just for a moment,

that the cottage was still behind us

and we were just sitting there watching the sunset,"

said Erin afterward.

Scott Olson/Getty Images

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Hurricane Irene

August 29, 2011

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/08/hurricane_irene.html

Aid Workers Reach Vermont Towns

Cut Off by Floodwaters

August 31, 2011
The New York Times
By DIRK VAN SUSTEREN

CALAIS, Vt. — Federal and state environmental teams on Wednesday were investigating the extent of health risks related to damaged sewage and water treatment plants in more than a dozen Vermont towns where flash flooding after Hurricane Irene has left thousands of people without electricity or potable water since Sunday.

Teams of engineers from the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation were visiting several areas that have been cut off to make preliminary hazard assessments, officials said. The teams will try to determine the extent of damage to sewage and water plants in at least 13 towns, including chemical and other hazardous material spills and leaks, said Justin Johnson, deputy commissioner of the environmental department.

Three days after remnants of the hurricane spawned torrential downpours in areas rarely bothered by flooding, access in and around much of southern Vermont remained so difficult that officials were unsure how many facilities had been contaminated because they had been unable to send out inspectors until Wednesday.

“We have 13 towns on ‘boil water’ notice, where we know there has been some level of damage, but we don’t have an exact count right now,” Mr. Johnson said, adding that he said he expected the number to grow.

Mr. Johnson said he was unaware of any illnesses so far.

The Vermont National Guard continued airlifting supplies to residents in 13 towns stranded by washed out roadways, damaged bridges, fallen trees and gobs of thick mud. A helicopter from the Illinois National Guard joined the relief effort Wednesday, helping distribute food, water, medicine, blankets, diapers, baby formula, tarps and other items, said Mark Bosma, a spokesman for the Vermont Division of Emergency Management.

On Tuesday night, crews completed makeshift roads into all of the towns except Wardsboro, population 850, in south-central Vermont.

The roads, some of which pass through treacherous mountain terrain, are accessible only by all-terrain vehicles and four-wheel drive trucks and cannot support a large scale evacuation of residents — although they have been used to deliver additional emergency supplies, officials said.

Work continued Wednesday to repair the road into Wardsboro, and state officials said they expected it to be serviceable for emergency and relief vehicles by the end of the day.

National Guard troops have been going door to door to check on residents in the sequestered towns.

Officials say they do not know how long it may take to repair some 260 roadways and 35 bridges damaged across the state by the storm.

In Mendon, a portion of Route 4, the main east-west route through central Vermont, was swept away by water, as were at least four historic covered bridges, officials said. Railroad tracks were also heavily damaged, and Amtrak suspended service indefinitely on its Vermont routes.

When asked how soon some of the more significant repairs to the state’s infrastructure might take place, Gov. Peter Shumlin noted that the start of winter was not far off.

“We are up against a time frame,” he said. “Snow will begin flying in 12 weeks.”

About 12,000 people remained without power in the state. On Wednesday, W. Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, visited New Jersey and New York, which also experienced heavy flooding in the wake of Irene, which was downgraded to a tropical storm as it reached the United States coastline but still caused an estimated $7 billion to $10 billion in damage, one of the costliest storms in the nation’s history.

Mr. Fugate surveyed flooding in Vermont by helicopter on Tuesday, and Ms. Napolitano traveled to North Carolina and Virginia to assess damage.

On Wednesday, federal officials said a team of doctors, nurses and other medical professionals had been dispatched to Vermont to help supply emergency health care at hospitals and health centers.

Abby Goodnough contributed reporting from Williamsville, Vt.,
and Timothy Williams from New York.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 31, 2011

An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Route 4
in Mendon, Vt.,
as Interstate 4.

    Aid Workers Reach Vermont Towns Cut Off by Floodwaters, NYT, 31.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/01/us/01flood.html

Waters recede

but storm victims suffer in East

Wed Aug 31, 2011
4:06pm EDT
Reuters
By Brendan McDermid and Scott Malone

PATERSON, N.J./BRATTLEBORO, Vermont


PATERSON, N.J./BRATTLEBORO, Vermont (Reuters) - Floodwaters finally started to recede from areas of the northeast devastated by Hurricane Irene but many communities were still under water on Wednesday and relief workers battled cut-off roads and raging rivers to deliver emergency supplies.

The storm battered the East Coast with up to 15 inches of rain on Saturday and Sunday, setting river level records in 10 states, the Geological Survey said.

Wide swathes of New Jersey, upstate New York and Vermont experienced the worst flooding in decades, and while many disaster areas began to see waters recede other rivers had not yet crested, the USGS said.

Some 1.7 million homes and business were still without power after as many as 6.7 million had lost electricity.

With damage in the billions of dollars -- Standard & Poor's estimated the national total at $20 billion, though others have put the number at half that -- homeowners were also battling insurance companies that exclude flood damage coverage.

Adding to the anxiety, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it had to put long-term projects on hold and focus on rushing immediate relief to battered states because it had only $800 million left in its disaster relief fund.

The White House said President Barack Obama on Sunday planned to visit the hard-hit New Jersey city of Paterson, one of many places where residents and businesses suffered personal and economic catastrophe.

In Little Falls, New Jersey, Sean Mathews could only wait for floodwaters to recede along Williams Street, where he owns a two-story home that was swamped in four to five feet of water.

"I figure I've got about $20,000 in damage," Mathews said, adding that floods typically leave dead rats, snakes and garbage strewn through the house. "I can deal with snakes. But the sewage smell -- the smell."

Mathews, who installs sheet metal for a living, said moving would be nearly impossible after four major floods in five years wrecked property values.

"We think about moving all the time, but how are you going to sell the house?" he said.

Street after street in Little Falls was flooded, and many were nearly abandoned. Police hung signs saying "No scavenging."

New York state alone suffered $1 billion in damage with 600 homes destroyed, six towns inundated and 150 major highways and 140,000 acres of farmland damaged, Governor Andrew Cuomo said.

"Sometimes the bottom line is the bottom line. We need help on the economics," Cuomo said.

Disaster relief has reignited Washington's budget battles, with some Republicans saying additional spending to help these communities should be offset by cuts elsewhere in the budget.

FLOATING REFRIGERATORS

In Paterson, where hundreds of people had to be rescued from the raging floodwaters by boat or truck, the Passaic River reached its highest level since 1903, officials said.

Once an industrial powerhouse, Paterson has since declined in wealth relative to neighboring towns. Many of its factories were powered by the Great Falls of the Passaic River, the second largest waterfall by volume on the East Coast.

From a helicopter overhead, mist could be seen rising at least 200 feet above the waterfall, making it resemble Niagara Falls.

An entire neighborhood upriver was covered by water, drowning at least two schools, three gas stations and much of the city's industrial area, whose chemicals left a visible sheen on the river. Down the debris-strewn river, two bridges were submerged.

Passaic floodwaters were receding on Wednesday, said James Furtak, acting emergency management director of Bergen County. He said towns such as Wallington, population 11,000, were starting to recover, thanks in part to volunteer firefighters who left their own families to help others.

"You had couches floating, refrigerators floating," Furtak said. "It flooded streets that never got flooded before. Some people lost everything. Their lives."

In Vermont, relief teams worked around the clock to repair washed out roads, drop off emergency supplies to stranded residents and restore electricity.

Vermont had four of its National Guard helicopters in the air and borrowed two from Illinois to send in drinking water, food, medical supplies and diapers, officials said.

"We have these things called goat paths around the state that are extremely rough roads but emergency vehicles can now pass along them, but we are urging residents to stay off this very treacherous terrain to leave it free for emergency vehicles," said Mark Bosma, a spokesman for the state's Emergency Management Agency.

In Brattleboro, where the Connecticut River and Whetstone Brook burst their banks on Sunday, people were busy clearing mud from their homes and assessing damage.

"We're pretty focused on cleaning up and glad the brook has gone down," said Ra Van Dyk, a 53-year-old carpenter, on a break from clearing his brookfront home. "Work and everything else is on hold till we get this done."

(Additional reporting by Grant McCool in Millburn, New Jersey, Svea Herbst-Bayliss
in Boston, Dave Warner in Philadelphia, Jon Oatis and Selam Gebrekidan in New York and Tabassum Zakaria in Washington; Writing by Daniel Trotta, Editing by Jackie Frank)

    Waters recede but storm victims suffer in East, NYT, 31.8.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/31/us-storm-irene-idUSTRE77K01820110831

Hurricane Cost

Seen as Ranking Among Top Ten

August 30, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL COOPER

Hurricane Irene will most likely prove to be one of the 10 costliest catastrophes in the nation’s history, and analysts said that much of the damage might not be covered by insurance because it was caused not by winds but by flooding, which is excluded from many standard policies.

Industry estimates put the cost of the storm at $7 billion to $10 billion, largely because the hurricane pummeled an unusually wide area of the East Coast. Beyond deadly flooding that caused havoc in upstate New York and Vermont, the hurricane flooded cotton and tobacco crops in North Carolina, temporarily halted shellfish harvesting in Chesapeake Bay, sapped power and kept commuters from their jobs in the New York metropolitan area and pushed tourists off Atlantic beaches in the peak of summer.

While insurers have typically covered about half of the total losses in past storms, they might end up covering less than 40 percent of the costs associated with Hurricane Irene, according to an analysis by the Kinetic Analysis Corporation. That is partly because so much damage was caused by flooding, and it is unclear how many damaged homes have flood insurance, and partly because deductibles have risen steeply in coastal areas in recent years, requiring some homeowners to cover $4,000 worth of damages or more before insurers pick up the loss.

This could make it harder for many stricken homeowners to rebuild, and could dampen any short-term boost to the construction industry that typically accompanies major storms, Jan Vermeiren, the chief executive of Kinetic Analysis, said in an interview.

“Especially now that the economy is tight, and people don’t have money sitting around, local governments are broke, and maybe people can’t even get loans from the banks,” Mr. Vermeiren said.

The governors of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut sought expedited disaster declarations from the federal government on Tuesday, which would pave the way for more federal aid. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York wrote President Obama that he had seen “hundreds of private homes either destroyed or with major damage and an enormous amount of public infrastructure damage.” Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey wrote the president that “immediate federal assistance is needed now to give New Jersey’s residents a helping hand at an emotionally and financially devastating time.”

Flooding and widespread power failures tied to the storm continued to affect tens of thousands of people in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut on Tuesday. And rivers and inland streams were still rising in New Jersey and Connecticut, forcing the evacuation of thousands of homeowners.

“I think this is going to end up being a bigger event than people think it is,” Connecticut’s governor, Dannel P. Malloy, said at a news conference. He added: “All of this is massive in scope. What the final dollar amount is, I don’t know.”

Officials in states up and down the Eastern Seaboard said that it was far too early to tally up the damage, and that they were still focused on clearing debris, restoring power, trying to reopen flooded roads and bridges, and, in some areas, helping stranded people.

In southern Vermont, the National Guard airlifted food, water and other supplies on Tuesday to hundreds of people who were stranded in 13 towns that have been cut off by floodwater since Sunday. Mark Bosma, a spokesman for the Vermont Office of Emergency Management, said most of the isolated towns had no electricity and none had potable water because floodwaters had overwhelmed local sewage and water treatment plants.

“I think it’s probably a very scary thing to not know when you can get out of town and to have a water system that’s not working and a general store that has run out of bottled water,” Mr. Bosma said. “People are extremely nervous about being isolated.”

More than 260 roads and 30 state bridges remained at least partly closed Tuesday because of the flooding, which in some areas remains a threat as larger rivers, like the Connecticut, are expected to continue rising until at least Wednesday as they gather runoff and flow from tributaries, officials said.

In Mendon, a part of Route 4, the main east-west road through central Vermont, was swept away, as were 35 bridges, including at least four historic covered bridges, officials said. Four railroad bridges in the state are also unpassable, and Amtrak has announced that it has suspended train service indefinitely on its Vermont routes.

“Some of the roads have literally washed away,” said Sue Minter, the state’s deputy transportation secretary.

Worried that the reports of the devastation could put off visitors as Vermont enters one of its prime tourist seasons — autumn always attracts legions of leaf peepers who come to gawk at foliage — the Vermont Chamber of Commerce opened a Facebook page, VisitVT, in which local inns and other businesses could leave posts explaining whether they are open and whether they were damaged.

“While some are devastated, some are not,” said Betsy Bishop, the chamber’s president.

In Delaware, where the popular beaches like Rehoboth Beach were evacuated last weekend, shutting restaurants and emptying hotels, Gov. Jack Markell is urging people to come back for the Labor Day weekend — and to bring friends.

“What I’m saying is if you had planned to be at the beach last weekend, come back this weekend for Labor Day and bring somebody else,” he said in an interview. “We’ll try to even it out.”

Mr. Markell unveiled a rapid response team on Tuesday to help small businesses cope with the fallout from the storm.

Exactly how much economic activity was lost to the storm is difficult to say. Airports were closed, Broadway theaters stayed dark, ballgames were called, commuters could not get to the office, businesses lost power, and big plants were flooded. And how much economic activity will be generated by the cleanup and rebuilding efforts is hard to pinpoint. But economists are beginning to make educated guesses.

Frederick R. Treyz, the chief economist of Regional Economic Models Inc., did an analysis of the possible impact of the storm.

Assuming that direct damages totaled $7 billion, Dr. Treyz projected that the recovery would generate roughly 42,000 jobs — including construction workers, debris removers and the jobs that would be generated by the money they earned and spent elsewhere. But he calculated that one day’s business disruption across the affected region — a rough estimate that allows for some businesses that were not disrupted at all, and others that were disrupted for several days — would lead to losses that could cost roughly 62,000 jobs.

 

Michael Cooper reported from New York. Reporting was contributed by Dirk Van Susteren from Calais, Vt.; Abby Goodnough from Chester, Vt;, and Patrick McGeehan, Timothy Williams, Thomas Kaplan and Michael M. Grynbaum from New York.

    Hurricane Cost Seen as Ranking Among Top Ten, NYT, 30.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/31/us/31floods.html

Scenes, and Lessons, From Irene

August 29, 2011
The New York Times


To the Editor:

Re “New York Spared Brunt of Storm; Suburbs Hit Hard” (front page, Aug. 29):

New York City residents were fairly lucky to have been spared the fury and devastation left by Irene.

The large-scale pre-emptive arrangements and evacuation ordered by the city and state authorities must be complimented along the lines of the time-tested wisdom “better safe than sorry.” Much credit goes to our city workers, firefighters, police officers, medical and emergency personnel and volunteers who heeded the call to keep New York prepared and safe for all.

As the clouds disperse and the sun emerges and shines again on New York, I am sure that many fellow New Yorkers will be proud to be a part of this extraordinary city!

ATUL M. KARNIK
Woodside, Queens, Aug. 29, 2011

To the Editor:

Re “ ‘Some Hurricane,’ New Yorkers Grumble as Danger Passes” (news article, Aug. 29):

It is shocking to hear complaints about Irene’s turning out not to be as serious in some areas as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had predicted, and about the costly preparations New Yorkers made that turned out to be unnecessary.

The expectation that the mayor could predict the exact behavior of a storm throughout this topographically complex region is as childish as the expectation of infants that mother can always make everything right.

The mayor did his job well in positing a worst-case scenario; if he had done otherwise and the storm turned out to be as devastating as predicted, the mayor would have been deservedly criticized.

Some New Yorkers need to do some growing up!

INGEBORG OPPENHEIMER
Bronx, Aug. 29, 2011

The writer is a social worker.

To the Editor:

Those complaining of officials being too safe about Hurricane Irene overprotect themselves in their everyday lives; they lock their front doors and wear seat belts. They know that there’s a very small chance they need to, but they still do it.

DEAN MORRIS
New York, Aug. 29, 2011

To the Editor:

Observing how our country has reacted in such a coordinated, cohesive manner to Hurricane Irene — on both a government and a personal level — I find that the remarkable power of America comes into view.

Imagine what we could accomplish if we dealt with our political issues in the same unified manner.

I just returned from a business trip to India, where chaos, confusion and poverty reign. Yet India is still able to maintain phenomenal economic growth. We have so much more capacity and upside in the United States. Imagine what we could do here to solve all of the issues of the day if we could somehow take politics out of the equation.

ROBERT M. MILLER
New York, Aug. 29, 2011

To the Editor:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency and state disaster officials should post the following announcement at hurricane relief distribution centers:

“To all Tea Party members, Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry supporters: Being aware of your desire to keep the government out of your lives, aware also of your objection to any more government spending, aware that you feel so strongly about our debt that you were willing to let the nation default rather than raise the debt ceiling, you need not apply for any disaster relief funds. Have a nice day!”

JOHN E. COLBERT
Chicago, Aug. 29, 2011

To the Editor:

While scientists may disagree as to whether global warming caused Irene (“Seeing Irene as Harbinger of a Change in Climate,” news article, Aug. 28), they agree that global temperatures are rising as a result of trapped greenhouse gases and that a major contributor of greenhouse gases is the burning of fossil fuels.

It is within our power to slow or reverse this destructive trend, which threatens our very existence. Why take the risk, since even if some claims turn out to be exaggerated, we will all live in a cleaner, greener, sustainable world?

TOM MILLER
President, Green Cities Fund
Oakland, Calif., Aug. 28, 2011

    Scenes, and Lessons, From Irene, NYT, 29.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/opinion/scenes-and-lessons-from-irene.html

Recovery Is Slower

in New York Suburbs

August 28, 2011
The New York Times
By SAM DOLNICK

Tropical Storm Irene swept through the desolate streets of New York on Sunday, flooding low-lying areas and leaving millions of homes without power along the Eastern Seaboard as it continued on to New England. Most New Yorkers emerged from their makeshift bunkers to find little of the widespread devastation the authorities had feared.

But the aftermath of the storm, at least in New York and its suburbs, could be most felt on Monday in the early-morning commute -- which, for some people, was a nonstarter.

Although most of the city subway’s 22 lines were running by 6 a.m. on Monday, the experience could not be more different outside the city, where fallen trees and downed wires caused problems throughout suburban New York and Connecticut. There was no service whatsoever on the Metro-North Railroad, and no commuter service into New York on New Jersey Transit. The Long Island Rail Road had extremely limited train service; Amtrak was not running any trains between Boston and Philadelphia, and service between New York and Albany was also stopped.

PATH trains did resume on Monday; New Jersey Transit buses also were running on a truncated weekday schedule. But for many suburban commuters, getting to New York meant doing something out of their normal routine: taking ferries, commuter vans or finding instant car pool partners.

The storm, which was downgraded from a hurricane shortly before it hit New York, attacked in a flurry of punches. A police station in Cranford, N.J., flooded and had to be evacuated. Firefighters paddling in boats rescued more than 60 people from five-foot floodwaters on Staten Island. New York’s major airports were closed, and at least five storm-related deaths were reported in New York State and New Jersey.

But after wide-ranging precautionary measures by city officials that included shutting down New York’s mass-transit network, sandbagging storefronts on Fifth Avenue and issuing evacuation orders for 370,000 people across the city, Hurricane Irene is likely to be remembered by New Yorkers more for what did not happen than for what did.

Windows in skyscrapers did not shatter. Subway tunnels did not flood. Power was not shut off pre-emptively. The water grid did not burst. There were no reported fatalities in the five boroughs. And the rivers flanking Manhattan did not overrun their banks.

Still, when the center of the storm arrived over New York City, about 9 a.m., winds had reached 65 miles per hour, making Irene the largest storm to hit the city in more than 25 years, even as the bulk of the storm’s power was reserved for the suburbs.

“All in all, we are in pretty good shape because of the exhaustive steps I think we took to prepare for whatever came our way,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said at a news conference on Sunday afternoon.

Before striking New York, the storm left a path of wreckage that killed at least 16 people in six states, paralyzed most modes of transportation across the Northeast and caused flooding in several states.

“Many Americans are still at risk of power outages and flooding,” President Obama said, “which could get worse in the coming days as rivers swell past their banks.”

New York’s economic costs have yet to be calculated, but with Broadway dark, storefronts covered in plywood and virtually the entire population shuttered indoors, the weekend’s lost sales and storm damage could end up costing the city about $6 billion, said Peter Morici, a business school professor at the University of Maryland. The total national cost could reach $40 billion, Mr. Morici added.

Outside New York City, the storm’s wrath was stark. In New Jersey, more than 800,000 customers were without power on Sunday, and the state’s largest utility, Public Service Electric and Gas, estimated it could take a week to restore electricity to all of its customers. In Connecticut, 670,000 customers had lost power — roughly half the state — which surpassed power failures caused by Hurricane Gloria in 1985.

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said more than 300 roadways were blocked, but he warned that dire problems were still to come, particularly along the Delaware, Ramapo and Passaic Rivers. “The real issue that we are going to have to deal with now is flooding,” Mr. Christie said.

Flooding in Philadelphia reached levels that had not been seen in that city in more than 140 years. Vermont was also struck particularly hard; even as the worst of the winds had dissipated, flooding forced officials to evacuate parts of southern Vermont, and floods were expected in the northern portion of the state as late as Monday.

In New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said it could take a week to fully restore power to the 750,000 customers without electricity. That included 457,000 on Long Island, 50,000 in Westchester County and 34,000 in Queens, officials said. Consolidated Edison said power was not cut in Manhattan.

Mr. Obama said that though the storm had not proved as strong as many feared, the aftermath would be substantial. “The impacts of this storm will be felt for some time,” he said Sunday from the White House. “And the recovery effort will last for weeks or longer. I want people to understand that this is not over.”

But despite the lack of power, flooding and foiled weekend plans, the soggy Northeast’s collective mood shifted Sunday from dread to relief.

In New York, joggers, not floodwaters, were spotted along the East River. Restaurants, bookstores and bars reopened. Traffic picked up, and officials at the United States Open announced that the tournament would begin on Monday after all.

By 11 a.m., with the sun peeking out, tourists flocked to Central Park even though police officers shooed them away for fear of falling branches.

“I slept like a baby,” said Steven Boone, a homeless man who rode out the storm in a shelter in the East Village. “Nowhere near as bad as I thought.”

Despite the region’s relative good fortune, many applauded the preparations for a worst-case disaster. Mr. Bloomberg strongly defended the drastic measures, which saw 9,000 evacuees enter 81 emergency shelters.

“I would make the same decisions again without hesitation,” he said. “We’re just not going to take any risk with people’s lives, and the best scenario possible is you take the precautions and it turns out they’re not needed.”

The city lifted a highly unusual evacuation order of low-lying neighborhoods a day after residents of Zone A — including Coney Island, the Rockaways and Battery Park City — were ordered to leave for their own safety. (The city’s zoned labels showed signs of outlasting the storm’s more tangible effects. Viktoriya Gaponski, a fashion blogger, said on Twitter that she planned to “only date Zone B men from now on. Less dangerous than Zone A, but edgier than Zone C.”)

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey reopened the city’s three major airports on Monday morning.

The storm caused several deaths in the region, including at least three in New Jersey. Celena Sylvestri, 20, was driving to her boyfriend’s house when she was caught in flood waters in Salem County. Ms. Sylvestri called police to say she was trapped in water up to her neck, but by the time rescue workers found her, eight hours later, she was already dead inside her car.

In Buena Vista, N.J., in Atlantic County, officials scrambled to evacuate three dozen elderly residents from trailer homes that were threatened by sudden flooding.

The police also said a 39-year-old volunteer rescue worker for Princeton Township’s Rescue and First Aid squad was in critical condition on Sunday after he was injured while trying to make a rescue in swift-moving water at 4:30 a.m.

There were close calls in New York City, as well. In the Bulls Head section of Staten Island, dozens of people stood on their nearly submerged porches to flag down firefighters who took them to safety in their rafts. The flood waters had swallowed rows of parked cars, angering at least one resident.

“I was like, ‘This hurricane isn’t cool anymore,’ ” said Safina Skaf, 27, who woke up to find her new sport utility vehicle underwater. “Please go away now.”

In Brooklyn on Sunday afternoon, bars flung open their windows and sidewalk cafes set up outdoor tables as businesses and patrons looked to make up for a lost Saturday night. The Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene said it was packed less than 10 minutes after opening around 2:30 p.m. Across the street, Habana Outpost served margaritas and planned to play a movie outdoors as long as the weather cooperated.

Others found poetry in the gales of wind and sheets of rain.

“You may not see this again in your lifetime,” said Teddy Ferris, 55, an East Village resident who had refused to evacuate and had taken a seat along the East River on Sunday morning. “This is beautiful. This is nature at its best.”

    Recovery Is Slower in New York Suburbs, NYT, 28.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/nyregion/wind-and-rain-from-hurricane-irene-lash-new-york.html

With Katrina in Mind,

Obama Administration

Says It’s Ready for Irene

August 27, 2011
The New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON — Determined to avoid any comparisons with the federal government’s failed response to Hurricane Katrina, the Obama administration made a public display Saturday of the range of its efforts to make sure officials in the storm-drenched states had whatever help they needed from Washington.

President Obama, who returned to Washington a day early from his summer vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, visited the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency shortly after noon. While there, he checked in on the National Response Coordination Center, a 24-hour command center based at FEMA, where dozens of federal employees from a range of agencies were assembled around the clock to help orchestrate the response to Hurricane Irene.

On wall-size television monitors, they keep track of the storm’s progress and are able to turn up or down the volume of the federal government’s response, by directing the various federal agency representatives who are there to pass on updates to their bosses.

“You guys are doing a great job, obviously,” Mr. Obama said during his brief visit. “This is obviously going to be touch and go.”

Even before the storm made landfall, Mr. Obama had declared a federal emergency for Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island and Virginia, clearing the way for federal financing and support to respond to the hurricane.

While still at FEMA headquarters, Mr. Obama joined a video conference of state and local officials in the regions expecting to be hit by the storm.

“It’s going to be a long 72 hours,” Mr. Obama said during the conference.

The bulk of the responsibility in advance of any hurricane rests with local and state governments, which are in charge of evacuation orders and preparations for flooding or other storm damage. But federal agencies must be ready in advance to provide any requested assistance, as they ultimately did in Louisiana and Mississippi in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina. But during that storm, they were often unable to quickly answer the requests.

To avoid such a repeat on Saturday, FEMA had 18 disaster incident response teams in place in coastal states and had stockpiles of food, water and mobile communications equipment ready to go. The Coast Guard had more than 20 rescue helicopters and reconnaissance planes in East Coast air stations ready to take off.

The Defense Department has another 18 helicopters in the Northeast set aside for response, and it has coordinated with states along the storm path to ensure that about 101,000 National Guard members are available, if necessary.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta issued a “prepare to deploy” order for 6,500 active duty military on Saturday to support the hurricane response. No troops have yet been deployed, as the National Guard, under the command of state officials, typically is the first called out to help in disasters.

As of Friday, the American Red Cross had positioned more than 200 emergency response vehicles and tens of thousands of ready-to-eat meals in areas in the path of the storm.

FEMA has moved onto the Internet and into social media in a big way, too, with Craig Fugate, the FEMA director, posting several times an hour from his account, @CraigatFEMA, to deliver updates on the agency’s response and the status of the storm.

“The category of the storm does not tell the whole story,” Mr. Fugate wrote Saturday morning, after Hurricane Irene was downgraded to a Category 1 storm but was still considered dangerous. “Some of our nation’s worst flooding came from tropical storms.”

The agency even released new software for Android cellphones that allows the public to monitor information on how to prepare for a hurricane, and if necessary, to apply for disaster assistance, which bogged down in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

At a news conference Saturday morning at FEMA headquarters in Washington, the Homeland Security secretary, Janet Napolitano, said that as the storm was making its first contact on the East Coast, she knew of no outstanding requests to the federal government for assistance from state or local governments.

“None of them have reported any unmet needs right now,” she said. “But we really are at the beginning of this storm response. We are basically at the end of the preparation phase.”

Ms. Napolitano urged people along the path of the storm to heed warnings to evacuate, even though the storm continued to lose some of its intensity.

“Irene remains a large and dangerous storm,” she said. “People need to take it seriously. People need to be prepared.”

Mr. Fugate, the FEMA director, said that the heavy rains and tornadoes that might accompany Hurricane Irene were not reflected in its Category 1 status, so people should not let down their guard.

“Until we actually get the impacts, we are not going to know how bad areas are getting hit,” Mr. Fugate said.

Mr. Fugate said the early reports of widespread power failures — as of 1 p.m. on Saturday an estimated 400,000 homes and businesses were without power, The Associated Press reported — suggested that federal agencies would be called on to help out.

Bill Read, the director of the National Hurricane Center, said that as of Saturday morning the storm was moving north-northeast at about 15 miles per hour and that he expected to see a storm surge along the coasts of between 5 and 9 feet — more than enough to cause severe flooding.

Mr. Read said there could also be as much as 15 inches of rain in North Carolina before the storm clears and 5 to 10 inches of rain across the Mid-Atlantic and into New England, which could cause major flooding and tree damage, even inland, as the ground is already saturated from recent heavy rains.

    With Katrina in Mind, Obama Administration Says It’s Ready for Irene, NYT, 27.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/us/28obama-1.html

Challenges

in Predicting the Intensity of Storms

August 27, 2011
The New York Times
By HENRY FOUNTAIN

Irene may be the first hurricane to hit the East Coast in several years, but in one respect it is like all the others that have come and gone before it: forecasters have had difficulty predicting its strength.

Officials with the National Hurricane Center warned Saturday that the storm was still capable of inflicting heavy damage, particularly from flooding, as it slogged toward New Jersey and New York. But they said it had decreased in intensity, with sustained wind speeds of about 80 miles an hour, down 15 miles an hour from 12 hours before. And they acknowledged that they did not know precisely why it had weakened.

“There’s some internal dynamics of the storm that we don’t completely understand,” said Todd Kimberlain, a hurricane specialist at the center in Miami.

Mr. Kimberlain said one reason for the weakening may be that the storm had never completed a typical hurricane cycle in which the innermost band of spinning clouds, called the inner eye wall, dissipates and is replaced with an outer band that contracts.

“Some hurricanes get through this process and afterward will strengthen,” he said. “But we don’t know what has to go on internally.”

By never completing the cycle, Irene has become less organized and has lower peak winds, although it is still a very wide storm.

Hurricanes also tend to strengthen over water that is warm and deep, and Irene may have passed over areas that are a bit shallower. “There are some peculiar aspects to the water in that part of the Atlantic,” Mr. Kimberlain said. But it is very hard to know how the water may have affected Irene “because we don’t have observations everywhere.”

Mr. Kimberlain said that despite the uncertainty about the storm’s strength, he was especially concerned about the potential for heavy rainfall, especially in parts of New York and New Jersey that have received much rain in the past few weeks.

He also said the storm was still capable of producing a surge of four to eight feet over normal tides in New Jersey and New York. Storm surges are only partly related to maximum wind speed; the size of the storm and its overall speed are important as well. Irene has winds over 39 miles an hour over an area about 500 miles wide, which would tend to create higher surges, but is moving relatively slowly at about 15 miles an hour, which would tend to lessen them.

The problems in predicting Irene’s strength are typical, scientists say. Hurricane forecasting is far better at estimating where a storm will go.

“We’ve had a wonderful history of improving tracking forecasts,” said Clifford Mass, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington who works on numerical modeling of storms. A hurricane, he said, is essentially like a top, and it is relatively easy to gauge the steering winds and other forces that will move it.

“But we have not gotten good in intensity forecasts,” Dr. Mass said. “To get the intensity right, we have to get the innards of the storm right.”

The problem is a lack of observational data; it is very difficult to get information from the heart of a hurricane. Aircraft that fly into them do so at about 10,000 feet, far above the most intense winds and conditions. They carry radar that can gauge some conditions far below, and they also drop sensors on parachutes to measure wind speeds, air pressure and water temperatures. But it is not enough data to plug into a numerical model and yield a forecast that has a high degree of certainty, Dr. Mass said.

Mr. Kimberlain said the difficulty in gauging a storm’s intensity led the National Hurricane Center to be cautious when updating its forecasts, as it has been doing every several hours in the case of Irene.

“We’re slow to make changes to the forecast,” he said. “We’d rather be a little high than a little low.”

    Challenges in Predicting the Intensity of Storms, NYT, 28.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/us/28forecast.html

Irene Hits New England

as South Recovers

August 28, 2011
The New York Times
By STUART EMMRICH

This article was reported by Kim Severson, Brian Stelter, Dan Barry, Sabrina Tavernise and Campbell Robertson and was written by Stuart Emmrich.

Having cut a path of destruction from the Outer Banks of North Carolina to the eastern tip of Long Island that killed at least 10 people in six states and caused an unprecedented shutdown of the transit systems in Washington, Philadelphia and New York, a weakened but still ferocious Hurricane Irene, now downgraded to a tropical storm, set its sights on a battened-down New England late Sunday morning.

In Philadelphia, which lies between the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers, residents in low-lying areas woke up to rising water. Mark McDonald, spokesman for the Philadelphia mayor, Michael Nutter, said water levels were 15 feet above normal in some areas, and were not expected to stop rising until 2 p.m. Sunday. The waters were approaching the highest level ever recorded — 17 feet in 1869, he said. “There are many streams and creeks, and they are all above flood stage now,” Mr. McDonald said by telephone.

The storm, which dumped at least six inches of rain on the city, caused the collapse of seven buildings there, he said. Though nobody was injured, at one building — a six-story structure at 734 South 17th Street, just south of Center City, 20 residents had to be evacuated to safety. The airport, which closed at 10:30 Saturday night, would probably not reopen before late Sunday afternoon, Mr. McDonald said, though subways and buses would begin running around noon.

In all, the city’s three shelters drew only 170 people; most residents appeared to have stayed home. There was one fatality: a passenger in a car was killed during the night when the car struck a telephone pole, Mr. McDonald said.

About 21,000 residents in Philadelphia were without power Sunday morning, Mr. McDonald said, and as many as 300,000 in the larger metropolitan area. He said that an estimated 165 trees were down in the city and that only 6 had been removed so far Sunday morning. "The mayor’s message is, please stay home," he said. "There’s a lot of water on the ground and trees down that will turn many of the streets of the city into a difficult proposition in terms of driving around."

To the south, millions of residents were trying to pick up the pieces left in the storm’s wake.

In Maryland, about 800,000 people were without power, a significant portion of the state’s 5 million residents. Edward Hopkins, communications director for the Maryland Emergency Management Agency, said about 180 streets were closed in the state as of Sunday morning, because of fallen trees and flooding. The state had one fatality, he said, in Queen Anne’s County on the Eastern Shore, when a tree fell on a house.

“We’re still very much into this,” he said by telephone. He added that teams of emergency workers were going county to county to evaluate the damage.

In North Carolina, the state that took the first hard hit from Irene, residents woke up to a sun-drenched morning and ventured out to assess just how much damage had been done. The hurricane, which hit the coast Saturday morning with sustained winds of 85 miles per hour, was well on its way north by late evening, leaving a state soggy but grateful the damage was not worse.

The flooding picture was better on Sunday than feared the day before, but state and federal officials said they still did not know the extent of the storm’s damage.

“I think the cost is going to be significant,” said Gov. Bev Perdue. She will be flying to three of the hardest hit parts of the state on Sunday, touching down in Jones County in the morning and then heading to the coastal communities around Morehead City and Atlantic Beach, near where the hurricane first hit land, and then on to Dare County, which includes the Outer Banks.

On Sunday morning, more than 225 roads and 21 bridges remained closed, blocked by trees and floodwaters or to keep travelers from dangerous conditions, said Ernie Seneca, a spokesman for the state emergency management office. More than half a million people remained without power. Workers at 56 shelters housed more than 4,600 people overnight.

Water rescues dominated the weekend. All told, swift rescue teams pulled 76 people from the water. Nine people were rescued from flooded homes in Northampton County, which is inland and near the Virginia border.

While the storm whipped up punishing waves in the Atlantic, the flooding on the ocean side of North Carolina was not nearly as severe as the flooding of homes along the Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds, just on the other side of the fingernail of islands that make up the Outer Banks. Callers to a coastal radio station spoke of jet skis, small boats and cars strewn across streets and under elevated houses on the shore of the Outer Banks facing the sound.

Most of the debris washed in after the eye had passed and the wind switched direction, pushing water across the sounds. Those living along the sound in mainland North Carolina, having checked on their houses and found them in good condition on Saturday evening, returned Sunday morning to find them sitting in four or five feet of water.

“The beach was pretty bad, but the sound just came up and attacked,” said Adam Anderson, a 25-year-old monster truck driver who lives in Powells Point, N.C. What set Irene apart, Mr. Anderson said, was not the ferocity of the winds but their direction and duration, first sucking the water out of the sounds and then shoving it back in for hours. “Worst I’ve ever seen,” Mr. Anderson said, “and I’ve been here all my life.”

Roads toward the Ablemarle Sound in Currituck County ended in lakes, the houses beyond sitting in several feet of water. “A buddy of mine’s house got flooded so bad it ruined everything,” said Harold Herndon, 51, who works for the Outer Banks town of Southern Shores. “He rode out the storm in the shed with his dog.”

In Virginia, authorities began re-opening roads and lifting curfews, though arterial roads like the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel were expected to remain closed well into the day on Sunday. Several bridges were closed to traffic during the storm.

The storm had funneled storm surge and floodwater to the Jersey Shore overnight. The National Hurricane Center said the center of the storm crossed over land near Little Egg Inlet, north of Atlantic City, about 5:35 a.m. Even before Irene was downgraded to a tropical storm on Sunday morning, federal, state and local officials along the East Coast strongly recommended that people not be fooled into complacency by the gradual decrease in the hurricane’s maximum wind speed. They said that a central concern was the storm surge of such a sprawling hurricane — the deluge to be dumped from the sky or thrown onto shore by violent waves moving like snapped blankets.

With the anxiety of the storm gone, days of response and cleanup begin.

Downed and denuded trees. Impassable roadways. Damaged municipal buildings. Widespread flooding. The partial loss of a modest civic center’s roof, forcing the relocation of dozens of people who had found shelter there.

Damage assessments will begin in earnest on Sunday. About three million people were reported to be without power, including more than one million in the Washington area.

The hurricane contributed to at least 10 deaths in four states. In South Jersey, a 20-year-old woman was found dead in her submerged car at 9:30 Sunday morning on a flooded rural road in Salem County, eight hours after she called the police to say she was trapped in her vehicle with water up to her neck, state police said.

In Maryland, a person in Queen Anne’s County died after a tree fell on a house, The Associated Press reported.

Five people died in North Carolina, including a man installing plywood on the windows of his home in Onslow County who had a heart attack. Three died in car accidents. One man in Nash County was killed when a tree limb fell Saturday.

Three more people died in Virginia: in Newport News, a tree crashed through the roof of an apartment building and killed an 11-year-old boy; in Brunswick County, a tree fell on a car and killed a man; the most recent death was caused by toppled trees.

By early Sunday, the massive storm was continuing north at about 18 miles an hour — speeding up slightly — and producing tornado watches and warnings from Delaware to New York City.

With the first hurricane to make landfall in the continental United States since 2008, government officials issued evacuation orders for about 3 million people along the Eastern Seaboard, according to The Associated Press — from 100,000 people in Delaware to a million people in New Jersey, where the governor, Chris Christie, seemed to speak for all concerned public officials when he told everyone to “get the hell off the beach.”

The storm, or the anticipation of it, upended everyday life from the Carolinas to New England, as communities went into lockdown mode and governments declared states of emergency. Amtrak canceled all train service in the Northeast, while airlines canceled thousands of flights and Newark Liberty International Airport, Kennedy International Airport and La Guardia Airport shut down. On Sunday, all three airports remained closed, and federal officials were saying they were not sure when they would be reopened. They noted that mass transit in New York remained shut down, making it difficult for airport employees and passengers to reach the airports.

Major League Baseball postponed games. Broadway plays went dark in deference to nature’s more dramatic production. And, if Cairo Wine and Liquor in Washington was any measure, liquor stores enjoyed brisk, storm-related business. (“It’s like New Year’s Eve,” Gary Lyles, an employee, said. “They’re buying everything. Wine. Beer. Even water.”)

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, still seeking to redeem itself from its spotty performance after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, had 18 disaster-response teams in place along the East Coast, with stockpiles of food, water and mobile communications equipment ready to go. The Coast Guard: more than 20 rescue helicopters and reconnaissance planes ready to take off. The Defense Department: 6,500 active duty military personnel poised for deployment. The National Guard: about 101,000 members available to respond. The American Red Cross: more than 200 emergency response vehicles and tens of thousands of ready-to-eat meals in areas due to be hit by the storm.

And President Obama: back early in Washington from his vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, and issuing federal emergency declarations for North Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The declarations clear the way for federal support in responding to the hurricane’s aftermath, which could affect more than 50 million people and cause significant financial harm.

Early Sunday, according to The Associated Press, more than 2.3 million customers were without power from North Carolina through parts of Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and Connecticut. In Virginia, a spokesman for Gov. Bob McDonnell said the power failure was among the worst in the state’s history, second only to Hurricane Isabel in 2003. In North Carolina, the communities of Wrightsville Beach and Carolina Beach struggled with flooding, while Atlantic Beach dealt with a pier’s partial collapse. And just outside the port city of Wilmington, the dangerous weather conditions forced the police to suspend the search for a teenage boy who had jumped off a boat ramp and into the churning waters.

Power was out for about half of Wilmington’s 106,000 residents. At the New Hanover Regional Medical Center, several dozen children had spent the night in sleeping bags and inflatable beds, arriving with staff members who had to work and parents from the area who wanted a safe place to wait the storm out.

After a night of fierce winds that gusted to nearly 80 miles an hour, people emerged from their homes to downed trees, darkened traffic lights — and a collective sense of having been spared the worst of the storm’s wrath.

