Category: Hurricane Sandy

Raging In The Rockaways: Tweet Reax

(Above image updated at 3 am from this one via Jeff Pegues)

Sandy Rocks NYC: Tweet Reax II

Flood

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Empire

Sandy Rocks NYC: Tweet Reax

Follow the latest tweets and re-tweets @SullyDish. The view from the Times’ webcam:

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Rescue

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Face Of The Day

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Mark Clemente, who is staying at the evacuation center stationed inside Seward Park High School, has a cigarette prior to the arrival of Hurricane Sandy in New York City. Sandy, which has already claimed over 50 lives in the Caribbean, is predicted to bring heavy winds and floodwaters as the mid-Atlantic region prepares for the damage. By Andrew Burton/Getty Images.

Man-Made Natural Disasters, Ctd

Brad Plumer uses the hurricane to discuss global warming

You can see how a combination of rising sea levels, tides, and storms could affect different parts of the United States with this helpful GIS mapping tool from Climate Central. For New York City, the map showed just a 15 percent chance of a major six-foot surge by 2020—it takes a rare storm like Sandy and high tides to pull it off. But as the world warms and sea levels rise, the odds of a big storm surge increase. Suddenly, that freak event won’t be so rare anymore.

Elizabeth Kolbert chimes in:

Coming as it is just a week before Election Day, Sandy makes the fact that climate change has been entirely ignored during this campaign seem all the more grotesque. In a year of record-breaking temperatures across the U.S., record drought conditions in the country’s corn belt, and now a record storm affecting the nation’s most populous cities, neither candidate found the issue to be worthy of discussion. Pressed about this finally the other day on MTV, President Obama called climate change a “critical issue” that he was “surprised” hadn’t come up during any of the debates, a response that was at once completely accurate and totally disingenuous. (As one commentator pointed out, he might have brought up this “critical” issue on his own since “he is the friggin’ POTUS.”)

Earlier commentary here.

Christianism Watch

“Hurricane Sandy is hitting 21 years to the day of the Perfect Storm of October 20, 1991. I write about this in my book as America Has Done to Israel. This was the day that President George Bush Sr. initiated the Madrid Peace Process to divide the land of Israel, including Jerusalem. America has been under God’s judgment since this event. Both of these hurricanes were cause by freakish weather patterns that came together to create [sic]

Twenty-one years breaks down to 7 x 3, which is a significant number with God. Three is perfection as the Godhead is three in one while seven is perfection.

It appears that God gave America 21 years to repent of interfering with His prophetic plan for Israel; however, it has gotten worse under all the presidents and especially Obama. Obama is 100 percent behind the Muslim Brotherhood which has vowed to destroy Israel and take Jerusalem. Both candidates are pro-homosexual and are behind the homosexual agenda. America is under political judgment and the church does not know it!” – John McTernan, pro-Greater Israel, Christianist fanatic.

There is, however, a punchline:

The storm is projected to come right over my house, so it might curtail the prayer meeting if the power is knocked out.

Ah, the power of cognitive dissonance.

Sandy’s Politics, Ctd

Blake Zeff points out that Sandy will force Obama and Romney out of their campaign comfort-zones:

For two presidential campaign’s entering their final week, [Hurricane Sandy is a] rare moment where they’re no longer in control of the news “narrative” driving the race’s coverage, and must instead be forced to cope with unpredictability. For them, this means that the next few days will revolve around developments – like crisis management, how to address the nation, and the real suffering of many Americans — that they do not plan, initiate, or foresee. Compare that to a typical day on the campaign trail, where the national conversation and media coverage are instead based largely on pre-planned press conferences, news releases, interviews, and attacks — all storylines created by the campaigns. What it also means is that these next few days will provide voters unscripted moments and, perhaps, coverage of the candidates more revealing than the typical stagecraft.

Previous Dish on the political implications of Hurricane Sandy here and here.

Picturing Sandy

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Cord Jefferson warns about fake Hurricane Sandy photos making the rounds:

NPR was one of the more reputable news organizations to send out this picture, which depicts soldiers standing guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier despite being pounded by heavy winds and rain. That picture is real, but it was taken in September, not today. And then there's this photo of the Manhattan skyline tweeted early this morning by someone calling himself "Jamster" and instantly retweeted by thousands of people. Once again, that's a real picture with origins at the Wall Street Journal, it's just from a long time ago, not today.

If you think you've come across an "amazing" or "terrifying" picture of Hurricane Sandy today and tomorrow, take a few seconds to do a reverse image search or ask yourself, "Hmmm, does this picture of a shark swimming down a flooded New York street look utterly fake?"

The WSJ has a clever interactive graphic comparing Sandy and Irene while the Weather Channel is live-streaming its coverage of the current storm: