The hurricane is coming! The hurricane is coming!

We live inland so, when a hurricane arrives, I don’t really think too much of it other than that we’re in for a couple of rainy, crappy days.

Back in the eighties, Hurricane Gloria was supposed to hit Manhattan head on. It was one of those much ado about nothing days. I was driving a cab back then and it turned out to be a wet Friday where Manhattan was deserted because everyone was afraid of the storm. The most notable thing that happened was Howard Stern got fired from WNBC radio that day.

Then there was Hurricane Floyd back in ’99...



Floyd too was one of those storms that everyone got warnings about.

I know I was working in the city that day and like a lot of New Yorkers, left work early to get home before the storm hit. After a train ride where people were crammed standing the length of the car, we wound up taking a cab home from the train station in the rain (taking the grand tour of Ossining). I know we drove down to White Plains (so I could get my comics jones taken care of) and even had time for a hot dog over at the Little Spot in North White Plains. The rain would come in waves, there would be a heavy, heavy wave and then it would seem to let up.

I was worried during the drive back to the house, and when we got off the parkway in Millwood there was quite a bit of flooding (and the prerequisite dumbass driving). We made it home though and I alternately fought to keep our basement from flooding and watched an increasing number of cars get stuck in the small lake that was forming in front of the neighbors house which is downgrade from us and sits in a low point in the neighborhood.

Turned out there was about 14" of rain in just a few hours. During the battle with the torrent, I had an ongoing fight with my father (76 at the time), who insisted on going out to meet his often dinner companion for a meal even though the weather was really, really bad and getting worse.

He managed to slip away while I was busy fighting to keep our basement from flooding in the back. He returned an hour later after finding the shopping center he had been on his way to was submerged (lord only knows what the drive had been like). His dinner companion was stranded and wound up back at our house as well.

Here is where the problem came in, my father in his infinite wisdom (you cannot hear my voice laden with sarcasm), who had decided both he and his friend should go out and meet in this mess against all better judgment, now didn’t want his friend to spend the night in the house lest she get the wrong idea.

Not sleep in the same bed or anything like that, just get a foothold into the house where she might think he wanted to invite her in somehow. I wound up driving her home from our house to hers which under normal circumstances would take under 5 minutes.

It took over 45 minutes.

In that time I went around the neighborhood and saw quite a few of the neighbors houses under water. I don’t want you to get the impression people’s basements were flooded (they were), we’re talking about having problems if there wasn’t a second floor on your house. Streets were lakes (or rivers). I had never seen anything like it and around here they called it something like a 100 year event (the flood).

Down by the train station I heard a story later of someone who was driving up the hill in a minivan when there was just a wave of muddy water that descended down the street washing the person’s van along in the flow (I can’t begin to imagine how horrifying that must have been).

All I know is after weaving my way through a very circuitous route (which included going the wrong way down a major highway at one point), avoiding downed power lines and trees, I found myself in one spot driving on a road where the water was over the hood of the car. I’m still not sure how I managed to get through it all. I had to go through the water and then back as there was one point in the road where the road dipped as a bridge crossed over what in normal times would be a small brook.

I was very happy when I got home. The train was out for several days as the tracks got washed out. The thing that’s always amazing is how the people in Manhattan are so insulated from anything remotely weather related, they can’t understand when there are snowstorms or floods and how, yes, very near to the city, peoples lives are in fact affected by the weather.

Anyway, even after all that, I still take the hurricane stuff with a grain of salt. Two towns up and two towns down they didn’t have anywhere near the rain we got during Floyd so, go figure.