Sandy Sinks HMS Bounty, Knocks Off Gawker Websites 238
Black Parrot writes "Several news sites are reporting that the 1962 replica of the HMS bounty was lost at sea due to hurricane Sandy, about 90 miles off North Carolina. The latest news I find says 14 of 16 crew rescued, one drowned, and the Captain still missing." And on land, the combination of wind and water surges knocked off Gawker sites and the Huffington Post for a time, and forced the evacuation of NYU's Langone Medical Center. Did it affect you?
Huffington Post (Score:3)
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No worries, Wall Street is replete with bailout packages. If you're a bank.
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The S+P is flat today...
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Re:Huffington Post (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder what sea water flooding implies for the financial district.
1. A brisk day of trading in derivatives based on underwater mortgages.
2. A vindication of the Saltwater school of economics.
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I wonder what sea water flooding implies for the financial district.
NASDAQ is testing their systems, now. The exchanges do not seem to have suffered significant damage. The problem is going to be transportation; the exchanges may open tomorrow, but the markets will not be able to function properly if people can't get to their jobs in the financial district.
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As long as they have telephone and internet access thay can do their jobs by telecommuting.
There may be many reasons why that's not possible. Traders use very specialized systems (hardware and software) to do their job. Administrators have access to highly confidential information. Many IT people do not want to have it all available on the Internet, even though a well encrypted VPN may be safe enough. One concern is that they don't know who is on the other side of that VPN (who has physical access to you
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And the Huffington Post is still down! I wonder what sea water flooding implies for the financial district.
Looks like they sort of tried on Wall Street:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/data?pid=avimage&iid=iB520MWRNVP8 [bloomberg.com]
Re:Huffington Post (Score:4, Insightful)
And the Huffington Post is still down!
And nothing of any value will be missed while it remains down.
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And the Huffington Post is still down!
And nothing of any value will be missed while it remains down.
Except we'll be forced to resort to Drudge for news.
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It was either a mod making a mistake or someone who agreed that huff post is a lot of biased drivel. Why are you surprised or upset?
Re:Huffington Post (Score:5, Funny)
Bankers need bailing out again...
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...and nothing of value was lost. :-P
last post (Score:2, Insightful)
for the good cap'n.
but what they were doing bobbing around in the path of frankenstorm i don't know.
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probably trying to avoid the storm surge...
Re:last post (Score:4, Informative)
Re:last post (Score:5, Insightful)
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Even though it was a replica, I've always loved that style of ship. It's especially sad that 1, possibly 2, crew members lost their life.
Re:last post (Score:4, Interesting)
There was a plenty of warning of the scale and scope of this storm before the Bounty left port. This wasn't a case of it being caught unprepared in harbour with a hurricane bearing down on it trying to get to sea. This captain made a decision to put this ship into incredible danger. A ship which is 400 years out of date in technology and used as a school ship to teach sailing.
This was not the right decision.
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You've got very little if any control over where your boat goes in a storm like that. If you're anywhere near the coast, there's very good odds you're going to end up on the rocks. (or in the street, or on top of the building, etc) Just look at the tsunami in japan, all the boats that were shoved inland.
Best thing they can do is get the boat out as far as possible away from anything it can get tossed into. But for a ship of
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I don't understand why they didn't set sail sooner, even with a tow to speed it up.
This is what sunk them. Safest place to be when a hurricane smashes into your home port, is 500 miles away on a sunny beach sipping a margarita. Even just 150 miles off to the side in a really bad rainstorm is better than right in the path of the hurricane.
I've personally done this on a much smaller scale with thunderstorms on a sailboat. Both the distances and warning times are shorter by about the same fraction.
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I don't understand why they didn't set sail sooner, even with a tow to speed it up.
This is what sunk them. Safest place to be when a hurricane smashes into your home port, is 500 miles away on a sunny beach sipping a margarita. Even just 150 miles off to the side in a really bad rainstorm is better than right in the path of the hurricane.
I've personally done this on a much smaller scale with thunderstorms on a sailboat. Both the distances and warning times are shorter by about the same fraction.
