Quote:
Originally Posted by UntoHim
Let's all pray for the folks affected by the serious flooding!
There are several posters here that live in the affected area. Maybe they could pop in for a second and give us a report.
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I took a tour of Queens today. I saw about 6 trees that had fallen on houses, maybe more, but certainly less than 10. I saw some areas that were without electricity, but only small areas. I did not see any significant flooding. I went to the Rockaways, one of the mandatory evacuation zones, and did not see any damage at all. I did see people who evacuated on Saturday returning today.
For the last 2 days I have worked in one of the evacuation sites and I would say that NY was extremely well prepared for this emergency. I was called to come in on Friday, and spent the night putting supplies into place (cots, water, food, setting up nursing stations). When I returned the second night the numbers had swollen to a thousand people, 400 more than we were intended to handle and yet they were managing. I was very impressed.
We could never have handled this without the help of the evacuees, in one case I heard 50 evacuees had helped them to rapidly set up an area for the extra people.
This morning as my shift ended the National guard came and helped us. Having extra men on site is very helpful. All of the evacuees were under huge stress wondering if their homes were safe from the storm and from looters.
One thing they did very well was they shut down the mass transit system with enough time to then go and send the buses to the evacuation zones to transport people to the Evacuation centers. These buses were left parked by the Evac ctr. I imagine that today these same buses were used to bring the people back to their homes (I wasn't there at the time, but I did see these same buses dropping off people when I visited the Rockaways).