Opinion: Hurricane Irene Approaches

A good friend of mine was the top photographer for The Miami Herald, the guy they sent to cover wars and natural disasters. He once told me that when he checked into a hotel room on one of his assignments, he would pull the mattress off the bed, place it against the window and sleep on the floor.

Despite the dangers of wars, he said the scariest things he ever covered were the hurricanes that hit his home state of Florida and the surrounding region. A major contributory factor was that no matter how often people had seen on newscasts the devastation wrought by hurricanes, they never took the threats seriously enough when they were in the crosshairs of an approaching storm.

We are now in the crosshairs, with the approach of Irene.  Conventional wisdom is hope for the best, but definitely plan for the worst. 

I spent years writing about the islands of the Caribbean and the rainforests of Central America for Audubon magazine and the website I founded, www.naturaltraveler.com. I, too, have seen the incredibly damaging effects of hurricanes. Flying in to the British Virgin Islands the day after Hurricane Hugo, a Category 5 storm, which devastated that beautiful cluster of isles in 1989, I was aghast to see sailboats from the harbor in Tortola tossed into the hillsides on the other side of the seacoast highway.

In Antigua, after Luis, a Category 4 hurricane in 1995, I inspected a hotel that had been blown off its foundation and had shards of glass from the sliding doors, which had faced the sea, imbedded through the walls of the hallway opposite like rows of shark’s teeth. The corrugated metal roof, which had been painted orange, was sand-blasted to metallic sheen. 

In Honduras, after Hurricane Mitch in 1998, a Category 5 storm that brought with it torrential rains, I witnessed entire forested hillsides, washed down into rivers, the trees surging down the current, having wiped out small villages and toppled bridges that would have been crucial to accessing the devastated areas once the storm had passed.  

As of this writing, the best guess is that Long Island will suffer a Category 2 hurricane and while that seems like a zephyr compared to the storms described above, such a storm can be very dangerous, as well. According to information on various government and weather service sites, wind speeds will average 96-110 miles per hour.

We can expect damage to roofing material, doors, windows and building structures. There will be considerable damage to vegetation, mobile homes, and piers. If the storm also packs an extremely wet punch, coastal and low-lying escape routes will flood two to four hours before arrival of the storm center. Small craft, in unprotected anchorages, are likely to break free from their moorings.

The basic message is: heed the advice of people in government, weather and emergency services and hopefully when the sun breaks out on Monday, we will have all come through it all right.