Right, so why was he sailing to Florida? If it had been me I'd have been running her northeast *away from the storm* as fast as I could go.
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Re:last post (Score:5, Informative)
According to news reports, the engine broke down and they were not able to repair in time.
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Gotta love it when your sailboat suffers an engine breakdown... (I wonder if any of their crew even knew how to operate sails?)
But like I said before, they should have had a tug or some other vessel helping them out. I wonder if there were any naval destroyers or other military vessels hanging around that could have tossed them a rope?
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To concur and re-emphasize... sails in a storm like that become shreddeds ribbons. At most you'd run a single jib of mizzen sail, and that likely reefed, in order to keep the vessel bow/stern to waves.
The problem is that the ship was taking on water, and with the engine/generator down. There was no way to pump it out. Ships like this of old had a full compliment of crew. (ie: 50-100). That's because they were working vessels. And many of those crews were used to perform a variety of tasks. Modern day ves
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I wonder if this has anything to do with the ship being a replica, and the crew probably working for Disney :)
It is horrible (Score:5, Funny)
I have no way of getting on the internet.
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Who needs the Internet when you have Slashdot?
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I have no way of getting on the internet.
*SMACK*
Low-flying "whoosh" misjudged its height and hit you in the face instead?
Hurricane redirected the whoosh
Missing? (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, sure, the Captain of the HMS Bounty is "missing" because of a "hurricane".
We've heard that one before.
Missing Captain (Score:4, Funny)
and the Captain still missing.
You'll find him adrift on the ship's boat somewhere in the Pacific I expect.
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HMS Bounty (Score:3)
The latest news I find says 14 of 16 crew rescued, one drowned, and the Captain still missing.
The captain is missing ... perhaps somebody mutinied?
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The part of Fletcher Christian will now be played by Tom Hardy.
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The woman who dies was decended from Fletcher Christian, and Capt. Robin still hasn't been found. Those of us who live and work on these boats are still hoping to find a long loved and respected member of our community. As far as the Captain's experience, the coast guard went to him for the sail training program for the Eagle.
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The latest news I find says 14 of 16 crew rescued, one drowned, and the Captain still missing.
The captain is missing ... perhaps somebody mutinied?
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. The problem was Kirk self destructed the enterprise while the klingon boarding crew was aboard. The captain is in the volcano. Yes, if you look close as a joke the starfleet crew did rename the BoP "The Bounty". By far the strangest part of the movie plot was how starfleet kind of abandoned them on Vulcan. Sure you stole/borrowed and then destroyed a ship, then almost started a war, then hung around an exploding planet, then stole a klingon ship, then resurrected a dead s
Re:HMS Bounty (Score:4, Interesting)
One bit of Bligh's reputation is secure. He was one helluva a seaman. There are damned few sailors in history who could have accomplished what he managed to do; sailing and navigating a launch with eighteen loyal crewmen 3,600 nautical miles to Timor with only one casualty (from a native attack). It is one of the great feats of maritime history.
I think most historians long ago centered most of the blame on Fletcher Christian. As you say, Bligh was a man of his times, and in those days, where you might spend a year or longer at sea, if you did not maintain absolute discipline, it was likely no one would ever see home again.
WTF were they even doing at sea? (Score:2, Insightful)
The original HMS Bounty didn't have the benefit of knowing a week in advance when a hurricane was coming. This one did. WTF were they even at sea for? Unless this was a suicide run, that was pretty fucking stupid.
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This is what I came in here to say, too. They had lots of time to get the hell out of the whole damned region.
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And they decided to do so, having left a week ago.
Sailboats are not motor boats.
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Safer at sea than at port - though I saw mention that they were in dry dock very recently, which might be safer than either other option. The stupider part though was that they didn't sail due East to get away from the storm, but instead tried to sail South towards their destination in Florida (after going only a little bit East to try to avoid the storm).
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Safer for the ship, of course, not the crew.
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The stupider part though was that they didn't sail due East to get away from the storm, but instead tried to sail South towards their destination in Florida (after going only a little bit East to try to avoid the storm).
