Hurricane Sandy!
October 29th, 2012, 3:32pm by MikeWriting from the middle of the storm! Well, if by “middle” I mean 500 miles from the eye of the storm — but we’re getting pretty well pounded here in Boston.
In the interest of future context, the “Frankenstorm” is a rare, late-season hurricane that started up in the Carribbean and basically tracked due north toward the mid-Atlantic. The storm was predicted to combine with a strong, cold jet stream, and a high-pressure area over Greenland was to prevent the normal hurricane track, and force it onshore. In the about 7 days leading up to its arrival, the hype has built and built — and as of now, it looks like it was pretty well-founded.
Here in Boston, we’re having lots of wind, and power outages (or so I’ve heard), but not much rain, and we probably won’t get too much. The coast is really getting battered by the waves, and there’s massive flooding in New Jersey. I cancelled my work trip to NYC — turns out that flights and trains were all cancelled, and NYC transit shut down last night at 7pm — so it would have been all for nothing, anyway.
And I just saw on Twitter that a crane atop an under-construction building, across the street from the hotel I often stay in, is about to collapse.
Every disaster these days seems to bring with it new technological ways of experiencing what’s going on, and this one is no different. Between Twitter’s Sandy hashtag, all sorts of interactive maps (like the Boston Globe’s and NStar’s power outage map, live streams from the Weather Channel, and live updates on the NYT’s site, it’s hard not to be overwhelmed with info.
You’ll know if we lose power if the site goes down!