In the tiny hamlet of Swansboro, N.C., for example, about 30 miles west of where the hurricane made landfall, 80 mile-an-hour winds had stripped many trees of their foliage, sent tumbleweedlike balls of rain rolling down deserted streets and knocked out power. But the mayor, Scott Chadwick, expressed relief while sharing doughnuts with city workers at a local fire station after an afternoon that he described as “pretty rough.”

“I’ll tell you what, everybody’s breathing a lot easier than they were,” Mr. Chadwick said. “This could have been terrible.”

But farther north, in Currituck County, close to the Virginia border, the dread of the approaching unknown mixed with the rain. .

Louis Davis, the owner of the Coinjock Marina and Restaurant, drove a pickup truck through his deserted community, as the wind jostled the vehicle and his cellphone rang with calls from worried boat owners. (“So far, so good, Cap,” Mr. Davis said.) Then he returned to his marina, feeling buoyed by reports that the hurricane’s direction had veered away from his business. Then he looked at the radar, which indicated that the hurricane was coming straight for the marina.

“That’s not good,” he said.

A couple of hours later, about 5:20, the storm’s eye passed right over this small, unincorporated place, suddenly stilling the howling onslaught of wind and rain that had been driving the water of the Intracoastal Canal, on which the marina sits, into Albemarle Sound. Everything got quiet, which meant the problems were really getting started.

Until then, most people had experienced Hurricane Irene only through the multicolored radar maps that appeared on television. Or maybe they had seen the breathtaking, even humbling, images arriving from some 200 miles up, via the International Space Station: the photographs taken by astronauts that showed what looked like a massive swirl of mashed potatoes straddling the edge of the green plate of the United States.

But, in Coinjack, the storm had dramatically moved from being a radar image to becoming a violent, roaring presence in the life of Mr. Davis, 40, a burly man in waders and a baseball cap, waiting for the rising waters to flood his dock shop and even his home.

With resignation and respect, he said: “It is what it is.”

Kim Severson reported from Wilmington, N.C., Dan Barry from New York and Campbell Robertson from Coinjock, N.C. Reporting was contributed by Brian Stelter from Nags Head, N.C., Stuart Emmrich and Shaila Dewan from New York, Abby Goodnough from Boston, and Sabrina Tavernise and Eric Lipton from Washington.

    Irene Hits New England as South Recovers, NYT, 28.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/us/29hurricane.html

Irene Sweeps Through New York

August 28, 2011
The New York Times
By THOMAS KAPLAN

Tropical Storm Irene swept through the New York City area on Sunday morning lacking anywhere near the force that had been feared, but still cutting power to more than a million people, toppling trees and flooding some parts of the city.

Though the storm packed strong winds and heavy rain, it never dealt the kind of punch that prompted city officials to order unprecedented evacuations. There were no reports of major damage to skyscrapers, and officials said the flooding appeared to be limited. In much of the city, people awoke anxious that they would see destruction out their windows, only to find a scene more typical after a major summer storm.

Still, even after the squall was downgraded to a tropical storm as it moved up the Eastern Seaboard, it provided a thorough soaking for the region. On Staten Island, firefighters used boats to rescue more than 60 people from a flooded neighborhood; in Westchester County, National Guard troops in Hummers and five-ton trucks planned to convoy to Long Island to help with clean-up efforts.

The storm, which had first come ashore on Saturday morning in North Carolina before slipping back over water, made landfall on Sunday about 5:30 a.m. near Little Egg Inlet, north of Atlantic City in New Jersey. The National Hurricane Center said that winds swirled at 65 miles per hour when the center of the storm finally arrived over New York City at about 9 a.m.

City officials warned that a big problem could be flooding at high tide on Sunday morning, which seemed likely to coincide with when the storm was at its fiercest. But from daybreak onward, forecasts offered some encouragement. City officials said it appeared that the hurricane moved more quickly than they had expected, meaning less damage as the storm passed through the metropolitan area.

In the Battery, the storm surge breached the seawall in several spots, including near the Staten Island Ferry Terminal in Lower Manhattan. Flooding was more serious in low-lying neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens and on Staten Island, with water, in some places, reaching people’s thighs and residents using kayaks to navigate inundated streets.

Flooding was also causing problems on roadways across the city, including the Henry Hudson Parkway, the West Side Highway and the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive in Manhattan, and the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn. Pooling water also forced the closure of one of the tubes of the Holland Tunnel, and mudslides and flooding shut down a section of the New York State Thruway in Rockland and Orange Counties, as well as the Tappan Zee Bridge.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is expecting a lengthy recovery from the storm, transit officials said on Sunday morning, although many parts of the system had yet to be inspected by repair workers, who were waiting out the final hours of the storm. Officials said many of the system’s low-lying train yards and bus depots were underwater, while flooding and downed power lines had damaged parts of the Metro-North Railroad.

The storm’s greatest effect was on the power grid in New York City’s suburbs, where falling trees brought down power lines throughout the metropolitan area.

In New Jersey, more than half a million customers were without power on Sunday, and the state’s largest utility, the Public Service Electric and Gas Company, estimated that it could take as long as a week to restore electricity to all its customers. Connecticut Light & Power said 566,000 customers had lost power — or nearly half of the state — which it said surpassed the outage caused by Hurricane Gloria in 1985.

In New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said that at least 750,000 customers were without electricity on Sunday. That included 451,000 customers who get their power from the Long Island Power Authority, and 114,000 customers of Consolidated Edison. Many of those blackouts were in Queens, where 34,000 customers were without power, and on Staten Island.

The most significant damage appeared to have happened outside of New York City. In some places in New Jersey, roadways were flooded out; in other places, they were blocked by downed power lines or other debris.

In Buena Vista, N.J., in Atlantic County, officials scrambled on Sunday to evacuate three dozen elderly residents from trailer homes that were threatened by sudden flooding. In Millburn, N.J., in Essex County, at least five houses had been struck by falling trees; widespread flooding was reported, and the authorities asked residents to boil their water before drinking it.

Shortly before sunrise, the Millburn Police Department deployed a bucket loader to rescue a motorist who had driven around a barricade, only to get stranded in chest-high floodwaters. “We are not having a great morning,” said Lt. Peter Eakley, the township’s deputy emergency management coordinator.

On Long Island, officials in Nassau County said they responded overnight to several house fires that were caused by candles. Around the county, trees had fallen on several state parkways, and many traffic lights had gone dark.

As the storm neared, Nassau County officials deployed 11 high-axle vehicles provided by the National Guard to the most threatened areas to help residents who refused to evacuate. Mr. Cuomo said additional heavy equipment would be shifted to Long Island on Sunday afternoon to deal with the problems there.

But elsewhere, the storm barely left a trace — or at least nothing that matched the nearly apocalyptic buildup to the storm, which spurred New Yorkers to raid grocery stores for bottled water and D batteries, and prompted city officials to reassure residents that they had learned lessons from Hurricane Katrina.

In Midtown Manhattan, a small army of construction workers boarded up Bloomingdale’s on Saturday, and Times Square was virtually deserted by late Saturday night. But 12 hours later, the sun had begun to poke through the clouds. Tourists returned to the theater district, some not even carrying umbrellas. And a large video screen on the Port Authority Bus Terminal that carried an ominous warning about the storm switched back to flashing advertisements for Tropicana orange juice and Fidelity retirement planning.

 

Joseph Goldstein, Michael M. Grynbaum and Sarah Maslin Nir contributed reporting.

    Irene Sweeps Through New York, NYT, 28.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/nyregion/wind-and-rain-from-hurricane-irene-lash-new-york.html

Seeing Irene as Harbinger of a Change in Climate

August 27, 2011
The New York Times
By JUSTIN GILLIS

The scale of Hurricane Irene, which could cause more extensive damage along the Eastern Seaboard than any storm in decades, is reviving an old question: are hurricanes getting worse because of human-induced climate change?

The short answer from scientists is that they are still trying to figure it out. But many of them do believe that hurricanes will get more intense as the planet warms, and they see large hurricanes like Irene as a harbinger.

While the number of the most intense storms has clearly been rising since the 1970s, researchers have come to differing conclusions about whether that increase can be attributed to human activities.

“On a longer time scale, I think — but not all of my colleagues agree — that the evidence for a connection between Atlantic hurricanes and global climate change is fairly compelling,” said Kerry Emanuel, an expert on the issue at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Among those who disagree is Thomas R. Knutson, a federal researcher at the government’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J. The rising trend of recent decades occurred over too short a period to be sure it was not a consequence of natural variability, he said, and statistics from earlier years are not reliable enough to draw firm conclusions about any long-term trend in hurricane intensities.

“Everyone sort of agrees on this short-term trend, but then the agreement starts to break down when you go back longer-term,” Mr. Knutson said. He argues, essentially, that Dr. Emanuel’s conclusion is premature, though he adds that evidence for a human impact on hurricanes could eventually be established.

While scientists from both camps tend to think hurricanes are likely to intensify, they do not have great confidence in their ability to project the magnitude of that increase.

One climate-change projection, prepared by Mr. Knutson’s group, is that the annual number of the most intense storms will double over the course of the 21st century. But what proportion of those would actually hit land is another murky issue. Scientists say climate change could alter steering currents or other traits of the atmosphere that influence hurricane behavior.

Storms are one of nature’s ways of moving heat around, and high temperatures at the ocean surface tend to feed hurricanes and make them stronger. That appears to be a prime factor in explaining the power of Hurricane Irene, since temperatures in the Atlantic are well above their long-term average for this time of year.

The ocean has been getting warmer for decades, and most climate scientists say it is because greenhouse gases are trapping extra heat. Rising sea-surface temperatures are factored into both Mr. Knutson’s and Dr. Emanuel’s analyses, but they disagree on the effect that warming in remote areas of the tropics will have on Atlantic hurricanes.

Air temperatures are also rising because of greenhouse gases, scientists say. That causes land ice to melt, one of several factors leading to a rise in sea level. That increase, in turn, is making coastlines more vulnerable to damage from the storm surges that can accompany powerful hurricanes.

Overall damage from hurricanes has skyrocketed in recent decades, but most experts agree that is mainly due to excessive development along vulnerable coastlines.

In a statement five years ago, Dr. Emanuel, Mr. Knutson and eight colleagues called this “the main hurricane problem facing the United States,” and they pleaded for a reassessment of policies that subsidize coastal development — a reassessment that has not happened.

“We are optimistic that continued research will eventually resolve much of the current controversy over the effect of climate change on hurricanes,” they wrote at the time. “But the more urgent problem of our lemming-like march to the sea requires immediate and sustained attention.”

    Seeing Irene as Harbinger of a Change in Climate, NYT, 27.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/us/28climate.html

New York Wakes to Hurricane’s Fury

August 27, 2011
The New York Times
By JAMES BARRON

Hurricane Irene made its second landfall, this one early Sunday in southern New Jersey, as the storm continued its relentless push toward New York City.

Though the storm weakened as it moved up the Eastern Seaboard, it continued to funnel storm surge and flood water to the Jersey shore overnight, where the National Hurricane Center said the center of the storm crossed over land near Little Egg Inlet around 5:35 a.m., which is north of Atlantic City. The storm’s maximum sustained winds are estimated to be 75 miles per hour, making it a weak category one hurricane.

The hurricane first came ashore Saturday morning near Cape Lookout, N.C., slipped back over water further north near Virginia and Maryland, before hitting land again in New Jersey.

New York was the next major city in the hurricane’s path and for much of the night, the metropolitian area was pounded with heavy rain and wind, causing power failures and flooding.

While New York had all but closed down in anticipation of what forecasters warned could be violent winds with the force to drive a wall of water over the beaches in the Rockaways and between the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan, as of early Sunday morning, all bridges and tunnels remained open, with the exception of the lower level of the George Washington Bridge because of high winds, said Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Forecasters said the relentless rain from the slow-moving storm made it very dangerous.

“Even though they are saying that the storm is quote-on-quote weakening, hurricane winds are hurricane winds,” John Searing, the deputy commissioner of the Suffolk County Department of Fire, Rescue and Emergency Services, said before daybreak Sunday as he prepared to deal with the damage. “Whether they say its 80 miles or 75 miles an hour, what’s the physical difference in that?”

City officials warned that a big problem could be flooding at high tide, at about 8 a.m. Sunday — before the storm has moved on and the wind has slacked off. The storm is expected to pass through by Sunday afternoon, moving into Southern New England.

“That is when you’ll see the water come over the side,” Mr. Bloomberg cautioned Saturday afternoon.

In its latest forecast, the National Hurricane Center warned that “water levels have been rising rapidly in advance of the center of Irene.” At 5 a.m., the center reported the storm surge of 3.1 feet at Cape May, N.J., 3.8 feet in Sandy Hook, N.J., and 3.9 feet in New York Harbor.

On the Jackie Robinson Parkway, three feet of water blocked all lanes, state and city officials reported. Floodwaters diverted traffic on the Verrazano Bridge and shut the southbound F.D.R. drive at 116th Street. The Union Turnpike ramp on the Grand Central Parkway was shut and on the Cross Bronx Expressway, the rising waters blocked the exit at White Plains Road.

More than 100,000 people in the New York area had lost electricity by early Sunday morning — 150,338 on Long Island, according to the Long Island Power Authority, which shut power to Fire Island, Captree Island, Robert Moses, and Oak Island; 166,000 in New Jersey, according to Public Service Electric and Gas; and about 57,992 in the city and in Westchester, according to Consolidated Edison. Of those more than 8,400 were on Staten Island, according to utility’s Web site, and about 5,000 in Queens and Brooklyn.

Utilities in Connecticut reported about 70,000 customers are without power, according to The Associated Press. The Connecticut Light and Power Company reported nearly 60,000 customers were without power early Sunday, and United Illuminating, which serves the Bridgeport and New Haven area, reported 10,000 customers.

“The number of outages continues to climb as Hurricane Irene moves north,” the New Jersey utility said in a statement on its Web site.

Since Friday, the city had done more than issue warnings. The subway system, one of the city’s trademarks, had shut down in the middle of the day on Saturday, and firefighters and social service workers had spent much of Saturday trying to complete the evacuation of about 370,000 residents in low-lying areas where officials expected flooding to follow the storm. In New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie said that more than a million people had been evacuated, mainly from four counties in the southern part of the state.

The storm, a wide and relentless mass that had had lurched onto the Outer Banks of North Carolina in the early daylight hours of Saturday, heaved clumsily but implacably north, leaving in its wake at least nine deaths. After crawling slowly from North Carolina into Virginia, the storm weaved out to sea and onto a path that forecasters said would take it to Long Island and New York City.

The storm was a spinning kaleidoscope of weather, sometimes pounding windows with rain, sometimes flashing the sky with lightning, sometimes blacking out the horizon with ominous, low-riding clouds. As the hurricane moved up the East Coast, tornado watches had moved right along with it, and that lockstep continued as the storm closed in on the New York area: early Sunday, the National Weather Service announced a tornado watch for the city, along with Westchester, Suffolk, Nassau and Rockland Counties. “It’s actually common when we have these tropical systems,” said Brian Ceimnecki, a meteorologist with the Weather Service.

The Nassau County executive, Edward P. Mangano, said that “thousands” of people were spending the night in county facilities, including Nassau County Community College. He asked people in areas that were in danger to stay with friends or relatives, if possible.

The city opened 78 emergency shelters that could take in 70,000 people. But officials said that only 8,700 had arrived by 11 p.m. on Saturday. The only other statistics available pointed to the difficulty of getting people to abide by the mayor’s mandatory evacuation order in what the city calls Zone A low-lying areas: The mayor had said several hours earlier that 80 percent of the residents in some city-run buildings — but only 50 percent in others — had left.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo ordered 2,000 National Guard troops called up. Mr. Cuomo saw the first of them off from the 69th Regiment Armory, on Lexington Avenue at 26th Street, after saying they would assist the police, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. He also said that some would be sent to Long Island, which could face heavy damage in the storm.

Mr. Christie said 1,500 National Guard troops had been deployed in New Jersey.

The mayor attributed one casualty to the storm, a 66-year-old man who fell from a ladder while trying to board up windows at his house in Jamaica, Queens, early in the day. A Fire Department spokesman said the man, who was not immediately identified, was in serious condition at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center.

The mayor said police rescuers had pulled two kayakers from the water off Staten Island after their boats capsized. “When they were out there in spite of all the warnings, I don’t know,” the mayor said at his late-evening briefing, adding that they had been “kept afloat by lifejackets” they were wearing. He said they had been given summonses.

He also said that going out in the water as the storm approached was a “reckless” move that had “diverted badly-needed N.Y.P.D. resources.”

The city’s beaches were closed, and at midday, as the transit system prepared to shut down, police officers sounded the warning, strolling along subway platforms and telling people that the next train would be the last. The conductor of a No. 4 train that pulled into the Borough Hall station in Brooklyn at 12:14 p.m. had the same message.

“This is it,” he said, smiling. “You’re just in time.”

Soon subway employees were stretching yellow tape across the entrances to stations to keep people from going down the steps and into a subterranean world that was suddenly off limits, but not deserted. Transit workers were charged with executing a huge, mostly underground ballet, moving 200 subway trains away from outdoor yards that could flood if the storm delivered the 6 to 12 inches of rain that forecasts called for. The trains were to be parked in tunnels across the city, making regular runs impossible.

Mr. Bloomberg said the transit system was “unlikely to be back” in service on Monday. He said crews would have to pump water from tunnels if they flooded and restore the signal system before they could move the parked trains out. That would mean “the equipment’s not where you would want it” for the morning rush, he said. “Plan on a commute without mass transit on Monday morning.”

Mr. Bloomberg also said electricity could be knocked out in Lower Manhattan if Consolidated Edison shut off the power to pre-empt the problems that flooding could cause for its cables. (A Con Ed spokesman said later that the company, while prepared, had no immediate plans for that kind of shutdown.)

Other officials, including Mr. Christie, repeated what they had said on Friday: Evacuate.

Mr. Christie said that 90 percent to 98 percent of residents in parts of four counties in South Jersey had left — Cape May, Atlantic, Ocean and Monmouth. About 1,200 people who were evacuated from Atlantic County on Friday had spent the night without cots at the Sun Center arena in Trenton, where many people ended up sleeping in seats, he said. They were taken to the Rutgers University campus in New Brunswick, which Mr. Christie visited after a news conference.

In New York, Mr. Bloomberg said the evacuation and the transit shutdown, actions that he said had not been ordered before, had gone as well as could be expected. Officials went door to door in high-rise housing projects and firefighters drove school buses to help get homebound residents out of low-lying neighborhoods.

But, for all the evacuation, some people had to stay put. The city did not evacuate inmates on Rikers Island because, a city spokesman explained, “It’s not in Zone A.”

The storm caused major disruptions long before the first bands of rain swirled by. The three major airports in the New York region stopped clearing flights for landing at noon. Officials said they would remain open for planes that wanted to take off, but most flights had been canceled on Friday, according to Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority.

Amtrak canceled most trains after 11 a.m., although there was some confusion at Pennsylvania Station. A northbound train that left at 10:15 a.m. was, the conductor said, the last one going in that direction and was sold out.

The storm’s potential path reminded weather historians of the devastating hurricane of 1938. That storm devastated the Connecticut coast and rearranged Long Island’s geography, carving an inlet through what had been a thin but solid stretch of land on the way to the Hamptons.

On Saturday, New York awoke to an odd, greenish-gray sky, overheated air that felt heavy with moisture and only a light, summery breeze. It was not just another sleepy Saturday in August — too many people were on alert too early. In Battery Park City, long lines of taxis waited to take evacuees who carried their possessions to the curb. Uptown, some were dismayed when they found that stores like the new Fairway on East 86th Street had closed.

“It fits into the whole alarmist nature of the city,” said Mike Ortenau, 44, who lives in the neighborhood.

Reporting for the hurricane coverage was contributed by Al Baker, Michael Barbaro, Matt Flegenheimer, Christine Haughney, Thomas Kaplan, Andrew O’Reilly, Anna M. Phillips, Jennifer Preston, Melena Ryzik, Liz Robbins, Noah Rosenberg, Fernanda Santos and Tim Stelloh.

    New York Wakes to Hurricane’s Fury, NYT, 27.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/nyregion/new-yorkers-warned-of-possible-electrical-shutdown.html

Hurricane Irene Hits, Raising Fears of Storm Surge

August 27, 2011
The New York Times
By KIM SEVERSON, DAN BARRY and CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

This article was reported by Kim Severson, Dan Barry and Campbell Robertson and was written by Mr. Barry.

WILMINGTON, N.C. — After several anxious days of dire forecasts that forced much of the East Coast into unprecedented levels of lockdown, a weakened but still ferocious Hurricane Irene made landfall on Saturday morning along the southern coast of North Carolina.

It announced itself with howling winds, hammering rains and a gradual, destructive move northward toward the battened-down cities of Washington, New York and Boston.

Shortly after daybreak in Nags Head, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, surging waves ate away at the dunes, while winds peeled the siding from vacated beach houses — as if to challenge the National Hurricane Center’s early morning decision to downgrade Irene to a Category 1 hurricane, whose maximum sustained winds would reach only — only — 90 miles an hour, with occasional stronger gusts.

“Some weakening is expected after Irene reaches the coast of North Carolina,” an update by the hurricane center at 8 a.m. said. “But Irene is forecast to remain a hurricane as it moves near or over the mid-Atlantic states and New England.”

The massive storm was expected to push out to sea again later Saturday and then head north toward New York, where the specter of an electrical shutdown was added to the list of potential consequences. The region prepared to face powerhouse winds that could drive a wall of water over the beaches of the Rockaway Peninsula and between the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan.

The city scrambled to complete evacuation of about 300,000 residents in low-lying areas where officials expected flooding to follow the storm. Officials also ordered the entire public transportation system — subways, buses and commuter rail lines — to shut down Saturday for what they said was the first time in history. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said mass transit was “unlikely to be back” in service on Monday, but electricity in Lower Manhattan could remain out.

“This is just the beginning,” the mayor said at a morning news conference in Coney Island, Brooklyn, where he and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly inspected boats that emergency workers could use in neighborhoods they could not travel through any other way. “This is a life-threatening storm.”

Officials said the central concern at the moment was the storm surge of such a large, slow-moving hurricane — the deluge to be dumped from the sky or thrown onto shore by violent waves moving like snapped blankets. “I would very much take this seriously,” Brian McNoldy, a research associate of the Department of Atmospheric Research at Colorado State University, said. “Don’t be concerned if it’s a Category 1, 2, 3, 4. If you’re on the coast, you don’t want to be there. Wind isn’t your problem.”

Mazie Swindell Smith, the county manager in Hyde County, N.C., which is expecting storm surge from the inland bay that abuts it, agreed. “The storm is moving more slowly than expected,” Ms. Smith said. “That’s not good as far as rainfall, because it will just sit here and dump rain.”

With the first hurricane to make landfall in the continental United State since 2008, government officials issued evacuation orders for about 2.3 million people, according to The Associated Press — from 100,000 people in Delaware to 1 million people in New Jersey, where the governor, Chris Christie, told everyone to “Get the hell off the beach.” And in New York City, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took the historic step of ordering the evacuation of several waterfront areas, including Manhattan’s Battery Park City.

On Saturday, both Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York were stressing the seriousness of the situation, telling residents in the evacuation zones to get out for their own safety. On Friday, city officials issued what they called an unprecedented order for the evacuation of about 370,000 residents of low-lying areas, while on Long Island, county and town officials ordered a mandatory evacuation of about 400,000 people.

Irene was projected to hug the coast throughout Saturday and make landfall again around midday on Sunday on Long Island, just east of New York City. That track gives the city a bit of a break, because the east side of a hurricane is more powerful than the west, though there might be storm surges of four to eight feet.

“They’re going to be on the west side, but they’re still going to get strong winds and storm surge,” John Guiney, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said.

Hurricane watches were posted and states of emergency declared for Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New England, New Jersey, New York and Virginia. Amtrak canceled train service for parts of the Northeast Corridor for the weekend, and airlines began canceling flights, urging travelers to stay home. Broadway shows shut down. Major League Baseball games were postponed.

Most airlines have grounded flights this weekend, in the New York City area and beyond, and Newark Liberty International Airport, Kennedy International Airport and La Guardia Airport were set to close at noon on Saturday in anticipation of the severe weather. Michael Trevino, a spokesman for the merged United Airlines and Continental Airlines, said 2,300 flights would be canceled. A JetBlue spokesman said the airline had grounded 1,252 flights in the New York area and beyond starting Saturday.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, still seeking to redeem itself from its spotty performance after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, had 18 disaster-response teams in place along the East Coast, with stockpiles of food, water and mobile communications equipment ready to go. The Coast Guard: more than 20 rescue helicopters and reconnaissance planes ready to take off. The Defense Department: 18 more helicopters set aside for response. The National Guard: about 101,000 members available to respond. The American Red Cross: more than 200 emergency response vehicles and tens of thousands of ready-to-eat meals in areas due to be hit by the storm.

FEMA has also moved onto the Internet and social media in a big way, with Craig Fugate, the FEMA director, posting updates on Twitter several times an hour about the agency’s response and the status of the storm.

“The category of the storm does not tell the whole story,” Mr. Fugate wrote Saturday morning on his Twitter feed, after Hurricane Irene was downgraded to a Category 1 storm. “Some of our Nation’s worst flooding came from tropical storms.”

President Obama ended his vacation early by flying back Friday night from Martha’s Vineyard to be in Washington for the storm. In advance of Irene’s arrival, he had issued federal emergency declarations for New Hampshire, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Virginia, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Jersey, clearing the way for federal support to respond to the hurricane.

The toll being exacted on North Carolina — even before the hurricane’s eye wall reached land just east of Cape Lookout — augured what was likely in store for other states along the Atlantic Seaboard, with some 50 million people possibly affected. Downed trees. Damaged municipal buildings. The flooding of the communities of Wrightsville Beach and Carolina Beach. The partial collapse of a pier in Atlantic Beach. The suspension of a search for a teenage male who jumped off a boat ramp and disappeared into the churning waters outside Wilmington; officials said the dangerous weather would delay a search until sometime Saturday afternoon for the young man.

North Carolina officials said another man was killed near Nashville, N.C., when a tree branch fell on him while he was walking in his yard. And a surfer was killed in Virginia beach, Va., while testing the massive waves in advance of the storm’s arrival.

By Saturday morning, some 200,000 customers had lost power in North Carolina, according to Progress Energy, with the utility expecting more blackouts as the hurricane moved inland. Power was out for about half of the 106,000 residents in the port city of Wilmington. After a night of fierce winds that gusted to nearly 80 miles an hour, people emerged from their homes to downed trees, darkened traffic lights — and a collective sense of having been spared the worst of the storm’s wrath.

Judy and Greg Harvey, out-of-towners from Philadelphia, were surprised by how the locals had taken the storm in stride. The Harveys had driven in from Philadelphia to care for his mother, who was in a hospice that had shut down at 6 p.m. Friday and was keeping visitors out of the facility until noon Saturday. This made for a maddeningly long morning for the couple — “She could be gone, actually,” said Judy Harvey — but a morning allowing for observation of the area’s post-storm reaction.

“No one seems to be too upset at all,” Ms. Harvey said. “They just shut everything down and pull the metal grates across the windows and wait.”

Meanwhile, at the New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington, about 100 children had spent the night in sleeping bags and inflatable beds, arriving with staff members who had to work and parents from the area who wanted a safe place to wait the storm out. A band of doctors in scrubs entertained them with soft rock.

Twelve babies were born during the night. According to a hospital nurse, the parents of two of them were said to be considering the middle name Irene.

In Curritack County, all bridges connecting the mainland to the Outer Banks had been shut down, save for last-minute and emergency traffic, and the main highways were eerily quiet.

On Friday, several business owners along the main thoroughfare had bravely insisted that they would remain open through the storm. But by Saturday morning it appeared that, having woken up to powerful gusts of car-rattling winds and driving rain, these merchants had reconsidered. For example, the spray-painted word “Open” adorned the plywood covering a local 7-Eleven, but the door was locked, and a small sign listed numbers to call in case of emergency.

These were the first on-the-ground manifestations of what most people had experienced only through the multi-colored radar maps that appeared on television, beside meteorologists wearing studied looks of concern. These maps showed a cone-shaped mass of reds, yellows and greens inching north from the Bahamas.

Perhaps the most breathtaking, even humbling, images came from some 200 miles up, via the International Space Station. Photographs taken by astronauts showed what looked like a massive swirl of mashed potatoes straddling the edge of the green plate of the United States.

“If you were to just put it on a map of the United States, it would go from South Florida to Pennsylvania, and from North Carolina to eastern Oklahoma,” Mr. McNoldy said. “It’s big, yeah.”

 

Kim Severson reported from Wilmington, N.C., Dan Barry from New York and Campbell Robertson from Coinjock, N.C. Brian Stelter contributed reporting from Nags Head, N.C., Shaila Dewan from New York and Eric Lipton from Washington.

    Hurricane Irene Hits, Raising Fears of Storm Surge, NYT, 27.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/us/28hurricane-irene.html

Wind and Rain Start to Lash Carolina Coast

August 27, 2011
The New York Times
By BRIAN STELTER, KIM SEVERSON and CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

NAGS HEAD, N.C. — The eye wall of Hurricane Irene, now a category one storm, is within a hours of making landfall in eastern North Carolina, the first stop in the mainland United States for a storm that is expected to scrape up the East Coast and bring flooding rains to a dozen states.

Howling winds and sheets of rains accompanied the storm overnight, signaling the approach of its core. A hurricane-force wind gust was reported at Hatteras on the Outer Banks. A predawn update by the National Hurricane Center indicated that the hurricane would make landfall after daybreak Saturday somewhere between Morehead City, to the west, and Cape Hatteras, to the east. After reaching land, it is expected to force a storm surge into the bays and sounds, inundating low-lying areas.

The storm is then forecast to continue churning north-north-east toward New York, where mandatory evacuations were issued in parts of the city.

On Saturday morning the hurricane center downgraded Irene from a category two to a category one, indicating that further weakening had occurred overnight. Irene’s maximum sustained winds are now said to be 90 miles per hour, with higher gusts. But forecasters said it remained a very powerful storm.

Still, some slight sighs of relief were evident early Saturday morning at local emergency management offices in North Carolina, which had prepared for a brush with a much stronger and more unpredictable category three or four storm.

But signs still abounded of the storm’s potency — spotty power outages, downed trees on roads near the coast, and damage to municipal buildings were all reported overnight, and rescuers in New Hanover County had to end a search for a possible drowning victim in the Cape Fear River because the weather had made it too dangerous to continue.

“The storm is moving more slowly than expected,” said Mazie Swindell Smith, the county manager in Hyde County, which is expecting storm surge from the inland bay that it abuts. “That’s not good as far as rainfall, because it’ll just sit here and dump rain.”

With an estimated 55 million people in the path of a storm the size of California, the East Coast’s major cities were preparing for the worst. Hurricane watches were posted and states of emergency declared for North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and New England. Amtrak canceled train service for the weekend, and airlines began canceling flights, urging travelers to stay home.

For the first time in its history, New York City planned to shut down its entire mass transit and subway system — the world’s largest — beginning at noon on Saturday. At least 370,000 people in the city were ordered evacuated from low-lying areas. New Jersey Transit was set to suspend service then as well.

Organizations from the Pentagon to the American Red Cross were positioning mobile units and preparing shelters with food and water. The Defense Department amassed 18 helicopters to be ready with lifesaving equipment and put them on the Wasp, an aircraft carrier that was moved out to sea from Norfolk, Va., to get out of Irene’s way.

“All of us have to take this storm seriously,” said President Obama, who cut short his family vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., to head back to Washington on Friday. “All indications,” he said, “point to this being a historic hurricane.”

The town manager of Wrightsville Beach, Robert Simpson, said the ocean started pouring over the dunes on Friday and flooded the small beachside community.

With a storm this big and this wet — the National Hurricane Center in Miami said its tropical-storm-force winds stretched 290 miles — when it hits land, the power of the winds might not be as important as the amount of rainfall.

Such a huge dump of sustained rain along with high winds will most likely uproot trees from soggy ground and cause wide-scale loss of power.

Flooding is the biggest concern, said Steve Pfaff, a meteorologist with the weather service’s office in Wilmington. As much as 9 to 10 inches of rain will fall over the easternmost areas here, overwhelming drainage systems.

Most airlines have grounded flights this weekend, in the New York City area and beyond, and Newark Liberty International Airport, Kennedy International Airport and La Guardia Airport were set to close at noon on Saturday in anticipation of the severe weather.

Michael Trevino, a spokesman for the merged United Airlines and Continental Airlines, said 2,300 flights would be canceled. “Our efforts have been focused at doing an orderly pre-cancellation so that customers can avoid having to go to airport only to find out their flight has been canceled,” Mr. Trevino said.

A JetBlue spokesman said it had grounded 1,252 flights in the New York area and beyond starting Saturday.

Not only were flights being grounded, but rebooking could be tricky. On Friday, Continental’s customer service line was overloaded and a recorded message told customers to try back later.

Federal officials warned that whatever the force of the winds, this storm was powerful and its effects would be felt well inland, as far as West Virginia, western Pennsylvania, western New York and interior New England.

“This is not just a coastal event,” said Bill Read, director of the National Hurricane Center. He said he was highly confident of the storm’s track, meaning that it would be a rare hurricane that travels right along the densely populated Interstate 95 corridor.

In Washington, officials postponed the dedication of the new memorial to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which had been scheduled for Sunday. Mayor Vincent C. Gray declared a state of emergency and said that starting Saturday, the city would distribute five sandbags per household to those preparing their homes to withstand flooding. Pepco, a major power provider for the area, warned of extensive blackouts and said it had engaged additional crews, including one from Ohio. The Metro system was expected to continue running, officials said.

With the worst of the storm expected to start in earnest in the small hours of the night, many here in Wilmington hunkered down and waited for daylight, hoping against hope that the storm would continue to turn slightly eastward.

Even veterans of the deadly hurricanes Fran and Floyd, which hit North Carolina in the 1990s, were worried.

“It’s a night you want to end,” said Tommy Early, who spent much of Friday watching lines of people here fill gas cans and fuel tanks.

That the storm is hitting the North Carolina coast in the middle of the night and might last much of the day is especially hard to bear.

“You sit through 8 or 10 hours of 80 mile an hour winds and it gets on your nerves,” he said. “It beats on everything for so long, and you can’t see the damage it’s doing.”

But the potential power of the coming storm did not frighten everyone.

Along the Caratoke Highway, the road out of the Outer Banks to the north, things were unusually quiet along a road usually crawling with vacationers. There were signs that some local residents had actually heeded the mandatory evacuation order for Currituck County.

But not everyone.

“I’m going to be here at 6 in the morning,” said Sybil O’Neal, who was stacking cases of Bud Light at her roadside convenience store, Currituck Sports II.

Like so many others, Ms. O’Neal, 53, was staying put. She was not hubristic about it, acknowledging that she was taking Hurricane Irene more seriously than any others in the past. But there is only so much that worrying could accomplish. “I’m going to tell you something my mother told me,” she said. “This is God’s way of cleaning things.”

Right after the last sandbag was put in place at the front door of the Cavalier Surf Shop in Nags Head, the store manager, Jerry Slayton, said the weekend would be a “hurri-cation.”

“We go home, play games and wait the storm out,” Jerry’s father, Ken Slayton, said.

It did not seem to matter that officials in Dare County warned on Friday afternoon that “those who do not evacuate should be prepared to sustain themselves for at least 72 hours and could experience hazards and a major disruption of services for an extended period of time.”

Others were taking things more seriously, and thinking about what mattered the most.

Daniel and Shari Sacchi secured their home near Carolina Beach on Friday before heading to her father’s house deeper inland. They packed what mattered: three days’ worth of clothes for their two sons, important documents and photo albums.

Oh, and three of Mr. Sacchi’s surfboards.

“As soon the storm passes, I’m getting in the water,” he said.

 

Brian Stelter reported from Nags Head, N.C., Kim Severson from Wilmington, and Campbell Robertson from Harbinger, N.C. Reporting was contributed by Andrew Dunn and Brian Freskos from Wilmington, Katharine Q. Seelye from New York and Eric Lipton from Washington.

    Wind and Rain Start to Lash Carolina Coast, NYT, 27.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/us/28hurricane-irene.html

With Storm Near, 370,000 in City Get Evacuation Order

August 26, 2011
The New York Times
By JAMES BARRON

New York City officials issued what they called an unprecedented order on Friday for the evacuation of about 370,000 residents of low-lying areas at the city’s edges — from the expensive apartments in Battery Park City to the roller coaster in Coney Island to the dilapidated boardwalk in the Rockaways — warning that Hurricane Irene was such a threat that people living there simply had to get out.

Officials made what they said was another first-of-its-kind decision, announcing plans to shut down the city’s entire transit system Saturday — all 468 subway stations and 840 miles of tracks, and the rest of the nation’s largest mass transit network: thousands of buses in the city, as well as the buses and commuter trains that reach from Midtown Manhattan to the suburbs.

Underscoring what Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and other officials said was the seriousness of the threat, President Obama approved a request from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York to declare a federal emergency in the state while the hurricane was still several hundred miles away, churning toward the Carolinas. The city was part of a hurricane warning that took in hundreds of miles of coastline, from Sandy Hook, N.J., to Sagamore Beach, Mass.

The hurricane, 290 miles of fury dancing angrily across the Atlantic Ocean toward the coast, was actually advancing more slowly than most late-summer storms, the National Weather Service said. It said that by doing a minuet instead of a faster step, the storm would prolong the pounding it delivered to coastal areas when it reached them.

A Weather Service forecast Friday night said rain associated with the storm would begin in Manhattan after 11 a.m. Saturday with conditions worsening into Sunday. The storm, which is moving toward North Carolina, weakened just slightly overnight, but remained a dangerous storm.

“You only have to look at the weather maps to understand how big this storm is and how unique it is,” Mr. Bloomberg said at a news conference on Friday at City Hall, “and it’s heading basically for us.”

The increasingly ominous announcements from officials — and the wall-to-wall coverage — sent New Yorkers hurrying to buy staples like canned food and candles. “Is this the apocalypse supply line?” a man asked as he stood in a line that stretched outside a hardware store on First Avenue, waiting to buy batteries.

Shoppers in places found that the shelves had been cleaned out. Some grocery stores remained open overnight — shoppers with Whole Foods bags could be seen up and down Broadway, near Columbus Circle. In shore towns in New Jersey and on Long Island, vacationers waited in lines at gas stations and watched as bulldozers built berms on low-lying beach roads.

In Point Lookout on Long Island, as in Point Pleasant Beach in New Jersey, homeowners covered windows with plywood, and boaters struggled to get their vessels away from docks. There were lines at the ramps at marinas as boats were pulled from the water and hitched on trailers, one at a time.

In the city — from high rises in Manhattan to smaller buildings in Queens and Brooklyn — apartment dwellers with balconies and terraces hauled in their patio furniture and their potted plants. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s New York field office, with more than 1,000 agents in two buildings in Lower Manhattan, told employees by e-mail that they should put files in drawers for the weekend rather than leave them lying on their desks, apparently out of concern that paperwork would go flying if the storm broke the windows.

The announcement about the transit shutdown and the evacuation of what the city called Zone A low-lying areas prompted a cascade of cancellations for Saturday and Sunday: Broadway shows, the Mets’ games against the Atlanta Braves at Citi Field, the performances by the Dave Matthews Band on Governors Island and the outdoor showing of opera movies at Lincoln Center, among others. Even the New York Aquarium and the Bronx, Central Park and Prospect Park Zoos closed for the weekend.

Starting at noon Saturday, all three major airports in the New York region will be closed to arriving flights. They will remain open for departures, pending changes in the weather, but most of those scheduled departures have already been canceled, according to Steve Coleman, a Port Authority spokesman.

Some Atlantic City casinos made plans to stop rolling the dice and turn off the slot machines by 8 p.m. Friday. The naval submarine base in Groton, Conn., sent four submarines out to ride out the storm deep in the Atlantic Ocean.

And Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said that all lanes of a 28-mile stretch of Route 72 in Ocean County would go in only one direction — westward — beginning at 6 p.m. on Friday to help speed the trip away from Long Beach Island, which is connected to the mainland by only a single bridge. He said he was also considering reversing traffic on part of the Garden State Parkway to help get drivers away from the shore.

But some beachgoers were staying. Some were surfers who wanted to catch a last wave. Mr. Christie, for his part, sounded annoyed that they had not followed his instructions when he said at a late-afternoon briefing that he had seen television coverage of “people sitting on the beach in Asbury Park.”

“Get the hell off the beach in Asbury Park and get out — you’re done,” he said. “You’ve maximized your tan. Get off the beach. Get in your cars, and get out of those areas. You know, it amazes me that you have responsible elected officials from North Carolina north through Massachusetts, along with National Weather Service folks, telling you this is going to be an enormous storm and something for New Jersey that we haven’t seen in over 60 years. Do not waste any more time working on your tan.”

Mayor Bloomberg said no one would be fined for violating the city’s evacuation orders. “Nobody’s going to go to jail,” he said, but he warned that the storm’s consequences could be fatal.

The number of people covered by the evacuation order was provided late Friday by Christopher Gilbride, a spokesman for the city’s Office of Emergency Management. An estimate of 250,000 had earlier been cited by the city.

Officials said the subway shutdown was prompted mainly by wind estimates that suggested the hurricane could rock subway cars in places where they run above ground. The commuter rail lines that serve Long Island, Westchester County and Connecticut will also be shut down, as will New Jersey Transit operations. New Jersey Transit will suspend train service at noon Saturday and will stop bus service six hours later.

Mr. Cuomo said tolls on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and on two other bridges in low-lying Brooklyn leading to the Rockaways would be suspended to help speed the evacuation. He also said that a half-dozen bridges — including the George Washington, the Robert F. Kennedy (formerly the Triborough), the Throgs Neck and the Whitestone — would be closed if winds reached 60 miles an hour for more than a short time.