Until Thursday, the storm was expected to go East off into the Atlantic after wrecking Cuba and Haiti. It was until the 11am Thursday forecast that it was expected to make landfall in New Jersey. At the speed they would be going and given how damn big Sandy is, I don't think going East at that point would have made any difference except putting them further from help.
Re:WTF were they even doing at sea? (Score:4, Insightful)
And for an example of why being at sea is better, Good Morning America showed footage this morning of a tanker that had been tied of at a dock in New York. The storm broke it free, carried it several miles, and beached it to where about half of it is on land. This was a modern ship with a metal hull, but it's safe to assume the hull took at least some damage when it beached. Now imagine what would have happened to a larg wooden hulled vessel that got smashed up against it's pier, or beached on some rocks.
Re:WTF were they even doing at sea? (Score:5, Insightful)
The original bounty would have pumps that would have been operated manually by gangs of sailors. Wood hauled ships of that type are pretty much in a constant state of sinking, you must pump the bilge.
The replica bounty was equipped only with electric pumps They had some kind of generator failure and could not run them.
What were they doing at sea. Its pretty much SOP of an ocean going vessel of any significant size to put to see ahead of storm. I hope its obvious to you why being anchor in heavy sees would be a problem. Since you can't be tied up you don't want to be anywhere near shallow water or anything like pier, rock, other ship, etc you might be pushed against.
So what you generally do is you try to sail out into deep open water, and avoid the storm as much as possible. This is the safest thing to do for the ship. Obviously you don't head strait into the storm, but this thing was so big they could not easily avoid even the worst of it; given their best possible speed.
So yes the original HMS Bounty and her crew probably would have survived this storm, although its likely some top men would have been killed trying to reef sails in heavy wind and sea. The replica with her mechanical dependencies and crew we value more than the vessel was not up to it.
Re:WTF were they even doing at sea? (Score:4, Interesting)
WTF were they even at sea for?
Ships (usually) move a lot faster than houses, so you simply sail out of the way... unless you have an equipment failure during the escape. Then you sink/die of course, because suddenly you're stationary. Its almost impossible to sink a boat that's underway in the modern radio era, even if its an ancient replica. Safest place to be when a hurricane is on the way is on a ship, because in about 12 to 24 hours you'll be somewhere sunny and pleasant instead of in a hurricane, and if you get a couple days warning that is not too difficult to get 12 hours away... I used to get endless shit from landlubbers when I was serious contemplating doing the liveaboard sailboat thing about hurricanes "What'll you do when a hurricane hits your harbor" "Probably drinking a margarita sitting on a sunny beach 300 miles away, what are you going to be doing when a hurricane hits your home city?" "Grr..."
I was a real small time sailboat sailor but even I know their "killer" (literally) mistake was not traveling in a convoy. So the mainmast snaps off or you spring a hopeless leak, who cares, everyone move from boat #4 to boat #27 and we'll continue along the way. Its more fun to sail in a group of friends anyway. Probably they were too scared of low visibility to escape in a group, if the odds of collision are 2% in heavy seas and dense fog, and the odds of sinking are 0.001% then you go it alone. In slashdot IT terms this is a Redundant Array of Inexpensive (LOL) Sailboats, but if its foggy you'll get massive filesystem corruption.
In all honesty quite a few "killed by hurricane" stories are REALLY "killed during hurricane" stories that have nothing to do with the weather, they'd be just as dead without the storm. Very few sailors are killed by hurricanes compared to landlubbers I'd feel much safer on a boat than on land.
Until they come out with a formal report we won't know what happened, but I'm guessing they were doing a hell of a lot better than the landlubbers until something very critical failed in an unanticipated manner.
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During a storm, ships are far safer at sea than in port. However, it appears they went south/southwest trying to cut inside the storm's track... when they probably should have gone northeast. (But I don't know what may have been waiting for them in the North Atlantic. It can be nasty this time of year.)
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The original HMS Bounty didn't have the benefit of knowing a week in advance when a hurricane was coming. This one did. WTF were they even at sea for?
As the captain said and every single news article about it quotes him, in a hurricane a ship is safer at sea than in port. They were trying to get the ship out of harm's way, but this hurricane was WAY bigger than most, 2000 miles wide.
