Just frickin great.

[Roo]

SPOTTED: Shark swimming in the streets of Wildwood, NJ (View #2) #Sandy #hurricane

And people around here said the flooding was bad



Any news from Sue??

[Gob]

Have any of the religious nutbags stated Sandy is god's way of showing he hates homosexuals yet?

[Gob]

Why did I bother asking?

A right-wing Christian preacher has blamed the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) communities for Hurricane Sandy hitting the American east coast.

In a wordy, and occasionally rambling blog on his website, Chaplain John McTernan linked Hurricane Sandy, and a number of other recent weather-related trends and natural disasters, on LGBT community and President Barack Obama’s backing of marriage equality.

While most of McTernan’s wrath is directed at Obama, he even blamed GOP candidate Mitt Romney, too.

"God is systematically destroying America,” McTernan wrote, adding: “Just look at what has happened this year.

According to the Huffington Post, calling Hurricane Sandy "the most powerful hurricane on record" that "could do catastrophic damage to the entire Northeast," McTernan wrote: "Obama is 100 percent behind the Muslim Brotherhood which has vowed to destroy Israel and take Jerusalem. Both candidates are pro-homosexual and are behind the homosexual agenda. America is under political judgment and the church does not know it!

http://defendproclaimthefaith.org/blog/

[Guinevere]

Where are BigRR (I think he is in Jersey) and oldr (on Long Island, also right in the bullseye)?????? Can someone check. I have email out to Sue.

[Sue U]

Thanks, Guin, got your email while I was typing this post.

Hahahaha, sharks swimming through Wildwood! Wildwood is where all the high school kids and Quebecois go down the shore. Too bad the season's over.

The wind was howling overnight but I didn't see any more damage today than what we had yesterday afternoon. Rain stopped this morning. We spent the day picking up fallen branches and hacking at the maple tree top lying in our back yard. Some friends from up the street stopped by with their kids since they were all going stir crazy, so we took some time to have tea and cookies while the kids ran around the yard chasing the chickens and climbing in the fallen trees. Starting two houses over from their house, the power was out in that part of the neighborhood, after a tree came down last night taking the wires with it. Another neighbor up the street came down to use our internet access. Verizon (our service) was working, but Comcast (his) was down. School is canceled again tomorrow due to power outages at some schools, but I'm sure I'll be back at work It's really been a lovely couple of days off.

And Jim, I resent that crack about my Monopoly strategy! What I did do was skip out on the rent when my daughters weren't paying attention to who was landing where.

[dales]

Have any of the religious nutbags stated Sandy is god's way of showing he hates homosexuals yet?

I dunno....................SF won the world series.

[Gob]

I'm sure none will object. I had an e-mail from Andy H who was asking after people in the storm's path,. I've cut and pasted some of the more relevant quotes from here, and passed them on, with a link to this thread.

[Crackpot]

Have any of the religious nutbags stated Sandy is god's way of showing he hates homosexuals yet?

I heard those lovely people at Westboro have already voiced an opinion.

[Gob]

Have any of the religious nutbags stated Sandy is god's way of showing he hates homosexuals yet?

I heard those lovely people at Westboro have already voiced an opinion.

It would be nice if some one went over and beat the living crap out of them. You see, if the article below really does illustrate the Phelp's god, and how he deals with homosexuals, then he's not a god anyone should worship in any case.

He's an incompetant twat

They stepped in the wrong puddle. They walked the dog at the wrong moment. Or they did exactly what all the emergency experts instructed them to do - they huddled inside and waited for its anger to go away.
They did what dog owners do. They walked the dog. Jessie Streich-Kest was 24 and Jacob Vogelman was 23. They were friends living in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. About 8pm on Monday, during the howling viciousness of the storm, they ventured out with her dog, Max, a white pit bull mix.
The storm found them all.

Hurricane Sandy, in the wily and savage way of natural disasters, expressed its full assortment of lethal methods as it hit the US East Coast on Monday night. In its howling sweep, the authorities said the storm claimed at least 39 lives in eight states.

They were infants and adolescents, people embarking on careers and those looking back on them — the ones who paid the price of this most destructive of storms. In Franklin Township, Pennsylvania, an eight-year-old boy was crushed by a tree when he ran outside to check on his family's calves. A woman died in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, when her car slid off a snowy road.

