MARKET WATCH COLUMNIST
It was the prudent thing to do.
Hurricane Bill was roaring northward. Who felt like being stubborn now? Swimmers would be ordered out of the water. Long Island’s beaches would have to be closed.
Waves were already pounding the shoreline, 8 to 10 feet. Rip currents. Undertows. Powerful force was clearly gathering Out There.
What would all this wind and salt water do the fragile sands of Robert Moses State Park? No one could say for certain, but less erosion didn’t look like a possibility.
Up and down the South Shore, the calculation was the same. At Long Beach. On the town beaches of Islip and Oyster Bay. Across to Fire Island National Seashore. Clear out to the Hamptons and Montauk.
The potential fury was unmistakable, and no one was messing around.
And all this from a storm not expected to pass closer than 300 miles east of Montauk Point.
For James Callahan of Nassau County’s emergency management office, Bill is mainly a practice storm – one he hopes won’t change course. “We don’t expect it to,” he said. “But it’s a great exercise for us.”
But if this is what the storm can do from a couple of hundred miles out, what would a straight-on hit feel like around here?
What could the winds blow over? What could the storm surge knock down? Would the citizens heed the warnings? What would our lives look like when the damage was done?
Blow, Bill, blow.
Out in the Atlantic.
We got a taste this time, and we didn’t’ much like it.
Don’t come closer, please.
IN QUOTES
1. Fave’s “retirement”
2. Starbuck’s “price adjustment”
3. “Female” track star
4. “Cash” for clunkers
5. Health-care “debate”
TOP THIS CORRECTION: From our former corporate cousins at the Los Angeles Times: “The Prime-Time TV grid in Thursday’s Calendar section mistakenly listed MTV’s ‘Jackass’ show on the MSNBC cable schedule at 7 and 10 p.m. where instead MSNBC’s ‘Countdown With Keith Olbermann’ should have been listed.” Accident – or slur?
‘NET FAME: It had to happen. Some horrible fate would eventually befall Obama Girl, the I-got-a-crush-on-you-know-who character created last year by YouTube sensation Amber Lee Ettinger and her streaming-video Svengalis at barelypolitical.com. But you had no idea – did you? – who’d be drafted to do the dirty deed. I confess: I “killed” Obama Girl. Peruse the evidence at tinyurl.com/badellis.
ASKED AND UNANSWERED: After “Cash for Clunkers,” doesn’t LIPA need a snappy name for its turn-in-an-old-refrigerator campaign? Ice for Iceboxes? Funds for Frigidaires? Whatcha got for me? . . . What’s the best way to flatter Dick Ravitch now? Call him Mr. Coulda-Woulda-Shoulda-Been Lieutenant Governor? . . . The Tax Revolt Party? With big branding challenges, would the national Republicans like to borrow the TRP name from their Nassau County cohorts? . . . With the Obamas heading up to Martha’s Vineyard, are some Democratic East Enders feeling slight pangs of “Hey, what about our pricey beach resort?” . . . There are several messages in the $1 million grandma-bilking prosecution of ex-Shelter Island Town Justice Katherine Pope and her husband, Wayne, but isn’t this a key one: A respectable-sounding judicial title can mean less than you think? . . . Short-shorts-gate? Is anyone really upset over Michelle Obama’s bare legs? The woman was vacation-bound! . . . He’s a 6-foot-4, 195-pound, hard-hurling lefthanded pitcher. But at Citi Field, didn’t 18-year-old Ward Melville grad Steven Matz seem not so long out of Little League as he signed on as the newest New York Met? Talk about a big-league kid! . . . You have any idea what you’ll be paying for heating oil this winter? Hardly anyone on Long Island does . . . Where do Garden City’s Helen and Joseph Tobin get their remarkable inner peace? Their 21-year-old son, Mark, was killed in the Lockerbie bombing. Yet they express no rancor and seek no revenge against terminally ill bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi. Inspirational.
Related posts