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Don't worry, no engineer would work for someone as stupid as you.
First, you seem to be too stupid to know that mooring a ship in a storm doesn't mean it is going to stay moored.
Second, you seem blissfully unaware that an unmoored ship in a storm poses a very large hazard. You don't know where it will go or what it will hit. You don't know how dangerous it will be to attempt to bring it under control again. You don't know what it will spill. In fact, you don't really know anything at all except you have
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Really, perhaps you should ask the U.S. Navy why they tend to move all their ships out of port during hurricanes?
You'd have opted to see the HMS Bounty guaranteed to be destroyed. Why?
The crew, whom loved that vessel they worked on, rather thought it'd be nice to keep and preserve it. So they tried to sail around the hurricane and do so before it arrived. And truthfully, they probably were a mere 1/2 day from having succeeded. And you would never have even heard this tale.
But for a mechanical failure...
The captain (Score:2)
...appears to have upheld the highest traditions of the sea. In the past couple of decades there have been at least two Mediterranean cruise ship skippers who can't say that.
Not a religious guy, but...
Hear us as we cry to thee,
For those in peril on the sea.
The Daily Show (Score:2)
No Daily Show. Now how will I get my news?
Why was boat out to sea (Score:2)
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Bounty's current voyage is a calculated decision... NOT AT ALL... irresponsible or with a lack of foresight as some have suggested. The fact of the matter is... A SHIP IS SAFER AT SEA THAN IN PORT!
Safer for the ship. The dead crew would have been safer in their beds on land.
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depends on where their beds were.
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Safer for the ship. The dead crew would have been safer in their beds on land.
Nah, their beds would be underwater due to the surge and they'd be drowned. If you gotta evac one way or another, you should do what you do best, and what sailors do best is sail, so...
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Huffington Post (Score:3, Insightful)
I read the title and all I got to say... (Score:2)
So where are all you idiots (Score:3, Insightful)
that said this storm wasn't going to be anything and were criticizing people getting prepared in the 'Sandy' story the other day? hmm? I expect you are apologizing and have learned your lesson~
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HMS Bounty missing (Score:2)
"Several news sites are reporting that the 1962 replica of the HMS bounty was lost at sea due to hurricane Sandy, about 90 miles off North Carolina."
Are they certain this wasn't the result of a mutiny?
The ship was called "Bounty" not "HMS Bounty" (Score:2)
wrong, populary called HMS Bounty by millions (Score:2)
it was a replica of the HMS Bounty, and is popularly called as such. the world doesn't care about royal navy registration and can put HMS in front of anything they please.
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I think that the Royal Navy might get slightly miffed about people doing that. Whether or not they could do anything about it is another matter. British Armed forces probably don't get much of a legal budget for pursuing these things.
Trapped (Score:2)
Re:Trapped (Score:4, Informative)
Here then, look at this neat map [hint.fm].
Kinda hypnotizing. (Wind map, in case anyone's scared to go there.)
Sad (Score:2)
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I got to see her when she was at Sample too, glad I got the oppertunity.
No (Score:2)
Not at all, this is the first I've heard of it. But I have also been working way to much the last few days to find time to browse news sites.
Best site backup plan? #Openthread (Score:3)
Dear lifehacker readers - what is the best way you've found to make sure a site remains available during a natural disaster?
-Adam Pash
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The Gawker sites have backup blogs that are now up. Gawker is at http://live.gawker.com/ [gawker.com] Lifehacker is at http://live.lifehacker.com/ [lifehacker.com] and so on. They seem to have already thought of a backup plan, albeit not a complete one.
Questions about site backup should be sent to Gizmodo, anyhow.
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I'm really amazed large websites such as the Gawker blogs and the Huffington Post are all hosted in a single data center.
Isn't this the age of the cloud and everything? I would have thought they'd simply serve from another location while the NY host is down, but apparently it's not set up in such a way that that is easily done.
Could Slashdot be wiped out by a single power failure as well?