There were 18 deaths reported in New York City, where the toll was heaviest, and five more fatalities elsewhere in the state.

Most of all, it was the trees. Uprooted or cracked by the furious winds, they became weapons that flattened cars, houses and pedestrians.

But also, a woman was killed by a severed power line. A man was swept by flooding waters out of his house and through the glass of a store. The power blinked off for a 75-year-old woman on a respirator, and a heart attack killed her. Three people, aged 50, 57 and 72, were found drowned in separate basements in the Rockaways.

And the storm left its share of mysteries.

A parking lot attendant was found dead in a subterranean parking garage in TriBeCa, the precise cause unclear. The body of an unidentified woman washed up on Georgia Beach in East Hampton, on Long Island.

Some people died and no one knew, not for hours, not until the storm backed away and moved on.

They did what dog owners do. They walked the dog. Jessie Streich-Kest was 24 and Jacob Vogelman was 23. They were friends living in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. About 8pm on Monday, during the howling viciousness of the storm, they ventured out with her dog, Max, a white pit bull mix.

According to his LinkedIn page, Vogelman was a student at Brooklyn College. Streich-Kest grew up with her family in Prospect Park South and was a teaching fellow. She had just started teaching at the Bushwick School for Social Justice, a high school. She had gone through her first parent-teacher conference last week, and was laughing about it afterward swith her parents and their friends.

Her father, Jon Kest, is executive director of New York Communities for Change and a longtime activist who has led the battle to unionise carwashes and supermarkets across the city, as well as being a leader in the battle for paid sick days. His daughter was herself a bit of an activist, and helped organise Stop Horse Abuse, which was aimed at the carriage horses in Central Park.

In the wind and the rain, the friends strode along Ditmas Avenue, a block of old Victorians and similar sprawling homes beneath a canopy of vast maples, oaks and lindens.

In rapid succession, perhaps within a space of no more than a half-hour, the brutal winds knocked down three trees. There was a booming sound as one fell. Their roots tore up massive chunks of sidewalk.

One of the trees on the south side of the block crushed Streich-Kest and Vogelman. Their bodies were not found until Tuesday morning.

No one realised that the trees had hit anyone.

"We had no idea," said Pat Atia, whose house faces out onto Ditmas Avenue on the block between East 17th and East 18th Streets.

The dog was bruised and was being cared for at an animal shelter.

He wanted pictures. In Richmond Hill, Queens, a power line the length of a block on 105th Avenue between 134th and 135th Streets snapped and crumpled to the ground. The frayed end of the line began sparking wildly.

About 8pm on Monday, according to witnesses and a friend, a 23-year-old woman who lived at the end of the block came out to her driveway clutching a camera.

Her name was Lauren Abraham, and she went by Lola. She was a licensed make-up artist who maintained a makeup studio in the basement of the house, which her parents owned. She used the third floor as a makeshift photography studio for shots to advertise her makeup skills.

Elpidio Nunez, a close friend for 10 years, said she was passionate about making her friends look gorgeous before a night out at the clubs.

"She was a beautiful girl, very carefree, she was never depressed," Nunez said on the steps to her house. "I had never seen her cry."

Tamica Penn, 22, her best friend, said, "If you ever needed to talk, she would be there."

The two had spoken at 7 pm. The line was still sparking as Abraham walked down the driveway and into the rain-drenched street. She came into contact with one end of the snapped wire.

She caught fire.

A half-dozen or so witnesses watched in utter horror. Nunez woke up in the middle of the night. He had a sick feeling that something was very wrong. He sent text messages to Abraham to see if she was all right. Nothing came back.

They did what they were supposed to, what they thought would get them safely through it.

North Salem in upper Westchester County is horse country, and it has estates owned by the well-off, but it is mainly a working-class town dotted with winterised bungalows.

Jack Baumler, 11, was a sixth-grader known as a star shortstop in the local Little League. Michael Robson, 13, was his best friend and neighbour down Bonnieview Street.

Valerie Baumler, Jack's mother, had a wood-frame cottage along Peach Lake, and the boys were spending the night together, along with two other boys.

They were watching television, the winds pounding outside, when the hurricane uprooted an enormous tree. It ripped through the roof of the compact cottage. Jack and Michael were killed.