Officials decided to go ahead with the Zone A evacuations, which they had first mentioned as a possibility on Thursday, because, Mr. Bloomberg said, “Irene is now bearing down on us at a faster speed than it was.” As he stepped up the plans on Friday, the city was already evacuating hospitals and nursing homes in low-lying areas. State officials continued arrangements for coordinating emergency services and restoring electricity if the storm does the kind of damage many fear.

Mr. Bloomberg said that 91 evacuation centers and shelters opened on Friday for people who could not stay in their homes. The Nassau County executive, Edward P. Mangano, said 20 shelters would be open by the time the storm hit.

Mr. Bloomberg had said Thursday that the city was ordering nursing homes and hospitals in those areas to evacuate residents and patients beginning at 8 a.m. Friday unless they received special permission from state and city health officials.

The city ordered construction work halted until 7 a.m. Monday. With the worst of the storm expected over the weekend, when relatively few construction crews would normally be on the job, the Buildings Department said Friday that its inspectors were checking construction sites to see that equipment had been secured. It said it would check over the weekend that builders complied with the no-work order.

In Connecticut, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said officials were preparing for “tremendous tree damage” and the loss of electricity across the entire state.

Consolidated Edison warned that it would have to cut off power to some customers if underground pipes and cables became submerged in water. To be ready for repairs, Con Ed said it was bringing in 800 additional workers from as far away as Texas.

In some Zone A areas, residents seemed unsure what to do: Evacuate or not? But some had their backpacks on and their suitcases-on-wheels rolling.

“I’m getting out of here,” said Mila Downes, 25, of England, who was visiting her sister. “I expected some excitement in New York City, but not an earthquake and a hurricane on the same week.”

    With Storm Near, 370,000 in City Get Evacuation Order, NYT, 26.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/27/nyregion/new-york-city-begins-evacuations-before-hurricane.html

New York Region Prepares for Hurricane Irene

August 25, 2011
The New York Times
By JAMES BARRON

With Hurricane Irene threatening a full-force hit, New York City on Thursday ordered the evacuation of nursing homes and senior centers in low-lying areas and made plans for the possible shutdown of the entire transit system.

The governors of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut declared states of emergency, and in one county in South Jersey, a mandatory evacuation was ordered.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said the city was ready with “evacuation contingencies” for low-lying places like Coney Island in Brooklyn, Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan and parts of Staten Island and the Rockaways in Queens — areas that are home to 250,000 people.

Mr. Bloomberg said the city was ordering nursing homes in those areas to evacuate residents beginning at 8 a.m. on Friday unless they receive special permission from state and city health officials, among them the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas A. Farley, who, the mayor noted, was chairman of the community health sciences department at Tulane University when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005.

At a City Hall briefing, the mayor said the five hospitals in the low-lying areas were reducing their caseloads and canceling elective surgeries on Friday to be ready for emergencies over the weekend. One, Coney Island Hospital, is to begin moving patients to vacant beds in other parts of the city on Friday, he said.

Mr. Bloomberg said he would decide by Saturday morning whether to order a general evacuation of the low-lying areas.

He also said he was revoking permits for events in the city on Sunday and in the low-lying areas on Saturday. The Sunday cancellations apparently included a concert on Governors Island by the Dave Matthews Band. A statement on the band’s Web site said people should check for updates on Friday.

The mayor said 300 street fairs over the weekend “would have to be curtailed” to keep streets clear for hurricane-related transportation — ambulances carrying patients to nursing homes or hospitals on higher ground, buses and city-owned trucks moving to where they would be ready for duty once the hurricane had swept by.

Mr. Bloomberg said people should stay out of parks because high winds could bring down trees. “And incidentally,” he said, “it’s a good idea to stay out of your own backyard if you have trees there.”

The mayor cautioned that forecasts were not always accurate and that the hurricane, a sprawling storm still far away, could become weaker.

“We’re talking about something that is a long time away in meteorological terms,” he said, “so what we have to do is assume the worst, prepare for that, and hope for the best.”

That seemed to be the official mantra from South Jersey to coastal Connecticut on Thursday. In East Hampton, N.Y., crews removed sidewalk benches so they would not blow away if Hurricane Irene howled through. In Long Beach, N.Y., maintenance crews used a different kind of defensive maneuver, building up berms that they hoped would block the waves. They also handed out sandbags.

In Southampton, N.Y., flashlights and batteries were sold out at one hardware store. There was a run on duct tape and plastic sheeting that could be placed over picture windows and sliding-glass doors, and there were lines at supermarkets and gasoline stations as people stocked up on provisions— or filled up for a getaway.

Boaters hunted for safe harbors. Steve Novack, the vice commodore of the Sag Harbor Yacht Club on Long Island, said all boats longer than 40 feet were to be removed from the dock. Next door at the Breakwater Yacht Club, where Mr. Novack is the administrator, the plan was to move all the vessels used to teach sailing onto land, but not until Friday.

In New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie told shore-area residents hoping to sit out the storm that “it is not the smart thing to do.” He said people who were thinking about a weekend along the coast should think again.

“Do not go,” he said.

Mr. Christie also urged people on barrier islands to leave. “Right now, I’m asking people to do this voluntarily,” he said. “I am actively considering a mandatory evacuation, but I’m not there yet.”

Officials elsewhere echoed his concern about areas closest to the Atlantic Ocean. On Long Island, the Islip town supervisor, Phil Nolan, called for a voluntary evacuation of Fire Island “to avoid a rush of people as the storm nears Long Island.”

Cape May County, N.J., went a step further, ordering everyone out. Evacuations of its barrier islands began on Thursday afternoon. People on the mainland were told to leave beginning at 8 a.m. on Friday, said Lenora Boninfante, the county communications director.

In the northern part of the state, the Jets-Giants game at MetLife Stadium was changed to 2 p.m. Saturday from 7 p.m. because of concerns about the weather.

Back in the city, Mr. Bloomberg, along with Joseph F. Bruno, the commissioner of the city’s Office of Emergency Management, instructed residents to take preliminary steps: stock up on basic supplies, identify an alternative place to sleep in the event of an evacuation and prepare a “go bag” of essentials to allow for a rapid departure, if necessary.

As for a transit shutdown, Jay H. Walder, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said his agency could not guarantee the safety of passengers if winds remained above 39 miles per hour for a sustained period. He said it could take up to eight hours to shut down the system, meaning that transit planners may have to make a judgment call on Saturday, well before the full force of the storm is felt.

And because it takes the agency several hours to restart trains and buses, a shutdown could last through early Monday, if not longer. “It’s hard to predict when it will come back,” Mr. Walder said, “because I can’t really predict for you exactly what will happen in the storm.”

In the event of a shutdown, Mr. Walder said, the transportation authority will aid in evacuation efforts.

Mr. Bloomberg warned New Yorkers to heed any evacuation call as quickly as possible, in case mass-transit options were unavailable.

Certain low-lying areas of the subway system are particularly susceptible to flooding, in Lower Manhattan and on exposed tracks in parts of Brooklyn. Overhead catenary cables, which provide power to commuter rail lines in the suburbs north and east of the city, can be knocked down by winds, and stations on elevated routes could be dangerous for the trains and for passengers waiting to catch them.

Still, against the drumbeat of plans and announcements from officials on Thursday, some all but disregarded the hurricane talk. Dave Merklin of Freeport, N.Y., said he was doing “practically nothing, because I’ve been through so many of these storms.”

“I’ve lived in this house for 40 years,” he said. “I wait until the storm is gone, and then I clean up the mess. I don’t do much in the way of preparation except make sure the doors are closed.”

Matt Flegenheimer, Michael M. Grynbaum and Stacey Stowe contributed reporting.

    New York Region Prepares for Hurricane Irene, NYT, 25.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/26/nyregion/new-york-region-prepares-for-hurricane-irene.html

Out West, Eye Rolls and Jeers for East

August 23, 2011
The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY

SAN FRANCISCO — Here in California, August has been just another average month in terms of earthquakes, with scores of tremors everywhere, from near the northern city of Eureka (which had an adorable little shake on Saturday) to around the Mexican border (which jittered with an even cuter temblor on Monday afternoon).

And so while the 5.8-magnitude quake on the East Coast was a seriously scary affair for those affected, it also elicited more than a few snarky remarks from those West Coasters for whom tremors are an unsettling, but steady, fact of life.

“Pah!” wrote one reader on The San Francisco Chronicle’s Web site. “We eat 5.9 for breakfast.” (The preliminary magnitude was later downgraded to 5.8, presumably an even lighter meal.)

The Twittersphere also was alight with seismic schadenfreude up and down the Pacific Rim. “Hey east coasters,” read one tweet from BigEeezy09, “remember when it snowed a lot here in Seattle and you called us babies?”

California emergency officials were slightly more mature. Tina Walker, chief of public information for the California Emergency Management Agency, said her agency often used such high-profile quakes to spread their message of “knowing your risk,” including studying evacuation routes and having enough supplies.

“After an incident, everyone is all concerned,” she said. “And then we all fall into a sense of complacency.”

Susan Garcia, a spokeswoman for the United States Geological Survey’s Earthquake Science Center, in Menlo Park, Calif., said her office started fielding calls from spooked East Coasters just moments after the quake, which had its epicenter about 70 miles from the survey’s national headquarters in Reston, Va.

“They just wanted to find out if that was an earthquake,” said Ms. Garcia, who said the calls came from New York, New Jersey and other East Coast states. “They just went to the Web site, saw a number and started dialing.”

And while such events are more common in Menlo Park, Calif., than in Menlo Park, N.J., Ms. Garcia said she hoped the lesson reverberated on both coasts.

“The message is the same,” she said. “Be prepared.”

 

Malia Wollan contributed reporting.

    Out West, Eye Rolls and Jeers for East, NYT, 23.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/24/us/24calif.html

Above All Else, Eastern Quake Rattles Nerves

August 23, 2011
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

Of all the things there are to worry about, earthquakes are fairly low on the list for those on the East Coast. So it was startling, just as the lunch hour was ending Tuesday and workers in a broad area of North America were settling back into their cubicles, when floors began to shake and chairs rocked.

In Clemson, S.C., water sloshed in glasses. In Washington, chandeliers swayed in the Capitol. And in the tiny town of Mineral, Va., china cabinets exploded.

An unusual earthquake centered near Mineral startled millions of people from Maine to Georgia on Tuesday. In the end there were few reports of serious damage, with more rattling of nerves than of property.

But the tremors disrupted life in some of the nation’s biggest population centers. Tens of thousands of people were evacuated from office buildings. Cellphone service was strangled as the quake led to disruptions in air traffic, halted trains, jammed roadways and gave some on the West Coast an opportunity to poke fun at Easterners who seemed panicked and uncertain of how to respond. In earthquake-prone areas, people usually are instructed to stay inside to avoid falling debris, but in places where earthquakes are unfamiliar — and in a post-Sept. 11 environment — few argued with evacuation commands.

The United States Geological Survey said the quake struck at 1:51 p.m. It preliminarily measured 5.8 and lasted 20 to 30 seconds. Survey officials reported two small aftershocks, of magnitude 2.8 and 2.2, within 90 minutes of the original jolt. Seismologists, suggesting little cause for further alarm, said the initial quake erupted from an old fault, which, unlike the San Andreas fault in California, normally produces much weaker results.

This quake was notable for its incongruity: it was one of the most powerful to hit the East Coast in decades, and yet it caused little damage. Reports of tremors came from as far north as Sudbury, Ontario, where government offices were closed, and as far south as Alabama.

Thousands of people in Midtown Manhattan were evacuated from their offices and found themselves suddenly sprung on a sunny summer afternoon. Farther downtown, police officers ordered the evacuation of City Hall, sending Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his staff scurrying out of the building.

But for all the disruptions and the fleeing of buildings, the quake was, for most people, a curious interruption before life quickly returned to normal. For some it provoked little more than amusement. “Felt a litle wobble here is Astoria, but none of my Scotch fell off the shelf,” a man who identified himself as William Schroeder posted on nytimes.com.

Others were more shaken. “I ran outdoors and found my neighbor calling a friend in Virginia who also felt the profound quake,” Bill Parks of Hummelstown, Pa., said in an e-mail. “This quake was like none I ever experienced in the East in my life and I am 76 years old.”

In Washington, the quake led to quick evacuations of the White House, the Capitol and monuments across the Mall. Some airplanes were left in a temporary hold pattern, and some were diverted to other airports. Amtrak stopped its trains. The Federal Emergency Management Agency asked the public to refrain from talking on cellphones and to use e-mail and text messages instead to relieve the congestion. The epicenter in Mineral is about 84 miles southwest of Washington, and a few miles from a nuclear power plant. Dominion Virginia Power, which owns the plant, said that its units tripped off line automatically as planned and that no damage to the plant had been reported.

Perhaps the most trauma occurred in Mineral itself. The quake stopped everything for hours. Schools closed. Coffee shops shut down. At the Food Lion, on the outskirts, managers shooed reporters away but not before one employee said: “The whole floor was going up and down. It was crazy in there.”

Ben Pirolli, 68, a co-owner of Main Street Plumbing and Electrical, said he was working in the bathroom when the quake hit.

“I was mopping the floor and the next thing you know, everything is falling in on me,” Mr. Pirolli said. “I thought the world was coming to an end.”

Geologists said that the region experiences frequent earthquakes but that they were usually so small that they were hardly noticed. This one was 3.7 miles deep, bigger than is typical, and produced a rumbling that grabbed the attention of millions of people hundreds of miles from the epicenter.

W. Craig Fugate, the FEMA administrator, said in an interview that the agency had spoken with emergency coordinators in states across the Atlantic Seaboard, and that so far there were no reports of injuries or major damage and no requests for federal help.

The lack of major damage was attributable to the geology of the East Coast, Mr. Fugate said. The hard rock transmits the energy of the earthquake longer distances, he said, even if the quake does not cause devastation.

“What we are getting is case by case — a building here, a building there,” he said. “Most of the major things like roads and bridges seem to be intact and O.K.”

One place that reported damage was the landmark National Cathedral in Washington. Several pinnacles in one of the towers cracked or broke off, a security official at the cathedral said. The cathedral’s central tower also appeared to be damaged, and the building has been closed to the public until further notice.

The National Park Service also indefinitely closed the Washington Monument after engineers found cracks near the top of it, The Associated Press reported.

At the Smithsonian Institution castle, plaster in offices cracked and fell.

But over all, the biggest problem in Washington may have been the giant traffic jams that formed as tens of thousands of workers left the city after the tremor. Tourists, with nowhere else to go, packed the streets. Debris had fallen from a few buildings, city officials said.

Rumbles were reported to The New York Times from places as far-flung as South Carolina, Pittsburgh and Martha’s Vineyard, where President Obama was on vacation and unaffected. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was in Japan, coincidentally checking out damage from that nation’s 9.0-magnitude earthquake in March.

Tuesday’s quake was also felt through a large part of eastern Canada, including Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that it extended as far north as the mining city of Sudbury.

Arthur Lerner-Lam, head of the Lamont-Doherty Division of Seismology at Columbia University, said the earthquake occurred in a part of central Virginia that is known as an area of geologically old faults, created several hundred million years ago during the formation of the Appalachian Mountains.

That area has frequent small earthquakes; the largest previously recorded there was a magnitude 4.8 in 1875. The last big quake in the East, with a magnitude of 5.8, was in 1944 in Massena, N.Y.

“We do expect earthquakes to occur here,” Dr. Lerner-Lam said. “Not as frequently as in California, but this is not a surprise.”

He described the central Virginia earthquakes as “kind of a randomized reactivation of these geologically old structures,” as opposed to the tremors that occur along an active fault like the San Andreas in California.

In Richmond, Va., Lance Fisk, 46, a tattoo artist, was an hour into applying a tattoo when the building started to shake.

“At first I thought it was a truck bouncing the building, but then it went on and on,” Mr. Fisk said, adding that chairs were rolling around the floor. “The guy in the chair was getting nervous. I told him, ‘Sorry about that crooked line.’ I was just messing with him.”

 

Reporting was contributed by Elisabeth Bumiller, Eric Lipton and Jeff Zeleny from Washington; Henry Fountain, Elizabeth A. Harris, Michael Barbaro, Serge F. Kovaleski and Catrin Einhorn from New York; Abby Goodnough from Brattleboro, Vt.; Michael D. Shear from Mineral, Va.; Lisa A. Bacon from Richmond, Va.; and Kim Severson from Atlanta.

    Above All Else, Eastern Quake Rattles Nerves, NYT, 23.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/24/us/24quake.html

Year Packed With Weather Disasters

Has Brought Economic Toll to Match

August 19, 2011
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

The weather this year has not only been lousy, it has been as destructive in terms of economic loss as any on record.

Normally, three or four weather disasters a year in the United States will cause at least $1 billion in damages each. This year, there were nine such disasters. They included the huge snow dump in late January and early February on the Midwest and Northeast, the rash of tornadoes this spring across the Midwest and the more recent flooding of the Missouri and Souris Rivers. The disasters were responsible for at least 589 deaths, including 160 in May when tornadoes ripped through Joplin, Mo.

These nine billion-dollar disasters tie the record set in 2008, according to a report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The total damage done by all storms, tornadoes, flooding and heat waves so far this year adds up to about $35 billion. The National Climatic Data Center says it estimates the costs in terms of dollars and lives that would not have been incurred had the event not taken place. Insured and uninsured losses are included in damage estimates and are likely to change as assessments become more complete. With four months to go in 2011, this year’s total amount of damage is likely to rise. Forecasters are already predicting further meteorological mayhem as hurricane season intensifies.

Over the last 30 years, there have been about 108 natural disasters that have caused $1 billion in damages each, according to NOAA. The total damage from all natural disasters since 1980 is about $750 billion.

“The increasing impacts of natural disasters, as seen this year, are a stark reminder of the lives and livelihoods at risk,” Jack Hayes, director of NOAA’s National Weather Service, said in a statement.

Part of the problem is that more people are living in high-risk areas, NOAA said. This makes them “increasingly vulnerable to severe weather events, such as tornado outbreaks, intense heat waves, flooding, active hurricane seasons, and solar storms that threaten electrical and communication systems,” the statement said.

NOAA, along with other private and public agencies, is taking several steps to try to make the nation more “weather ready,” including making more precise forecasts, improving the ability to alert local authorities about risks and developing specialized mobile-ready emergency response teams.

The National Weather Service is also planning several test projects involving emergency response and ecological forecasting. Test projects are to start soon at strategic locations in the mid-Atlantic region, on the Gulf Coast and elsewhere in the South. They include improvements to a system in Charleston, W.Va., for alerts three hours ahead of severe weather instead of the current half-hour.

The nine weather events that have caused at least $1 billion in damages so far this year are:

¶Central/East Groundhog Day blizzard (Jan. 29-Feb. 3). This storm was tied to 36 deaths. The losses exceeded $2 billion.

¶Midwest/Southeast tornadoes (April 4-5). Nine people were killed. Total losses were more than $2 billion.

¶Southeast/Midwest tornadoes (April 8-11). Resulted in more than $2 billion in losses.

¶Midwest/Southeast tornadoes (April 14-16). Caused 38 deaths. Total losses are more than $2 billion.

¶Southeast/Ohio Valley/Midwest tornadoes (April 25-30). Caused 327 deaths. Losses total more than $9 billion.

¶Midwest/Southeast tornadoes (May 22-27). Caused 177 deaths. Total losses are more than $7 billion.

¶Southern Plains/Southwest drought, heat waves, wildfires. Direct losses are more than $5 billion.

¶Mississippi River flooding. At least two deaths and losses ranging from $2 billion to $4 billion.

¶Upper Midwest flooding. Losses estimated at $2 billion.

    Year Packed With Weather Disasters Has Brought Economic Toll to Match, NYT, 19.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/20/us/20weather.html

With Floodwaters Ebbing, Long Haul of Sandbags Awaits

August 4, 2011
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM

MANDAN, N.D. — Homes alongside the Missouri River here have been guarded for months by millions of sandbags, assembled in an urgent and cooperative effort last spring by the National Guard, local governments, residents and other volunteers. And now, as the floodwaters slowly recede, comes the unglamorous and expensive aftermath of cleaning up after another disaster, but here with a back-breaking twist.

“At least I don’t have to feel guilty about not going to the gym,” said Rod Friesz, 58, as he hoisted dozens of 40-pound sacks of sand out of his pickup and into the town’s newly designated two-acre sandbag dump.

For Mr. Friesz, a railroad engineer, this was his 20th wearying truckload, with about 30 more to go.

“When it was crisis time, people came in from all over the state to help fill the sandbags,” he said, recalling the supercharged spirit in May when officials warned that record floods were on their way. “But now you hate to ask them to come back and help take it all down,” he said.

In his case, the waters never actually reached the barrier, leaving him with a bittersweet appreciation of his luck. “We were hoping it wouldn’t be necessary,” he said, “and then all this work turned out to be in vain, and now we’re feeling sorry for ourselves.”

