I'm in Manhattan and will be for the duration.

Incredibly important video.

I'm planning on driving from Raleigh, NC to back home in New England tomorrow morning. I didn't cancel my car trip because I figured storm would continue to 1) break NE and 2) it wouldn't make full landfall until tuesday. As of now it appears my predictions (and that of my amateur meteorology buddy) were correct. So we'll see what happens tomorrow on The Road. Hopefully it's less dystopian than the book of the same title.

Since they shut down the federal government in DC traffic should hopefully be negligible through that corridor.

America! I could teach you, but I'd have to charge.

Hoping our house in Delaware rides out the storm okay...we're in the safe(r) location of upstate NY.  We're kicking ourselves for not moving some more things out of the basement...

Allons-y!

"Whole Foods on Bowery is like a hipster-yuppie Thunderdome right now"

Having been through a couple of hurricane/tropical-storms on the east coast over the years, I'll take the occasional earthquake, thank-you-very-much - at least people don't go bonkers at the grocery store ahead of time.

Still not even raining in upstate NY...and so far the power outages around our house in DE have been minimal, so, so far, so good.  Looking like the storm is tracking a bit further north than they were initially calling for, so northern DE will be spared the brunt of it.

Allons-y!

It's raining now in upstate NY, but the wind is minimal...it looks like we're going to dodge the worst of the storm, if Weatherunderground can be believed.  Doesn't look like it's going to be as bad in DE as they were saying, either, but we'll see...Feel bad for folks on the coast though, Ocean City MD, Rehoboth DE and Atlantic City NJ all look like they're going to be wrecked by the time this is all over...

Allons-y!

Well, out here on the Prairies of Illinois we don't have storm surges, though I am worried about my nephew who is currently in Hampton Virginia working for the Obama campaign. What will be interesting is to see the level of complaints that come after the air clears. In 2011 Mayor Bloomberg was raked over the coals for shutting down the MTA transit system to prevent problems when Hurricane Irene passed over. It is the perennial problem for city officials, cry wolf or apologize after the disaster. One tonic for this is an interesting article from Popular Mechanics that was actually written before Irene, but wasn't printed until after. It is a pretty scary description of widespread damage to NYC. If this was what Bloomberg was hearing from his experts, I can see why he took drastic action, even if it meant people complaining. I also understand that at this hour (3:42 PM, EDT Oct. 29th) All transit has been suspended, this time by order of Gov. Cuomo.

If you need a bit of relief from the storm-induced tension, Boing-Boing has a reprint of a description of how hurricanes arise, written in 1763! The writer doesn't have the whole story (he doesn't deal much with temperature differentials) but he has some very canny descriptions of the whole phenomonen.

The really unusual thing about this storm is its slow northerly motion and the way it's moving to the west at high latitudes.  The GFS currently has the center of circulation tracking over Buffalo.

It isn't the only storm to behave like this this year, either.  The center of circulation of Isaac went up into Illinois, before being kicked to the south into the Gulf again, and heading for Mexico, still as identifiably the same circulation.  And then there was Nadine, the fourth-longest lived Atlantic system, which basically spent two weeks wandering in near the same spot at fairly high latitudes.  There were other storms which moved unusually slowly, too.

It's the cold air of the Arctic which pulls storms to the east in mid-latitudes in the North Hemisphere, and that hasn't been as cold lately, which has resulted in much slower motion of systems to the east.  It will be interesting to see if this continues to the same extent for hurricane tracks.  If it does, it should mean more hurricanes making landfall in the Middle Atlantic and Northeast and heading inland.

At least with only moderately warm water, wind shear, and dry air blowing off of land at the surface, storms haven't had an easy time turning into major hurricanes this year.

Well, the storm was a complete flop here in upstate NY...the local schools and the college my wife works at all cancelled classes today, but the power's on and the rain and wind have stopped.  So, day off for my wife, won't complain about that, but the whole thing didn't amount to a hill of beans.  If the power company's online system can be believed, our house in Delaware never lost power (although the neighborhood one block over did - we got lucky).  Waiting until later this morning to call our neighbor and check in, but since he hasn't called us I'm assuming no trees fell down and we dodged the bullet.  

Allons-y!

Another dramatic story: A hospital in NYC was evacuated after both the main and backup generators failed. Among the patients moved were a number of newborn infants in the Intensive Care unit.

BTW, my nephew in Virgina was evacuated from coastal Hampton to inland Richmond along with the rest of the Obama staffers, and all is well.

Are they trying to cause riots?

Here's a bunch of pictures showing Sandy's effects on points as far away as Toronto.  Found the link on fark.

I am shitfitter; hear me roar.

Well, the recriminations are beginning. The borough president of Staten Island feels that the city has abandoned his area, and he also attacked the Red Cross for ignoring them. The decision to continue this weekend's Marathon Race is a particular sticking point. He also said that they shouldn't pump out the tunnels to New Jersey until they pump out the Staten Islanders.

Of course, this is the difficult calculus that any mayor would have to make. Any extra rescue crews sent to Staten Island mean fewer crews in Brooklyn or the Bronx. Would you rather have the Island president howling at you or one of Rev. Al Sharpton's rent-a-mobs?