Re:Best site backup plan? #Openthread (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the age of putting things in the "cloud" and forgetting that cloud is just someone else's data center(s). If you pay for services sufficient to stay online if the entire northeastern US goes offline, you at the very least get to sue your provider and probably win when it doesn't work. If you periodically go into your datacenter, er, "cloud" and flip the breaker and listen to all the fans die and your backup site X thousand miles away seamlessly takes over, you stand a really good chance of actually weathering a storm like this.
The people who are down didn't necessarily do it wrong. They may have made a quite rational decision that the cost of fully redundant geographically dispersed backup infrastructure and live failover testing is greater than the expected cost of downtime when you factor in the probability of it happening. If they didn't think about it, or just assumed their provider wouldn't screw it up and are now running around wetting their pants, then yeah, they did it wrong.
nothing was lost (Score:4, Funny)
...wind and water surges knocked off Gawker sites...
And nothing of value was lost.
Re:End climate silence (Score:4, Funny)
The “Fossil-Fueled Storm” Calls for an Immediate Crash Course on Climate Change...
Wasn't the storm powered by a combination of solar and hydro?
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That was caused by those crazy "green energy" nutjobs demanding that hurricanes be generated using entirely renewable energy (don't ignore wind as well as solar and hydro). They should have stuck with good old coal, oil, natural gas, or maybe nuclear power to create hurricanes.
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hydro didn't power it, the energy in the form of 'heat' powered it.
You're statement would be like saying Gas and roads power cars.
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The Atlantic [theatlantic.com] is running an short article on some old newsreels from previous NE Hurricanes (1935, 1955 and 1969).
Most interesting....
Re:End climate silence (Score:5, Informative)
...Sandy blows all the historic stats out of the water, including 1938 hurricane Bellport [ucar.edu]. Calls bullshit on the "75 year cycle storm" theory - where is the data to back that up?
While a couple of hurricane landfalls in Florida have produced pressures in this range, most cities in the Northeast have never reached such values, as is evident in this state-by-state roundup. The region’s lowest pressure on record occurred with the 1938 hurricane at Bellport, Long Island (946 hPa).
The Data (Score:5, Informative)
The 1938 Hurricane wasn't called Bellport, that's where the measurement you're referring to was made. We didn't name storms back then. That storm was known as 'The Long Island Express' or 'Yankee Clipper,' as it was an incredibly powerful storm that reached a ground track speed of 70mph and struck Long Island and New England practically without warning.
Back to your question, however... The data doesn't exist, because we only recently understood what these storms are and had the capability to make these measurements! Flying aircraft into the center of hurricanes and dropping scientific measuring equipment into them is a relatively recent phenomenon. Otherwise, you had to be (un)lucky enough to be a ship or a city that the eye passed over to get an accurate measurement.
That being said, there is a well-documented history of incredibly powerful storms hitting the New England area, going back to the 1600s.
As previously mentioned, the Long Island Express [wikipedia.org] in 1938, which killed 700 people and did $6 billion in damages (2004 dollars). It had a minimum pressure of 947Mbar, compared to Sandy's 946 at landfall. The Express made landfall as a Category 3, however, showing that central pressure isn't everything. It created a couple new islands by breaking new inlets through the existing barrier islands.
Before that was the 1893 New York Hurricane [wikipedia.org] with a minimum pressure of 952. Came ashore as a strong Category 1. Killed 38, uprooted a bunch of trees, smashed some buildings... Completely removed Hog Island from the map. But pretty calm compared to the Express.
The 1869 Saxby Gale [wikipedia.org] also messed up New England pretty good. Killed over 100. Actually created a new land bridge between Nova Scotia and Partridge Island.
The 1821 Norfolk and Long Island hurricane [wikipedia.org] flooded NYC as well. It managed a 13-foot storm surge at low tide, compared to Sandy's 9-foot, which hit at high tide. Between Category 3 and 4 strength.
There was also the Great September Gale of 1815 [wikipedia.org]. Category 3. Actually created the island of Long Beach, as it used to be part of the Rockaways peninsula. This was actually the storm that apparently lead to the theory that Hurricanes were vortices, instead of just large waves of rushing atmosphere.