Not all the volunteer spirit has disappeared. As Mr. Friesz toiled, a truck pulling a trailerload of sandbags arrived at the dump. Micah Mathison, 18, had enlisted two friends to help him clear bags from his grandparents’ house, and Elmer Schwarz, a retired man who saw their plight, lent his trailer and labor.

Mr. Schwarz estimated that they had removed 3,000 bags from this single house so far, with 4,000 more remaining.

This area of the river, around Bismarck, the capital, is not used to heavy floods, and when the warning came, officials had to scramble to find bags. “We ordered 15 million of them, from all over the country,” said Jeff Heintz, director of public works service operations for Bismarck, across the river from Mandan.

City and county governments in this area expect to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars paying contractors to dispose of all the bags and dirt and as a last step, Mr. Heintz said, to sweep up all the loose sand that will surely spill in the streets.

    With Floodwaters Ebbing, Long Haul of Sandbags Awaits, NYT, 4.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/05/us/05sand.html

Utility Shelves Ambitious Plan to Limit Carbon

July 13, 2011
The New York Times
By MATTHEW L. WALD and JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON — A major American utility is shelving the nation’s most prominent effort to capture carbon dioxide from an existing coal-burning power plant, dealing a severe blow to efforts to rein in emissions responsible for global warming.

American Electric Power has decided to table plans to build a full-scale carbon-capture plant at Mountaineer, a 31-year-old coal-fired plant in West Virginia, where the company has successfully captured and buried carbon dioxide in a small pilot program for two years.

The technology had been heralded as the quickest solution to help the coal industry weather tougher federal limits on greenhouse gas emissions. But Congressional inaction on climate change diminished the incentives that had spurred A.E.P. to take the leap.

Company officials, who plan an announcement on Thursday, said they were dropping the larger, $668 million project because they did not believe state regulators would let the company recover its costs by charging customers, thus leaving it no compelling regulatory or business reason to continue the program.

The federal Department of Energy had pledged to cover half the cost, but A.E.P. said it was unwilling to spend the remainder in a political climate that had changed strikingly since it began the project.

“We are placing the project on hold until economic and policy conditions create a viable path forward,” said Michael G. Morris, chairman of American Electric Power, based in Columbus, Ohio, one of the largest operators of coal-fired generating plants in the United States. He said his company and other coal-burning utilities were caught in a quandary: they need to develop carbon-capture technology to meet any future greenhouse-gas emissions rules, but they cannot afford the projects without federal standards that will require them to act and will persuade the states to allow reimbursement.

The decision could set back for years efforts to learn how best to capture carbon emissions that result from burning fossil fuels and then inject them deep under-ground to keep them from accumulating in the atmosphere and heating the planet. The procedure, formally known as carbon capture and sequestration or C.C.S., offers the best current technology for taming greenhouse-gas emissions from traditional fuels burned at existing plants.

The abandonment of the A.E.P. plant comes in response to a string of reversals for federal climate change policy. President Obama spent his first year in office pushing a goal of an 80 percent reduction in climate-altering emissions by 2050, a target that could be met only with widespread adoption of carbon-capture and storage at coal plants around the country. The administration’s stimulus package provided billions of dollars to speed development of the technology; the climate change bill passed by the House in 2009 would have provided tens of billions of dollars in additional incentives for what industry calls “clean coal.”

But all such efforts collapsed last year with the Republican takeover of the House and the continuing softness in the economy, which killed any appetite for far-reaching environmental measures.

A senior Obama administration official said that the A.E.P. decision was a direct result of the political stalemate.

“This is what happens when you don’t get a climate bill,” the official said, insisting on anonymity to discuss a corporate decision that had not yet been publicly announced.

At the Energy Department, Charles McConnell, the acting assistant secretary of energy for fossil energy, said no carbon legislation was near and unless there was a place to sell the carbon dioxide, utilities would have great difficulties in justifying the expense. “You could have the debate all day long about whether people are enlightened about whether carbon dioxide should be sequestered,” he said. But, he added, “it’s not a situation that is going to promote investment.”

His department has pledged more than $3 billion to other industrial plants to encourage the capture of carbon dioxide for sale to oil drillers, who use it to more easily get crude out of wells.

The West Virginia project was one of the most advanced and successful in the world. “While the coal industry’s commitment and ability to develop this technology on a large scale was always uncertain, the continued pollution from old-style, coal-fired power plants will certainly be damaging to the environment without the installation of carbon capture and other pollution control updates,” said Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, co-author of the House climate bill. “A.E.P., the American coal industry and the Republicans who blocked help for this technology have done our economy and energy workers a disservice by likely ceding the development of carbon-capture technology to countries like China.”

A.E.P., which serves five million customers in 11 states, operated a pilot-scale capture plant at its Mountaineer generating station in New Haven, W.Va., on the Ohio River, from 2009 until May of this year. But the company plans to announce on Thursday that it will complete early engineering studies and then will suspend the project indefinitely.

Public service commissions of both West Virginia and Virginia turned down the company’s request for full reimbursement for the pilot plant. West Virginia said earlier this year that the cost should have been shared among all the states where A.E.P. does business; Virginia hinted last July that it should have been paid for by all utilities around the United States, since a successful project would benefit all of them.

Five years ago, when global warming ranked higher on the national political agenda, the consensus was that this decade would be one of research and demonstration in new technologies. A comprehensive 2007 study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded that global coal use was inevitable and that the ensuing few years should be used to quickly find ways to burn the cheap, abundant fuel cleanly. But with the demise of the Mountaineer project, the United States, the largest historic emitter of global warming gases, now appears to have made little progress solving the problem.

Robert H. Socolow, an engineering professor at Princeton and the co-director of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative there, said he was encouraged that some chemical factories and other industries were working on carbon capture without government incentives.

Mr. Socolow, the co-author of an influential 2004 paper that identified carbon capture as one of the critical technologies needed to slow global warming, said that there was a trap ahead. “Lull yourself into believing that there is no climate problem, or that there is lots of time to fix it, and the policy driver dissolves,” he said in an e-mail. He added that for companies like A.E.P., “business wants to be ahead of the curve, but not a lap ahead.”

    Utility Shelves Ambitious Plan to Limit Carbon, NYT, 13.7.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/business/energy-environment/utility-shelves-plan-to-capture-carbon-dioxide.html

The Great Corn Con

June 24, 2011
The New York Times
By STEVEN RATTNER

FEELING the need for an example of government policy run amok? Look no further than the box of cornflakes on your kitchen shelf. In its myriad corn-related interventions, Washington has managed simultaneously to help drive up food prices and add tens of billions of dollars to the deficit, while arguably increasing energy use and harming the environment.

Even in a crowd of rising food and commodity costs, corn stands out, its price having doubled in less than a year to a record $7.87 per bushel in early June. Booming global demand has overtaken stagnant supply.

But rather than ameliorate the problem, the government has exacerbated it, reducing food supply to a hungry world. Thanks to Washington, 4 of every 10 ears of corn grown in America — the source of 40 percent of the world’s production — are shunted into ethanol, a gasoline substitute that imperceptibly nicks our energy problem. Larded onto that are $11 billion a year of government subsidies to the corn complex.

Corn is hardly some minor agricultural product for breakfast cereal. It’s America’s largest crop, dwarfing wheat and soybeans. A small portion of production goes for human consumption; about 40 percent feeds cows, pigs, turkeys and chickens. Diverting 40 percent to ethanol has disagreeable consequences for food. In just a year, the price of bacon has soared by 24 percent.

To some, the contours of the ethanol story may be familiar. Almost since Iowa — our biggest corn-producing state — grabbed the lead position in the presidential sweepstakes four decades ago, support for the biofuel has been nearly a prerequisite for politicians seeking the presidency.

Those hopefuls have seen no need for a foolish consistency. John McCain and John Kerry were against ethanol subsidies, then as candidates were for them. Having lost the presidency, Mr. McCain is now against them again. Al Gore was for ethanol before he was against it. This time, one hopeful is experimenting with counter-programming: as governor of corn-producing Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty pushed for subsidies before he embraced a “straight talk” strategy.

Eating up just a tenth of the corn crop as recently as 2004, ethanol was turbocharged by legislation in 2005 and 2007 that set specific requirements for its use in gasoline, mandating steep rises from year to year. Yet another government bureaucracy was born to enforce the quotas.

To ease the pain, Congress threw in a 45-cents-a-gallon subsidy ($6 billion a year); to add another layer of protection, it imposed a tariff on imported ethanol of 54 cents a gallon. That successfully shut off cheap imports, produced more efficiently from sugar cane, principally from Brazil.

Here is perhaps the most incredible part: Because of the subsidy, ethanol became cheaper than gasoline, and so we sent 397 million gallons of ethanol overseas last year. America is simultaneously importing costly foreign oil and subsidizing the export of its equivalent.

That’s not all. Ethanol packs less punch than gasoline and uses considerable energy in its production process. All told, each gallon of gasoline that is displaced costs the Treasury $1.78 in subsidies and lost tax revenue.

Nor does ethanol live up to its environmental promises. The Congressional Budget Office found that reducing carbon dioxide emissions by using ethanol costs at least $750 per ton of carbon dioxide, wildly more than other methods. What is more, making corn ethanol consumes vast quantities of water and increases smog.

Then there’s energy efficiency. Studies reach widely varying conclusions on that issue. While some show a small saving in fossil fuels, others calculate that ethanol consumes more energy than it produces.

Corn growers and other farmers have long exercised outsize influence, thanks in part to the Senate’s structural tilt toward rural states. The ethanol giveaway represents a 21st-century add-on to a dizzying patchwork of programs for farmers. Under one, corn growers receive “direct payments” — $1.75 billion in 2010 — whether they grow corn or not. Washington also subsidizes crop insurance, at a cost of another $1.75 billion last year. That may have made sense when low corn prices made farming a marginal business, but no longer.

At long last, the enormity of the nation’s budget deficit has added momentum to the forces of reason. While only a symbolic move, the Senate recently voted 73 to 27 to end ethanol subsidies. That alone helped push corn prices down to $7 per bushel. Incredibly, the White House criticized the action — could key farm states have been on the minds of the president’s advisers?

Even farm advocates like former Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman agree that the situation must be fixed. Reports filtering out of the budget talks currently under way suggest that agriculture subsidies sit prominently on the chopping block. The time is ripe.

 

Steven Rattner was formerly counselor to the secretary of the Treasury and lead auto adviser. He has spent nearly 30 years on Wall Street as an investor and investment banker and is a contributing writer to Op-Ed.

    The Great Corn Con, NYT, 24.6.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/25/opinion/25Rattner.html

Concern at Nebraska Reactors as Floodwaters Rise

June 26, 2011
The New York Times
By MATTHEW L. WALD

BROWNVILLE, Neb. — Like inhabitants of a city preparing for a siege, operators of the nuclear reactor here have spent days working to defend it against the swollen Missouri River at its doorstep. On Sunday, eight days after the river rose high enough to require the operators to declare a low-level emergency, a swarm of plant officials got to show off their preparations to the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The reactor, Cooper Station, is one of two nuclear plants on the Missouri River that are threatened by flooding. The second reactor, Fort Calhoun, 85 miles north, came under increased pressure for a brief period on Sunday. Before dawn, a piece of heavy equipment nicked an eight-foot-high, 2,000-foot-long temporary rubber berm, and it deflated. Water also began to approach electrical equipment, which prompted operators to cut themselves off from the grid and start up diesel generators. (It returned to grid power later Sunday.) Both nuclear plants appeared prepared to weather the flooding, their operators and federal government regulators said.

Fort Calhoun was shut down in April for refueling and stayed closed because of predictions of flooding. Plant officials say the facility is designed to remain secure at a river level of up to 1,014 feet above sea level. The water level stabilized at 1,006.5 feet on Sunday, according to the Omaha Public Power District, the operator of the Fort Calhoun plant.

Cooper Station, which is owned by the Nebraska Public Power District, is still running. Managers brought in two tankerloads of extra diesel fuel and have stocked up on all the other consumable materials the plant uses, including hydrogen and carbon dioxide, in case of problems bringing in materials by truck.

At Cooper on Sunday, plant officials led Gregory B. Jaczko, the N.R.C. chairman, on a tour, past thousands of feet of new berms and buildings where every doorway was barricaded with four-foot-high water barriers that are intended to survive even if an earthquake hits during a flood. Mr. Jaczko also toured the building that holds the diesel generators, which would supply vital electricity if the water knocked out the power grid.

Getting into that space required some doing. First, Mr. Jaczko climbed over a makeshift metal staircase to get over the flood barrier at the entrance to the building. Then, past a security guard armed with a military-style rifle, he stepped through a doorway into a small hallway blocked with a four-foot-high flood barrier. Visitors climbed three steps up an A-frame ladder, and then took a long step onto a temporary wooden platform, stepped over the four-foot-high barrier onto another platform, and then down a ladder on the other side.

“And if the water gets in here, what would be the result?” Mr. Jaczko asked.

“We’ve got a sump pump over here,” said Dan Goodman, the assistant operations manager, leading him around to the other side of the giant diesel generator, which is the size of a tractor-trailer.

“One of the things we learned at the Fukushima event is the importance of dealing with natural hazards,” Mr. Jaczko said at a news conference. “Fundamentally, this is a plant that is operating safely.”

Twice an hour, 48 times a day, a technician with a tape measure gauges the water level at the water intake building, and other operators check the level recorded by the Army Corps of Engineers four miles upstream, in Brownville. Plant workers walk the levees near the river and add sandbags where they find soft spots or leaks.

Flooding is always a potential risk for nuclear reactors, but the threat has a higher profile lately because of the tsunami that hit the Fukushima Daiichi reactors in northeastern Japan in March.

Nuclear reactors require electric power to pump cooling water even when they are shut down, and at Fukushima, the tsunami destroyed the connection to the electric grid, flooded the emergency diesel generators, washed away the extra tanks of diesel fuel and damaged the switches that would have controlled the flow of electricity from the emergency generators to pumps, valves and other vital equipment.

    Concern at Nebraska Reactors as Floodwaters Rise, NYT, 26.6.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/27/science/earth/27nuke.html

Even Boom States Get the Blues

June 26, 2011
The New York Times
By A. G. SULZBERGER

MINOT, N.D. — For a very long time this state was derided as an empty expanse of windswept nothingness where snow stormed in and residents stormed out in predictable abundance. Then, as the rest of the country struggled the last few years, North Dakota started winning consistent praise as an oasis of economic prosperity. The snow kept coming, but suddenly so did new residents.

Among them was Lisa Tankersley, whose husband was one of the thousands to land a well-paying job in the oil fields that are helping to drive the economic boom. She arrived at her new home here last Monday afternoon, weary from the two-day drive from East Texas. Fifteen minutes later, not having unloaded a single box, she was ordered by a police officer to evacuate: floodwaters were on the way.

“I was freaking out,” said Ms. Tankersley, who immediately threatened to drive back to Texas but consented to stay indefinitely at the apartment of friends who had also migrated north. “Here I am, hundreds of miles from home, with my two children and all my worldly belongings, and I have no place to live.”

In many ways this has been a year of triumph for North Dakota, home to the nation’s lowest unemployment rate and fastest growing economy. But with historic flooding from one side of the state to the other, this is also the year when North Dakota reminded its residents that even in good times the state is — in the words of Andy Peterson, head of the state Chamber of Commerce — “not for the faint of heart.”

First the Red River flooded to near record heights for the third consecutive year, forcing weeks of desperate work to protect Fargo, the state’s largest city. Later, the unprecedented rise of the Missouri River forced Bismarck, the state’s capital and second largest city, into a flood fight expected to last the whole summer. And over the last week, the Souris River broke the century-old high mark not by inches but by feet, swamping more than a quarter of Minot.

Together, these and other waterways — fed by record rain and snow — harassed large and small communities, forcing evacuations, destroying crops and causing tens of millions of dollars in damage to infrastructure. But even as officials acknowledged that the extreme weather would cause hardships for the many affected residents and perhaps chase away some of the newcomers, they insisted that it would not knock the galloping economy off its stride.

“Will this flooding set us back some? Yes it will,” said Senator John Hoeven, a North Dakota Republican who grew up in Minot and focused on promoting economic development during his three terms as governor before winning election to the Senate last year. “But our fundamentals are there. We’ll recover, we’ll help people recover, and we’ll continue to grow.”

Tucked into a narrow valley and surrounded by plains, Minot, the fourth largest city in the state, offers a case study in this roller coaster year. The city, serving as a regional hub for the northwest corner of the state, has experienced frenetic growth over the last decade, driven largely by development of the nearby Bakken shale field, which has made the state one of the top producers of oil. Then, last week, it went under water.

The Souris River, known as the Mouse after its French name, stopped rising on Sunday. The crest topped the 130-year-old record by almost four feet, lower than predictions. But the river, which flooded many homes to their roofs and displaced an estimated 12,000 people, is expected to subside slowly, so residents must wait to see what damage lies beneath the muddy surface.

“Before the flood, the major challenge Minot faced was how do you handle the growth?” said John Coughlin, a developer who stopped work on several projects to help build protective levees.

“The flood has distracted the forward momentum,” he continued. “The recovery is going to cost money, and it’s going to cost time.”

Over the last decade, the population of North Dakota grew to 673,000, just short of the high mark achieved eight decades earlier. And while high commodity prices in an economy driven by energy and agriculture has led the growth, Gov. Jack Dalrymple said a diversified economy had been fostered by businesses-friendly laws, regulations and taxes passed during years of economic malaise and population loss.

“We came to it out of necessity,” said Mr. Dalrymple, who signed large tax cuts this year enabled by a billion-dollar budget surplus. “Those steps really paid off big time.”

In Minot, the population surged nearly 12 percent to 41,000 over the last decade, transforming a city that locals said had always seemed locked in time.

Leaders found themselves dealing with problems that would be considered blessings in most of the country. Instead of workers struggling to find jobs, jobs struggled to find workers — several businesses have had to close for lack of employees. Community leaders trolled places like Michigan, Ohio and Texas trying to fill the city’s many available jobs, currently estimated at 1,400.

And with home vacancy rates of less than 1 percent, the real estate market is also ignoring national trends. Property values have doubled, houses typically take just a few hours to sell, and local developers are building as much as they can as fast as they can, setting records for construction permits. Housing is so difficult to find that every hotel in town has been booked, almost solid, for years.

There are also less desirable consequences like traffic jams and rising crime. And seemingly everything now requires a wait in line. At least one restaurant has even started taking reservations.

“I was just getting used to the slow pace of a small town,” said Mary Pignet, a store clerk who arrived 15 years ago when she was assigned to the local Air Force base and then stayed to raise her three children. “And then all of the sudden it started to feel like a big city.”

Ms. Pignet’s house is now underwater, along with almost 5,000 others, according to city estimates. The lack of housing has already emerged as a serious obstacle for the people who were displaced. “As much as we want to say it’s not going to do much, this is really tough because it’s going to be a huge blow to the economy,” Mayor Curt Zimbelman said.

But North Dakotans pride themselves on being a hardy lot, even in the face of a solid soaking. Grand Forks suffered a devastating flood in 1997, and Fargo was seriously hit by the Red River three years ago. Both cities have grown since then. And as the state shifts toward recovery from the recent floods, the economic success ensures that there will be plenty of money available to rebuild.

“Fact is, people in North Dakota are really resilient,” said Maj. Gen. David A. Sprynczynatyk, who commands the State National Guard. “They have lived through hard times, economic or disaster.”

That group now includes Jason Barber, who has spent his whole life working oil fields. He had fought to stay in Texas until the bitter end, long after his company stopped making money, long after he had to sell most of what he had to cover his debts. But when he arrived out of necessity in North Dakota, he was awestruck at the sight of so many drilling rigs and excited about the prospect of all that oil underfoot.

“After all these floodwaters subside, I imagine a lot of new arrivals are going to leave,” he said in a warm-weather drawl as a tornado siren wailed outside his apartment. “Not me. As good as we have it up here, I’m not going home anytime soon.”

    Even Boom States Get the Blues, NYT, 26.6.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/27/us/27flood.html

Renewable Energy vs. Fossil Fuels

June 13, 2011
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “The Gas Is Greener,” by Robert Bryce (Op-Ed, June 8), claiming that vast amounts of natural resources are used to produce renewable energy:

Environmental organizations, including America’s largest, the Sierra Club, have been engaging communities across the country to build support for renewable energy projects because the toll that fossil fuels take on our health, economy and climate has been devastating. Especially as technology evolves, it would be a horrible mistake to ignore the tremendous job-creating potential that exists in developing clean energy like wind and solar.

All development projects require careful planning to ensure good stewardship of our environment. Fortunately, there are ample opportunities to plan renewable energy projects “smart from the start” by carefully locating them in areas that avoid sensitive wildlife habitats or important natural and cultural resources.

Seizing the opportunities presented to our country as we make a necessary transition to clean energy will require both cooperation and American ingenuity. Presenting false choices about renewable energy will only distract us from the important task that lies ahead.

VANESSA PIERCE
Deputy Director, Sierra Club’s
Beyond Coal Campaign
Washington, June 8, 2011


•

To the Editor:

Robert Bryce’s caricature of renewable energy grossly exaggerates the resource demands of wind power while minimizing those of gas-based electricity.

Farmers and ranchers around the country till fields and graze cattle amid the wind turbines on their land. Each turbine takes up a quarter of an acre. If California used today’s 3-megawatt turbines, it would need an area about the size of Central Park to site 8,500 megawatts of power — hardly equal to 70 Manhattans. And it would create enough power for about 2.5 million California households.

Mr. Bryce also compares the steel demands of wind- and gas-based power. He does not mention gas-based electricity’s share of the 800,000-plus miles of steel pipes used for gas drilling and transporting gas to market.

Wind turbines recover their full life-cycle energy inputs within the first seven months of operation. Gas plants are perpetual energy sinks. It’s not hard to see which is the cleaner energy resource.

PHILIP WARBURG
Newton, Mass., June 8, 2011

The writer is the author of the forthcoming book “Harvest the Wind.”


•

To the Editor:

Robert Bryce vastly overstated the amount of land needed for solar and wind power. Solar panels can be placed on rooftops — not requiring new land. More than 100,000 homeowners and businesses around the country have already installed rooftop panels to generate electricity.

Meanwhile, wind turbines, roads and support structures occupy only 2 to 5 percent of a wind farm. The area between the turbines can be used for other purposes, such as farming or ranching.

According to a peer-reviewed Union of Concerned Scientists study I co-wrote, wind and solar could meet 27 percent of America’s electricity needs by 2030 covering 36,600 square miles, including the area between the turbines. That’s only 1 percent of all land area in the United States.

Unlike natural gas, coal or nuclear plants, wind and solar plants don’t produce air or water pollution, global warming emissions or waste products, and use much less water.

STEVE CLEMMER
Director of Energy Research
Union of Concerned Scientists
Yarmouth, Me., June 8, 2011


•

To the Editor:

Robert Bryce is correct to highlight E. F. Schumacher’s dictum that “small is beautiful.” We do not need vast new tracts of land to install solar and wind power. We have acres and acres of buildings that are perfectly situated for rooftop collection systems and “small wind” generation.

Not only does this avoid the disturbance of new land but it also generates the power in the same location as it is consumed, avoiding the need for long-distance transmission, with its inherent power loss and ecological footprint issues. Our society likes to think big, but the solution lies in small.

GUY GEIER
Cranbury, N.J., June 8, 2011


•

To the Editor:

Robert Bryce makes some important points but overlooks one of the central benefits of renewable energy sources: they are renewable.

Mr. Bryce’s cost-benefit analysis does not take into account the cost of nonrenewable fuels themselves. For example, natural gas turbines might be cheap to build, but running them requires a constant supply of natural gas, which is costly, and will only become more costly as it becomes more scarce. On the other hand, operating solar panels requires only sunlight.

Regardless, the cost issue is moot. If we rely on nonrenewable energy, we will eventually run out of fuel, at which point we will be forced to construct solar and wind installations anyway. In the end, we will only have postponed the inevitable for a little while, incurring vast economic and environmental costs in the process.

BRIAN SEEVE
Boston, June 8, 2011

    Renewable Energy vs. Fossil Fuels, NYT, 13.6.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/opinion/l14energy.html

Feeding a Growing World Population

June 12, 2011
The New York Times


To the Editor:

“A Warming Planet Struggles to Feed Itself” (“Temperature Rising” series, front page, June 5) noted that the challenge to food security presented by water shortages and climate change will be made worse by a projected three billion increase in world population to 10 billion by 2100.

The United Nations has also made projections ranging between 5.5 billion and 14 billion. Many women and men in developing countries want smaller families, but lagging implementation of family planning and related reproductive health services suggests that limiting population growth to three billion by the end of the century will be difficult.

The father of the Green Revolution, Norman E. Borlaug, warned on the occasion of his receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize, “There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort.” Improvements in agricultural technology are needed, but attaining food security also depends on strengthening voluntary family planning services.

J. JOSEPH SPEIDEL
San Francisco, June 5, 2011

The writer is a professor in the department of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at the University of California, San Francisco.

To the Editor:

Your article concludes by asserting that a doubling of food supply will be necessary to feed our growing global population. Another option, which would require no scientific breakthroughs, is more efficient food use.

As Richard King of Oxfam International noted in The Guardian recently, “Today’s major problems in the food system are not fundamentally about supply keeping up with demand, but more about how food gets from fields and on to forks.”

One-third of the global cereal harvest and more than 90 percent of soy are fed to farmed animals. Of course, the vast majority of these calories are simply burned off by the animals. So yes, doubling supply is one option to the impending food shortage, but another option would be a global focus on shifting diets away from the vast inefficiencies of animal consumption to the healthier and more sustainable consumption of crops.

Every reader can choose, right now, to be a part of the solution to global hunger, by adopting a vegetarian diet.

BRUCE G. FRIEDRICH
Baltimore, June 5, 2011

To the Editor:

Your article is not a moment too soon in sounding the alarm over how rising temperatures affect agriculture. But there is a widespread misconception that more food is needed to feed a growing world population, when what we really need is to eat differently.

While the use of grain to produce meat was mentioned in the article, it bears a closer look.

Today, half of the world’s corn and 90 percent of all the soy grown are used to feed livestock — a serious misdistribution that diverts billions of pounds of grain away from people who could be eating it. In addition, the millions of acres of precious arable land used to grow animal feed leave less land — far less — available to grow the wide variety of vegetables and fruits needed for a healthy diet.

In China, the average amount of pork eaten per person rose 45 percent in just the dozen years ending in 2005. In the United States, the amount of chicken consumed rose from an average of 21 pounds to 86 pounds a year per person between 1950 and 2005, while the amount of beef eaten by the average American rose from 44 pounds to 65 pounds a year.

Put simply, more people who can afford to are simply eating too much grain-intensive meat, severely shrinking the land available to produce plant-based food for human consumption.

REGINA WEISS
Brooklyn, June 6, 2011

To the Editor:

Intensive agriculture, monoculture, feedlots, use of chemicals, genetically modified foods, antibiotics and hormones may have produced a lot of food for the short term, but in the long term we will have escalating rates of obesity and devastating effects on the planet.

We will only continue to accelerate climate change if we continue to farm this way. Sustainable farming using diverse, small family farms will reduce much stress on the planet and keep us healthier as well.

RACHEL BERGER
Brooklyn, June 5, 2011

    Feeding a Growing World Population, NYT, 12.6.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/13/opinion/l13warming.html

The Gas Is Greener

June 7, 2011
The New York Times
By ROBERT BRYCE

IN April, Gov. Jerry Brown made headlines by signing into law an ambitious mandate that requires California to obtain one-third of its electricity from renewable energy sources like sunlight and wind by 2020. Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia now have renewable electricity mandates. President Obama and several members of Congress have supported one at the federal level. Polls routinely show strong support among voters for renewable energy projects — as long as they don’t cost too much.

But there’s the rub: while energy sources like sunlight and wind are free and naturally replenished, converting them into large quantities of electricity requires vast amounts of natural resources — most notably, land. Even a cursory look at these costs exposes the deep contradictions in the renewable energy movement.

Consider California’s new mandate. The state’s peak electricity demand is about 52,000 megawatts. Meeting the one-third target will require (if you oversimplify a bit) about 17,000 megawatts of renewable energy capacity. Let’s assume that California will get half of that capacity from solar and half from wind. Most of its large-scale solar electricity production will presumably come from projects like the $2 billion Ivanpah solar plant, which is now under construction in the Mojave Desert in southern California. When completed, Ivanpah, which aims to provide 370 megawatts of solar generation capacity, will cover 3,600 acres — about five and a half square miles.

The math is simple: to have 8,500 megawatts of solar capacity, California would need at least 23 projects the size of Ivanpah, covering about 129 square miles, an area more than five times as large as Manhattan. While there’s plenty of land in the Mojave, projects as big as Ivanpah raise environmental concerns. In April, the federal Bureau of Land Management ordered a halt to construction on part of the facility out of concern for the desert tortoise, which is protected under the Endangered Species Act.

Wind energy projects require even more land. The Roscoe wind farm in Texas, which has a capacity of 781.5 megawatts, covers about 154 square miles. Again, the math is straightforward: to have 8,500 megawatts of wind generation capacity, California would likely need to set aside an area equivalent to more than 70 Manhattans. Apart from the impact on the environment itself, few if any people could live on the land because of the noise (and the infrasound, which is inaudible to most humans but potentially harmful) produced by the turbines.

Industrial solar and wind projects also require long swaths of land for power lines. Last year, despite opposition from environmental groups, San Diego Gas & Electric started construction on the 117-mile Sunrise Powerlink, which will carry electricity from solar, wind and geothermal projects located in Imperial County, Calif., to customers in and around San Diego. In January, environmental groups filed a federal lawsuit to prevent the $1.9 billion line from cutting through a nearby national forest.

Not all environmentalists ignore renewable energy’s land requirements. The Nature Conservancy has coined the term “energy sprawl” to describe it. Unfortunately, energy sprawl is only one of the ways that renewable energy makes heavy demands on natural resources.

Consider the massive quantities of steel required for wind projects. The production and transportation of steel are both expensive and energy-intensive, and installing a single wind turbine requires about 200 tons of it. Many turbines have capacities of 3 or 4 megawatts, so you can assume that each megawatt of wind capacity requires roughly 50 tons of steel. By contrast, a typical natural gas turbine can produce nearly 43 megawatts while weighing only 9 tons. Thus, each megawatt of capacity requires less than a quarter of a ton of steel.

Obviously these are ballpark figures, but however you crunch the numbers, the takeaway is the same: the amount of steel needed to generate a given amount of electricity from a wind turbine is greater by several orders of magnitude.

Such profligate use of resources is the antithesis of the environmental ideal. Nearly four decades ago, the economist E. F. Schumacher distilled the essence of environmental protection down to three words: “Small is beautiful.” In the rush to do something — anything — to deal with the intractable problem of greenhouse gas emissions, environmental groups and policy makers have determined that renewable energy is the answer. But in doing so they’ve tossed Schumacher’s dictum into the ditch.

All energy and power systems exact a toll. If we are to take Schumacher’s phrase to heart while also reducing the rate of growth of greenhouse gas emissions, we must exploit the low-carbon energy sources — natural gas and, yes, nuclear — that have smaller footprints.

Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is the author, most recently, of “Power Hungry: The Myths of ‘Green’ Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future.”

    The Gas Is Greener, NYT, 7.6.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/opinion/08bryce.html

A Warming Planet

Struggles to Feed Itself

June 4, 2011
The New York Times
By JUSTIN GILLIS

CIUDAD OBREGÓN, Mexico — The dun wheat field spreading out at Ravi P. Singh’s feet offered a possible clue to human destiny. Baked by a desert sun and deliberately starved of water, the plants were parched and nearly dead.

Dr. Singh, a wheat breeder, grabbed seed heads that should have been plump with the staff of life. His practiced fingers found empty husks.

“You’re not going to feed the people with that,” he said.

But then, over in Plot 88, his eyes settled on a healthier plant, one that had managed to thrive in spite of the drought, producing plump kernels of wheat. “This is beautiful!” he shouted as wheat beards rustled in the wind.

Hope in a stalk of grain: It is a hope the world needs these days, for the great agricultural system that feeds the human race is in trouble.

The rapid growth in farm output that defined the late 20th century has slowed to the point that it is failing to keep up with the demand for food, driven by population increases and rising affluence in once-poor countries.

Consumption of the four staples that supply most human calories — wheat, rice, corn and soybeans — has outstripped production for much of the past decade, drawing once-large stockpiles down to worrisome levels. The imbalance between supply and demand has resulted in two huge spikes in international grain prices since 2007, with some grains more than doubling in cost.

Those price jumps, though felt only moderately in the West, have worsened hunger for tens of millions of poor people, destabilizing politics in scores of countries, from Mexico to Uzbekistan to Yemen. The Haitian government was ousted in 2008 amid food riots, and anger over high prices has played a role in the recent Arab uprisings.

Now, the latest scientific research suggests that a previously discounted factor is helping to destabilize the food system: climate change.

Many of the failed harvests of the past decade were a consequence of weather disasters, like floods in the United States, drought in Australia and blistering heat waves in Europe and Russia. Scientists believe some, though not all, of those events were caused or worsened by human-induced global warming.

Temperatures are rising rapidly during the growing season in some of the most important agricultural countries, and a paper published several weeks ago found that this had shaved several percentage points off potential yields, adding to the price gyrations.

For nearly two decades, scientists had predicted that climate change would be relatively manageable for agriculture, suggesting that even under worst-case assumptions, it would probably take until 2080 for food prices to double.

In part, they were counting on a counterintuitive ace in the hole: that rising carbon dioxide levels, the primary contributor to global warming, would act as a powerful plant fertilizer and offset many of the ill effects of climate change.

Until a few years ago, these assumptions went largely unchallenged. But lately, the destabilization of the food system and the soaring prices have rattled many leading scientists.

“The success of agriculture has been astounding,” said Cynthia Rosenzweig, a researcher at NASA who helped pioneer the study of climate change and agriculture. “But I think there’s starting to be premonitions that it may not continue forever.”

A scramble is on to figure out whether climate science has been too sanguine about the risks. Some researchers, analyzing computer forecasts that are used to advise governments on future crop prospects, are pointing out what they consider to be gaping holes. These include a failure to consider the effects of extreme weather, like the floods and the heat waves that are increasing as the earth warms.

A rising unease about the future of the world’s food supply came through during interviews this year with more than 50 agricultural experts working in nine countries.

These experts say that in coming decades, farmers need to withstand whatever climate shocks come their way while roughly doubling the amount of food they produce to meet rising demand. And they need to do it while reducing the considerable environmental damage caused by the business of agriculture.

Agronomists emphasize that the situation is far from hopeless. Examples are already available, from the deserts of Mexico to the rice paddies of India, to show that it may be possible to make agriculture more productive and more resilient in the face of climate change. Farmers have achieved huge gains in output in the past, and rising prices are a powerful incentive to do so again.

But new crop varieties and new techniques are required, far beyond those available now, scientists said. Despite the urgent need, they added, promised financing has been slow to materialize, much of the necessary work has yet to begin and, once it does, it is likely to take decades to bear results.

“There’s just such a tremendous disconnect, with people not understanding the highly dangerous situation we are in,” said Marianne Bänziger, deputy chief of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, a leading research institute in Mexico.

A wheat physiologist at the center, Matthew Reynolds, fretted over the potential consequences of not attacking the problem vigorously.

“What a horrible world it will be if food really becomes short from one year to the next,” he said. “What will that do to society?”

 

‘The World Is Talking’

Sitting with a group of his fellow wheat farmers, Francisco Javier Ramos Bours voiced a suspicion. Water shortages had already arrived in recent years for growers in his region, the Yaqui Valley, which sits in the Sonoran Desert of northwestern Mexico. In his view, global climate change could well be responsible.

“All the world is talking about it,” Mr. Ramos said as the other farmers nodded.

Farmers everywhere face rising difficulties: water shortages as well as flash floods. Their crops are afflicted by emerging pests and diseases and by blasts of heat beyond anything they remember.

In a recent interview on the far side of the world, in northeastern India, a rice farmer named Ram Khatri Yadav offered his own complaint about the changing climate. “It will not rain in the rainy season, but it will rain in the nonrainy season,” he said. “The cold season is also shrinking.”

Decades ago, the wheat farmers in the Yaqui Valley of Mexico were the vanguard of a broad development in agriculture called the Green Revolution, which used improved crop varieties and more intensive farming methods to raise food production across much of the developing world.

When Norman E. Borlaug, a young American agronomist, began working here in the 1940s under the sponsorship of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Yaqui Valley farmers embraced him. His successes as a breeder helped farmers raise Mexico’s wheat output sixfold.

In the 1960s, Dr. Borlaug spread his approach to India and Pakistan, where mass starvation was feared. Output soared there, too.

Other countries joined the Green Revolution, and food production outstripped population growth through the latter half of the 20th century. Dr. Borlaug became the only agronomist ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1970, for helping to “provide bread for a hungry world.”

As he accepted the prize in Oslo, he issued a stern warning. “We may be at high tide now,” he said, “but ebb tide could soon set in if we become complacent and relax our efforts.”

As output rose, staple grains — which feed people directly or are used to produce meat, eggs, dairy products and farmed fish — became cheaper and cheaper. Poverty still prevented many people in poor countries from buying enough food, but over all, the percentage of hungry people in the world shrank.

By the late 1980s, food production seemed under control. Governments and foundations began to cut back on agricultural research, or to redirect money into the problems created by intensive farming, like environmental damage. Over a 20-year period, Western aid for agricultural development in poor countries fell by almost half, with some of the world’s most important research centers suffering mass layoffs.

Just as Dr. Borlaug had predicted, the consequences of this loss of focus began to show up in the world’s food system toward the end of the century. Output continued to rise, but because fewer innovations were reaching farmers, the growth rate slowed.

That lull occurred just as food and feed demand was starting to take off, thanks in part to rising affluence across much of Asia. Millions of people added meat and dairy products to their diets, requiring considerable grain to produce. Other factors contributed to demand, including a policy of converting much of the American corn crop into ethanol.

And erratic weather began eating into yields. A 2003 heat wave in Europe that some researchers believe was worsened by human-induced global warming slashed agricultural output in some countries by as much as 30 percent. A long drought in Australia, also possibly linked to climate change, cut wheat and rice production.

In 2007 and 2008, with grain stockpiles low, prices doubled and in some cases tripled. Whole countries began hoarding food, and panic buying ensued in some markets, notably for rice. Food riots broke out in more than 30 countries.

Farmers responded to the high prices by planting as much as possible, and healthy harvests in 2008 and 2009 helped rebuild stocks, to a degree. That factor, plus the global recession, drove prices down in 2009. But by last year, more weather-related harvest failures sent them soaring again. This year, rice supplies are adequate, but with bad weather threatening the wheat and corn crops in some areas, markets remain jittery.

Experts are starting to fear that the era of cheap food may be over. “Our mindset was surpluses,” said Dan Glickman, a former United States secretary of agriculture. “That has just changed overnight.”

Forty years ago, a third of the population in the developing world was undernourished. By the tail end of the Green Revolution, in the mid-1990s, the share had fallen below 20 percent, and the absolute number of hungry people dipped below 800 million for the first time in modern history.

But the recent price spikes have helped cause the largest increases in world hunger in decades. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimated the number of hungry people at 925 million last year, and the number is expected to be higher when a fresh estimate is completed this year. The World Bank says the figure could be as high as 940 million.

Dr. Borlaug’s latest successor at the corn and wheat institute, Hans-Joachim Braun, recently outlined the challenges facing the world’s farmers. On top of the weather disasters, he said, booming cities are chewing up agricultural land and competing with farmers for water. In some of the world’s breadbaskets, farmers have achieved high output only by pumping groundwater much faster than nature can replenish it.

“This is in no way sustainable,” Dr. Braun said.

The farmers of the Yaqui Valley grow their wheat in a near-desert, relying on irrigation. Their water comes by aqueduct from nearby mountains, but for parts of the past decade, rainfall was below normal. Scientists do not know if this has been a consequence of climate change, but Northern Mexico falls squarely within a global belt that is expected to dry further because of human emissions of greenhouse gases.

Dr. Braun is leading efforts to tackle problems of this sort with new wheat varieties that would be able to withstand many kinds of stress, including scant water. Descendants of the plant that one of his breeders, Dr. Singh, found in a wheat field one recent day might eventually wind up in farmers’ fields the world over.

But budgets for this kind of research remain exceedingly tight, frustrating agronomists who feel that the problems are growing more urgent by the year.

“There are biological limitations on how fast we can do this work,” Dr. Braun said. “If we don’t get started now, we are going to be in serious trouble.”

 

Shaken Assumptions

For decades, scientists believed that the human dependence on fossil fuels, for all the problems it was expected to cause, would offer one enormous benefit.

Carbon dioxide, the main gas released by combustion, is also the primary fuel for the growth of plants. They draw it out of the air and, using the energy from sunlight, convert the carbon into energy-dense compounds like glucose. All human and animal life runs on these compounds.

Humans have already raised the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 40 percent since the Industrial Revolution, and are on course to double or triple it over the coming century. Studies have long suggested that the extra gas would supercharge the world’s food crops, and might be especially helpful in years when the weather is difficult.

But many of those studies were done in artificial conditions, like greenhouses or special growth chambers. For the past decade, scientists at the University of Illinois have been putting the “CO2 fertilization effect” to a real-world test in the two most important crops grown in the United States.

They started by planting soybeans in a field, then sprayed extra carbon dioxide from a giant tank. Based on the earlier research, they hoped the gas might bump yields as much as 30 percent under optimal growing conditions.

But when they harvested their soybeans, they got a rude surprise: the bump was only half as large. “When we measured the yields, it was like, wait a minute — this is not what we expected,” said Elizabeth A. Ainsworth, a Department of Agriculture researcher who played a leading role in the work.

