Hurricane Irene: $7 billion in damages, on to Canada

Irene has now been downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm. As it nears the Canadian border, it is showing sustained winds of 50 mph (80 km/h) and is moving north-northeast at approximately 26mph (42 km/h). Forecasters expect the storm to reach Canada late Sunday or early Monday.

At the moment, the tallies for the damages caused by the storm stand at 15 dead and 3.9 million homes and businesses without power. The New York transit is still shut down as workers inspect the system. Airports are to re-open on Monday but a return to regular flights will be dependent on when transit starts up. Considering that everyone must wait for the waters to recede, it may not be until later on Monday that the subway system gets back to work.

While the storm has not yet completely left the area, people are starting to try and assess the damages. Power out, trees knocked down, flooding, what will the final price tag be? So far, the consensus of opinion is that the cost of the storm will be billions of dollars, not tens of billions of dollars.

Curiously enough, there may be some political fallout due to the preparations made for the storm. It seems that the public is starting to think that authorities overreacted. Considering what happened or what didn’t happen with Katrina, are those in charge concerned about not doing enough? Whatever the case, New York was spared any major calamity and Irene turned out to be something of a non event.

The New York Times had an article pegging the cost of Irene at $7 billion. At that amount, the article went on to point out that would make Irene in the top ten costliest catastrophes in American history. Clocking in at number one was Katrina with a price tag of $45 billion. Number two was 9/11, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with a cost of $23 billion.

Time: up to the minute storm tracking

ABC is offering an up-to-date map of the storm, Storm Tracker, which now labels Irene as a tropical storm.

Published on Aug 28, 2011 by AFP

Damage along east coast after Hurricane Irene

Communities along the east coast assessed damage caused by Hurricane Irene, a massive storm that killed more than a dozen people, triggered widespread flooding, and cut power supplies to well over a million customers.

References

Wikipedia: Hurricane Irene (2011)

Hurricane Irene is a North Atlantic tropical cyclone that inflicted extensive damage on Caribbean nations before making landfall in North Carolina, on the East Coast of the United States. The ninth named storm, the first hurricane and the first major hurricane of the 2011 season, Irene formed from a well-defined Atlantic tropical wave that showed signs of organization east of the Lesser Antilles.

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