The most impressive one, though, and the one we sadly have very little direct data for is probably the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635 [wikipedia.org]. It was most likely a Category 4, probably with a central pressure = 930Mbar. Simulations show a landfall pressure of 938Mbar in Long Island, which (if correct) would still beat Sandy for the all-time record above North Carolina. Damage was noticable 50 years later.
So there's the data we have. Doesn't look like a seventy-five year cycle to me. It does show, however, that such storms are unusual but not unheard of in recorded history. And, if I remember my studies correctly, there is evidence in the terrain of New England of even worse storms over the past thousand years.
What's changed? New England is much more densely populated than it used to be, our news is much more up-to-date and instantaneous, and our modeling and predictive capabilities are much better. The same was true of the Gulf Hurricanes a few years back (Katrina and Rita). Much of the areas that were devastated were areas that had been sparsely populated when they were previously destroyed (in Hurricane Camille, for instance), and had been spared destruction long enough for the memories to fade in people's minds.
Re:End climate silence (Score:4, Insightful)
end panic driven hyperbole (Score:2)
storms such as these are recurring phenomenon. in fact we were overdue for one like Sandy.
it has nothing to do with "climate change" nor anything to do with fossil fuel. It has to do with the star known as Sol....
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IP over Air Currents?
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It goes to show that these major broadcast networks prioritize their city or area.
They always have, but it is more noticeable when they call this "the Perfect Storm" or a "superhurricane" or whatever. Well... no, it's not. Perhaps it's the worst that NYC has seen in decades, but it was only a category 1.
Near the Gulf, we expect such a storm to directly impact us once every couple of years. The New York networks make mention of those storms during the weather segment, but then they'll go back and spend ha
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Nonstop coverage of something that doesn't affect me? Yes, because I couldn't watch real news.
By all means, please tell us what other news doesn't affect you, so we can remove it from the world's news post haste!
Here in Wisconsin, we'd be outside tailgating in a class 1 storm.
Yes, I imagine you get quite a few class 1 HURRICANES in Wisconsin, don't you? And the class just refers to the speed of the wind, not the size or how long it lasts. This is an extremely powerful storm, which would explain why all the weather forecasters say not to pay attention to what class this one is.
As for the boat, I'm no sailing expert but don't you typically not take low tech replicas of old ships sailing in a hurricane?
I'd hate to let the mere fact that you don't know anything about boats keep you from jud
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As for the boat, I'm no sailing expert but don't you typically not take low tech replicas of old ships sailing in a hurricane?
When they set sail, this storm wasn't expected to be anywhere near them. It was expected to trash Cuba and Haiti, then wander off west into empty ocean.
It wasn't until Thursday that the forecast showed it headed for New Jersey.
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Wander off east, rather.
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Uhh, we predicted the exact path of this storm last Monday, nearly a full week before it hit.
Who is "we"? The NHC's predicted track [noaa.gov] showed it headed for Bermuda until Wednesday.
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Nonstop coverage of something that doesn't affect me? Yes, because I couldn't watch real news.
How much of that "real news" actually does affect you?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seMaLEqotUw [youtube.com] - Transformer explosion at Consolidated Edison, Manhattan.
Seems like the vid may be looping. One hell of a flash though.
The BBC reported it as "a powerstation has exploded!"... Way to go for headline-grabbing misinformation (especially after the unfounded fearmongering over nuclear power stations potentially going to melt down that's been going on...)
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Did you not watch the video? Or are you nitpicking some particularly technical definition of "explosion" that you don't think the event quite met? Because it sure looked like an explosion to me.
I'm nitpicking that transformer != powerstation.
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Here we have some cloud and mild rain. Not exactly the end of days scenario we were told to expect.
Of course, you're in Seattle.
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they had mechanical problems and were dead in the water waiting for a tow
Ouch, its almost impossible to sink a ship that at least has steerage, but out of control you're in deep trouble if you get broadside to the waves or a big wave over the stern and you're done. Boats, even antique replicas, can survive almost anything headon other than hitting a lighthouse but from the side or back they're toast.
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Knocks Off Gawker Websites ... and nothing of value was lost.
Add the Huffington Post to your comment and you said exactly what I came here to say.