Brent Harold / Journal

Irene was never the east coast Katrina the media tried their best to hype her into. She wasn’t even a hurricane when she made landfall in New York City. But she had impressive reach. The wind was blowing almost as hard here, 200 miles to the east, as it was there.
She was not Katrina, not Bob; some of our nor’easters blow this hard. But winds blowing (according to the Wellfleet harbormaster’s anemometer) steadily in the mid 40s with periods of 50s and gusts over 60 command respect. Irene left an impressive number of people without power.
This storm was a Rorshach test, many things to many people.
For TV weathermen and women, Irene provided sufficient material to build into one of those stories that takes over the news for days. Trying to do justice to the opportunity, one anchor I tuned into kept insisting o n a landfall in New London that would have made his bailiwick, eastern Mass, the big story, almost to the moment Irene actually went on shore in the Big Apple, where the computer models had pretty much unanimously agreed for days it would.
For politicians Irene was an occasion to win points by intoning measured, paternal concern for this natural disaster which was, like themselves, above politics.
MoveOn, in an email exaggerating the storm to apocalyptic status, saw it as “an urgent opportunity to make sure millions of people make the connection between climate change and severe weather.” The majority of meteorologists I’ve read seem to think that there is no evidence that the busy hurricane seasons recently is anything more than a long-noted cyclical phenomenon. The historic floods have been the worst thing about Irene, but the records broken, or not quite broken, were set, many of them, 75 years ago. New York had worse hurricanes in the 1950s. And of course New England’s real Katrina is the nameless hurricane of 1938 .
None of this is to say that climate change isn’t a reality but it doesn’t do its image any good to have a lot of unsubstantiated claims made in its behalf, as if climate change itself were in need of hyping.
Amazingly, no one (that I know of) claimed that Irene was a terrorist attack on the American way of life. But Michele Bachmann, simply putting two and two together in that way she has, did point out that Irene pretty clearly showed what God thinks of those big spenders in DC.
For those of us who have fancied ourselves the sort of hearty, adventuresome type who welcomes a return to a simpler time of candles, ice-filled coolers, and more peaceful nights, Irene was a chance to discover the limits of camping out in one’s house.
The minute power went out and I could no longer watch the storm on TV I found myself desolate. Here we were being pounded by the worsening storm, its winds getting ever wilder, and I had lost contact with the big picture. I yearned to know where that center was now, what the central pressure had risen to, just how hard the wind was blowing elsewhere. (If a storm rages around you but you can’t google it, does it really exist?)
As for that peaceful nighttime that used to compensate for loss of power in a big storm, now the night is filled with the dull roar of generators all over town.
NStar’s responsiveness has been an issue, again. I called on Tuesday morning to get some sense of why we didn’t have power when a lot of friends around town did have theirs. Any slight paranoia to my curiosity was implicitly rebuked by an automated message informing me that I had many thousands of fellow-sufferers and if power were still out by September third (which would have meant a full week without) I should feel free to give them a call.
When on Wednesday, after 63 hours of involuntary camping adventure, the power went back on, NStar left a message informing me that it was back on. They added that the reason for the problem, in case I had been wondering, was bad weather. It does seem that their communication skills could use a little honing.