When they grew the soybeans in the sort of conditions expected to prevail in a future climate, with high temperatures or low water, the extra carbon dioxide could not fully offset the yield decline caused by those factors.

They also ran tests using corn, America’s single most valuable crop and the basis for its meat production and its biofuel industry. While that crop was already known to be less responsive to carbon dioxide, a yield bump was still expected — especially during droughts. The Illinois researchers got no bump.

Their work has contributed to a broader body of research suggesting that extra carbon dioxide does act as plant fertilizer, but that the benefits are less than previously believed — and probably less than needed to avert food shortages. “One of the things that we’re starting to believe is that the positives of CO2 are unlikely to outweigh the negatives of the other factors,” said Andrew D. B. Leakey, another of the Illinois researchers.

Other recent evidence suggests that longstanding assumptions about food production on a warming planet may have been too optimistic.

Two economists, Wolfram Schlenker of Columbia University and Michael J. Roberts of North Carolina State University, have pioneered ways to compare crop yields and natural temperature variability at a fine scale. Their work shows that when crops are subjected to temperatures above a certain threshold — about 84 degrees for corn and 86 degrees for soybeans — yields fall sharply.

This line of research suggests that in the type of climate predicted for the United States by the end of the century, with more scorching days in the growing season, yields of today’s crop varieties could fall by 30 percent or more.

Though it has not yet happened in the United States, many important agricultural countries are already warming rapidly in the growing season, with average increases of several degrees. A few weeks ago, David B. Lobell of Stanford University published a paper with Dr. Schlenker suggesting that temperature increases in France, Russia, China and other countries were suppressing crop yields, adding to the pressures on the food system.

“I think there’s been an under-recognition of just how sensitive crops are to heat, and how fast heat exposure is increasing,” Dr. Lobell said.

Such research has provoked controversy. The findings go somewhat beyond those of a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body that episodically reviews climate science and advises governments.

That report found that while climate change was likely to pose severe challenges for agriculture in the tropics, it would probably be beneficial in some of the chillier regions of the Northern Hemisphere, and that the carbon dioxide effect should offset many problems.

In an interview at the University of Illinois, one of the leading scientists behind the work there, Stephen P. Long, sharply criticized the 2007 report, saying it had failed to sound a sufficient alarm. “I felt it needed to be much more honest in saying this is our best guess at the moment, but there are probably huge errors in there,” Dr. Long said. “We’re talking about the future food supply of the world.”

William E. Easterling, dean of earth sciences at Pennsylvania State University and a primary author of the 2007 report, said in an interview that the recent research had slightly altered his perspective. “We have probably to some extent overestimated” the benefits of carbon dioxide in computerized crop forecasts, he said. But he added that applying a “correction factor” would probably take care of the problem, and he doubted that the estimates in the report would change drastically as a result.

The 2007 report did point out a hole in the existing body of research: most forecasts had failed to consider several factors that could conceivably produce nasty surprises, like a projected rise in extreme weather events. No sooner had the report been published than food prices began rising, partly because of crop failures caused by just such extremes.

Oxfam, the international relief group, projected recently that food prices would more than double by 2030 from today’s high levels, with climate change responsible for perhaps half the increase. As worries like that proliferate, some scientists are ready to go back to the drawing board regarding agriculture and climate change.

Dr. Rosenzweig, the NASA climate scientist, played a leading role in forming the old consensus. But in an interview at her office in Manhattan, she ticked off recent stresses on the food system and said they had led her to take a fresh look.

She is pulling together a global consortium of researchers whose goal will be to produce more detailed and realistic computer forecasts; she won high-level endorsement for the project at a recent meeting between British and United States officials. “We absolutely have to get the science lined up to provide these answers,” Dr. Rosenzweig said.

 

Promises Unkept

At the end of a dirt road in northeastern India, nestled between two streams, lies the remote village of Samhauta. Anand Kumar Singh, a farmer there, recently related a story that he could scarcely believe himself.

Last June, he planted 10 acres of a new variety of rice. On Aug. 23, the area was struck by a severe flood that submerged his field for 10 days. In years past, such a flood would have destroyed his crop. But the new variety sprang back to life, yielding a robust harvest.

“That was a miracle,” Mr. Singh said.

The miracle was the product not of divine intervention but of technology — an illustration of how far scientists may be able to go in helping farmers adapt to the problems that bedevil them.

“It’s the best example in agriculture,” said Julia Bailey-Serres, a researcher at the University of California, Riverside, who has done genetic work on the rice variety that Mr. Singh used. “The submergence-tolerant rice essentially sits and waits out the flood.”

In the heyday of the Green Revolution, the 1960s, leaders like Dr. Borlaug founded an international network of research centers to focus on the world’s major crops. The corn and wheat center in Mexico is one. The new rice variety that is exciting farmers in India is the product of another, the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines.

Leading researchers say it is possible to create crop varieties that are more resistant to drought and flooding and that respond especially well to rising carbon dioxide. The scientists are less certain that crops can be made to withstand withering heat, though genetic engineering may eventually do the trick.

The flood-tolerant rice was created from an old strain grown in a small area of India, but decades of work were required to improve it. Money was so tight that even after the rice had been proven to survive floods for twice as long as previous varieties, distribution to farmers was not assured. Then an American charity, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, stepped in with a $20 million grant to finance final development and distribution of the rice in India and other countries. It may get into a million farmers’ hands this year.

The Gateses, widely known for their work in public health, have also become leading backers of agricultural projects in recent years. “I’m an optimist,” Mr. Gates said in an interview. “I think we can get crops that will mitigate many of our problems.”

The Gates Foundation has awarded $1.7 billion for agricultural projects since 2006, but even a charity as large as it is cannot solve humanity’s food problems on its own. Governments have recognized that far more effort is needed on their part, but they have been slow to deliver.

In 2008 and 2009, in the midst of the political crises set off by food prices, the world’s governments outbid one another to offer support. At a conference in L’Aquila, Italy, they pledged about $22 billion for agricultural development.

It later turned out, however, that no more than half of that was new money not previously committed to agriculture, and two years later, the extra financing has not fully materialized. “It’s a disappointment,” Mr. Gates said.

The Obama administration has won high marks from antihunger advocates for focusing on the issue. President Obama pledged $3.5 billion at L’Aquila, more than any other country, and the United States has begun an ambitious initiative called Feed the Future to support agricultural development in 20 of the neediest countries.

So far, the administration has won $1.9 billion from Congress. Amid the budget struggles in Washington, it remains to be seen whether the United States will fully honor its pledge.

Perhaps the most hopeful sign nowadays is that poor countries themselves are starting to invest in agriculture in a serious way, as many did not do in the years when food was cheap.

In Africa, largely bypassed by the Green Revolution but with enormous potential, a dozen countries are on the verge of fulfilling a promise to devote 10 percent of their budgets to farm development, up from 5 percent or less.

“In my country, every penny counts,” Agnes Kalibata, the agriculture minister of Rwanda, said in an interview. With difficulty, Rwanda has met the 10 percent pledge, and she cited a terracing project in the country’s highlands that has raised potato yields by 600 percent for some farmers.

Yet the leading agricultural experts say that poor countries cannot solve the problems by themselves. The United Nations recently projected that global population would hit 10 billion by the end of the century, 3 billion more than today. Coupled with the demand for diets richer in protein, the projections mean that food production may need to double by later in the century.

Unlike in the past, that demand must somehow be met on a planet where little new land is available for farming, where water supplies are tightening, where the temperature is rising, where the weather has become erratic and where the food system is already showing serious signs of instability.

“We’ve doubled the world’s food production several times before in history, and now we have to do it one more time,” said Jonathan A. Foley, a researcher at the University of Minnesota. “The last doubling is the hardest. It is possible, but it’s not going to be easy.”

    A Warming Planet Struggles to Feed Itself, R, 4.6.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/science/earth/05harvest.html

In Wake of Natural Disasters,

Insurers Brace for Big Losses

June 1, 2011
The New York Times
By CHRISTINE HAUSER

The devastation from the natural disasters that have ripped through parts of the country this year has been starkly evident. Hundreds of people have died and thousands of houses have been shattered in a deadly string of tornadoes. Millions of acres of farms were inundated and businesses shut down by flooding along the Mississippi River.

Now, as homes are repaired, fields are pumped and factories are cleaned out, the damage assessments will mount, and another measure of the impact will come into clearer focus: the cost to insurance companies.

Based on nearly two dozen interviews with farmers, business owners, analysts and government officials, private insurance companies are likely to experience at least $10 billion in insured losses this year, mostly associated with the tornadoes and the flooding along the Mississippi, based on property damage, lost inventory, business interruption and disrupted crop plantings.

Insurance industry and risk analysis experts arrived at their projections by adding median damage estimates for the worst of the tornadoes so far. The tally will rise when private-sector insurance flood and crop claims associated with the Mississippi River flooding are tacked on and hundreds of other tornadoes and severe winter weather events are factored in.

“Natural catastrophe losses in the United States are likely to be well over $10 billion by the end of 2011,” said David Smith, the senior vice president of Eqecat Inc., a catastrophe risk modeling firm. And Robert P. Hartwig, president of the Insurance Information Institute, said that just one “relatively minor” hurricane this year could push the total private insurance catastrophe losses in 2011 above the $13.6 billion paid out in 2010.

Whatever the numbers prove to be, analysts acknowledge that the geographic and economic range of damage is vast. Farmland is still submerged, meaning farmers must wait until the water fully recedes to determine whether the soil is fit to replant. Damage assessment teams are still fanning out in tornado zones, surveying the destruction.

And there is also uncertainty about what insurance policies will cover, a question recently on the mind of Austin Golding, a 25-year-old manager in his family’s barge business in Vicksburg, Miss. Like other business owners along the Mississippi, Mr. Golding took pre-emptive measures when the river started to rise, moving equipment and staff members to portable trailers on higher ground and putting the main office on blocks, a costly operation that he said saved the insured building from water damage.

“I think we are probably going to try to recoup what we spent in trying to avoid a total replacement” of the building, Mr. Golding said. He added that they would at least try to negotiate a decrease in the premium.

The Mississippi River areas that were flooded include two million to more than three million acres of farmland and pasture, said Michael Cordonnier, a consultant with the Soybean and Corn Advisor, an information service for the commodity industry. Houses, ports, casinos, hotels, grain elevators, infrastructure, fisheries and other facilities are among the sources expected to generate claims from damages.

In addition to the flooding, some of the worst tornadoes in decades have struck this year. As of Wednesday, there have been at least 518 fatalities from tornadoes in the United States, just behind the 519 in 1953, the highest number since official record-keeping started in 1950, said Gregory Carbin, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration meteorologist.

Just the tornadoes that affected Alabama and neighboring states in the last week of April, and Joplin, Mo., in May, could produce insured losses of $4.5 billion to $8 billion, said Mr. Hartwig of the insurance institute. Eqecat Inc. estimated insured losses at $2 billion to $5 billion in the April week and $1 billion to $3 billion for Joplin. AIR Worldwide, a risk modeling and consulting firm, said it estimated $3.7 billion to $5.5 billion in insured losses for tornadoes and other severe weather events, including Alabama’s, in just one week: April 22 to 28.

Catastrophes are defined in the industry as any single event with $25 million or more in insured losses. The biggest catastrophe to hit the industry’s insurers was Hurricane Katrina, which generated $45 billion, adjusted for inflation, in insured losses for houses, businesses and vehicles.

While many in the industry, and those clearing out their homes or pumping out businesses, say it is too early to put a figure on the damage, private insurance companies will not be alone in bearing the cost.

The government will cover most of the losses related to flooding for insured homes and small businesses through the National Flood Insurance Program. Officials said the flood insurance program was already $17.7 billion in debt to the Treasury Department, mostly because of Katrina. They added, however, that the program still had $668 million in cash reserves as of April 30 and the ability to borrow nearly $3 billion more from the department if needed to cover this year’s claims.

Farmers Insurance, which is one of at least 90 private insurance companies that pays out the flood claims losses using the flood insurance program’s funds, has received about 300 claims for flood losses as of May 30, said Jeffery W. Hinesly, a manager of the program for the company. He said that each claim averaged $20,000 to $30,000 for property damage. “I do not expect much more than the 300 because many do not own flood insurance,” he said. The major loss exposure that private insurance companies will have using their own funds for flood losses is for automobile insurance, which is not covered by the flood insurance program, he added.

For crop insurance, the government’s Risk Management Agency shares the payments for losses with the 15 private insurance companies that it regulates. William J. Murphy, the administrator of the agency, said he expected crop-related losses from Missouri south through the Mississippi River basin to be in the $700 million to $800 million range. The amount paid by the private companies depends on individual contracts with farmers, but it is expected to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

“We are waiting to see the extent of the losses down there,” Mr. Murphy said.

Meanwhile, along the river and in tornado-wrenched towns, residents, farmers and business owners are struggling to adapt.

Bobby W. Armstrong, 79, and his wife, Barbara, moved into a Days Inn in Joplin after their three-bedroom home was damaged, but they considered themselves fortunate that it was not destroyed.

“We heard sirens going and so we went into the hallways and sat down next to the linen closet and huddled up there on the floor,” said Mr. Armstrong, a Marine Corps veteran. He said a “wild guess” was that the house needed a new roof, siding, gutters and other repairs, but they had yet to see a claims adjuster.

“We have turned in the report on it, and it will take time before they get out,” he said.

Farmers, too, must wait, and with commodity prices at recent highs, the delays can be costly. The floods wiped out investments in fertilizer, labor and seeds. Crop insurance might cover only 50 to 75 percent of the value, depending on average historical yields. In addition, there are seasonal issues. It is too late to replant corn, but soybeans may still take root if the topsoil is in shape.

John Michael Pillow, a 41-year-old farmer in Yazoo County, Miss., watched in dismay when the river spilled over onto his insured farmland, destroying about 3,000 of the 4,000 acres of corn he had already planted.

“I am really hoping we can plant soybeans,” he added, “so we will be able to get out of this year without a complete loss.”

    In Wake of Natural Disasters, Insurers Brace for Big Losses, NYT, 1.6.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/02/business/02insure.html

As Arizona Fire Rages,

So Does Rumor on Its Origin

June 1, 2011
The New York Times
By MARC LACEY

PORTAL, Ariz. — It is a dramatic tale: that illegal immigrants being pursued by the Border Patrol started one of the nation’s largest wildfires, which has burned up more than 70,000 acres of national forest along Arizona’s border with Mexico since it began almost four weeks ago. But the authorities say that despite the tale’s being repeated often by some residents of the rugged countryside here, they do not know for sure if it is true.

“Sometimes you can find the true cause and other times you can’t,” said Bill Edwards, the lead ranger at the Coronado National Forest, who told residents at a community meeting on Tuesday night that the so-called Horseshoe 2 Fire was caused by humans but that investigators had not determined who caused it. “Everything else is speculation.”

Border security is such a dominant issue in Arizona that it pops up in many contexts, wildfires included. Because fires surge across the border, from Mexico to the United States and vice versa, fighting them presents added logistical challenges in this part of the country. Already this year, a particularly fierce one for fires, dozens of United States Forest Service firefighters have crossed into Mexico with special clearances to try to control fires before they reach the United States.

The Horseshoe 2 fire began on May 8 in Horseshoe Canyon, well north of the border, but many residents still link the blaze directly to Mexico. They point out that most border crossings occur at night, when it is cold in the mountains and the migrants are likely to start fires for warmth. With the high winds, low humidity and extremely dry conditions in the forest right now, the likelihood of a campfire getting out of control is especially great.

The story of how it started, so vivid in some accounts that it sounds as if witnesses were peering through the brush as matches were thrown, comes up often in conversations here and was repeated in an open letter that ranchers wrote to President Obama recently, criticizing him as not adequately securing the border.

“You hear people talk about it like they were there,” said Helen Snyder, a retired biologist who settled here 25 years ago. “Some of them even say that the illegal immigrants that started the fire were being pursued by the Border Patrol and that they set the fire maliciously to get away. Now wouldn’t the Border Patrol have called in the fire?”

A Border Patrol spokeswoman referred questions about how the fire started to the Forest Service, which said that lightning had been ruled out but that the investigation was continuing.

“We have trained investigators who are trying to determine how it started,” said Dugger Hughes, the incident commander for the fire, who is based just across the Arizona state line in Rodeo, N.M. “It’s like any arson investigation. They look at burn patterns and they work it back to a tight spot to determine where it began.”

That spot is now marked on Forest Service maps with a red X, with shaded areas representing burnt forest extending in all directions. The fire is now 75 percent contained, firefighters said Wednesday, as smoke from controlled burns billowed up into the clouds.

Mr. Hughes acknowledged that relatively few suspects were located in wildfire investigations, but said that when they were found, they faced criminal and civil penalties, including the cost of the firefighting operation, which in the case of the Horseshoe 2 Fire exceeds $20 million.

“We know it was man-caused, and it probably started in a campfire,” Mr. Hughes said. “Do we have a suspect? No. And we can’t say it was an immigrant either.”

But some are saying just that.

“Who set the fire?” asked Ed Ashurst, an area rancher who is convinced that he knows. “It’s obvious. There’s a few people in America who don’t think man walked on the moon in 1969. To say that illegal aliens didn’t set the fire is like saying that Neil Armstrong didn’t walk on the moon.”

Mr. Ashurst acknowledges that his case is circumstantial. “Did anyone see the aliens drop a match or a cigarette? No. But we all know who started this. Who else would be up there?”

The Coronado National Forest, despite its thick forest cover and high altitudes, is in fact a major smuggling route for both drugs and migrants. Firefighters say they have even encountered illegal immigrants crossing the area as it is burning. Border Patrol officers continue to patrol there, using all-terrain vehicles and stopping cars in search of smugglers.

But none of that proves who ignited the fire.

Mr. Edwards, the ranger, cited four other southern Arizona fires, all of them in known smuggling areas, that were found to have been caused by American citizens. One was caused by a rancher whose welding created a spark that ignited the dry underbrush, he said. Another was found to have been caused by target shooters. In two cases, he said, military aircraft engaged in training exercises set off fires.

“The automatic assumption is that it was an illegal immigrant,” Mr. Edwards said, acknowledging that migrants have been found to have caused wildfires by setting campfires to stay warm.

Last year, the Coronado National Forest was singed by a fire, called Horseshoe 1, that began just north of the spot where the current fire started. It, too, was deemed as caused by humans but no suspect was ever found. Some residents, though, are sure they know who set it.

    As Arizona Fire Rages, So Does Rumor on Its Origin, NYT, 1.7.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/02/us/02wildfires.html

At Least 4 Are Killed

in Massachusetts Tornadoes

June 1, 2011
The New York Times
By ABBY GOODNOUGH

BOSTON — At least four people were killed when tornadoes touched down Wednesday in Springfield, Mass., and a number of nearby towns. The twisters flipped vehicles, collapsed buildings and stunned residents who are not used to such violent storms.

Gov. Deval Patrick activated the National Guard and declared a state of emergency. He said that at least two tornadoes had hit and that serious damage had been reported in 19 communities, many of them small towns along the Massachusetts Turnpike.

One man was killed when his car overturned in West Springfield, Mr. Patrick said. Two other deaths were reported in Westfield and one in Brimfield, he said, though he had no details.

With storms continuing into the night, Mr. Patrick found himself in the unusual position of instructing New Englanders more accustomed to blizzards to take shelter in basements and bathrooms if necessary.

The scope of the damage was still unclear, but photos and videos showed buildings with roofs and sides sheared off. The police were going door to door in some neighborhoods to make sure residents were unharmed.

“There’s just total destruction,” said Michael Day, a plumbing inspector from Agawam who was driving through West Springfield shortly after the first tornado struck around 4:30 p.m. “All I can hear is ambulances. There’s a lot of police sirens around and fire trucks.”

Tornado warnings had been issued for much of the state earlier Wednesday. One of the confirmed tornadoes traveled east from Westfield to Douglas, Mr. Patrick said, and the other traveled east from North Springfield to Sturbridge.

Mr. Patrick said 1,000 members of the Massachusetts National Guard were being dispatched to help with debris removal and, if necessary, search-and-rescue efforts. He said that State Senator Stephen Brewer had told him that Monson, a town of about 9,000 east of Springfield, appeared to have suffered some of the worst damage.

“He said, ‘You have to see Monson to believe it,’ ” Mr. Patrick said. In Springfield, Mayor Domenic J. Sarno said in a briefing at 11 p.m. that more than 40 residents had been injured and 250 were spending the night at a shelter set up in a local arena.

While tornadoes are relatively rare in New England, one that hit Worcester in 1953, known as the Worcester Twister, killed 94 people and injured more than 1,000.

Senator John Kerry, who called the twisters a “once-in-100-years” event, said teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency were on the way.

Mr. Patrick said, “We are hoping and praying and working as hard as possible to keep the fatalities limited.”

Katie Zezima contributed reporting.

    At Least 4 Are Killed in Massachusetts Tornadoes, NYT, 1.6.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/02/us/02tornado.html