"I lost my son," Valerie Baumler wailed to Danny Seymour, Jack's uncle, as she clasped him. "I lost my son."

The two other boys escaped with mild injuries. Baumler was unhurt.

"We lost two beautiful young boys last night," said Seymour, choking back tears outside the Baumler house. "Our hearts are broken; the pain is raw. We believe faith will carry us through. North Salem has a huge heart and they will wrap their arms around these two families."

Seymour was helping neighbours clear out the furnishings of the house. It was so severely damaged that a local policeman guarding the street said it may have to be demolished. On Tuesday morning, the tree was still deeply wedged into the cottage.

They did not want to get robbed.

Michael Abruzzo, 43, had lived for several years across the street from George Dresch and his family at the end of Yetman Avenue on Staten Island. The families attended the same church. They had each other's back.

"Good people" is how Abruzzo summed them up. "They watched our dog every time we went on vacation."

Abruzzo, an electrician who had lived in the neighbourhood for a decade, saw Dresch on Monday. Heeding warnings, Abruzzo had evacuated with his wife and two daughters on Sunday. He had returned to his house briefly to tackle some final chores.

Dresch told him that he, his wife, Pat, and their daughter, Angela, were going to sit out the storm. They weren't going anyplace.

"I said, 'Dude, why don't you go?"' Abruzzo told him. "'What's the point?"'

In advance of Tropical Storm Irene last year, both families had left, and Abruzzo said that their houses had been burgled. He thought that might be why Dresch wouldn't leave.

The storm punished Yetman Avenue. Huge waves crashed over it. The hurricane demolished both families' homes, as well as the homes of next door neighbours.

On Tuesday, all that remained of the Abruzzo home was its foundation. The Dresch home was a gaping hole in the ground.

The body of Angela Dresch, 13, was found about 100 yards from her house on Manhattan Street. Her mother was found, alive, a block to the north, and has been taken to hospital.

George Dresch is missing. On Tuesday afternoon, rescue workers spied a male body trapped in debris sandwiched between two nearby houses. They were trying to remove it so they could identify it.

"I was just with him," Abruzzo said in disbelief. "I told him to get out."



Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weath ... z2Aq108iVN

[Lord Jim]

I heard those lovely people at Westboro have already voiced an opinion.

I think that what has happened is that some of these tiny, off-brand pseudo-churches have gotten media-savvy about this stuff...(The Westboro cult certainly has)

They know that when a disaster like this occurs, a lot of folks in the media are going to be on the look out for "religious" nut pronouncements of this sort, so they obligingly provide them in order to get a little publicity for themselves...(and hopefully a few donations from the like-minded wing-nuts who hear about them.)

[alice]

oldr-n-wsr is in an area that seems to have lost 90% power, according to the reports. So hopefuly he's okay but just not able to tell us.

It's good to hear from Sue etc. I've been looking in to see how you all were going with this, but just didn't log in to say anything. i get very confused with where people live - I am somewhat dyselxic when it comes to geography matters, so I find it very hard to 'place' the locations and to remember where they are. So I was generally worried about anyone who was living anywhere in America until I started to get more of an idea of who was in the worst hit areas from the comments being made.

I've found this site very helpful http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national ... tes/58454/#
They've had updates all the way through. And the google map, and a couple of other sites. I've been trying to keep an eye on it all.

I have another friend (not from this board) who lives in Rochester. The google three day tracking seemed to suggest they were going to be directly in the path, but they've said they were okay - no power outages and no major damage to them or anyone in their area.

I don't have much, but if anyone over there needs a bit of help, let me know and I'll send a little bit over. Now or while you're trying to get back on your feet. I don't have huge amounts, but I can help in little bits here and there. Wish I could help more.

[Sue U]

i get very confused with where people live - I am somewhat dyselxic when it comes to geography matters, so I find it very hard to 'place' the locations and to remember where they are. So I was generally worried about anyone who was living anywhere in America until I started to get more of an idea of who was in the worst hit areas from the comments being made.

So you know who's where, I live in southern New Jersey about 50 miles northwest of Atlantic City and just outside Philadelphia. Big RR lives in northern New Jersey, about 25 miles west of New York City. oldr_n_wsr lives out on Long Island, I can never remember if it's in the Farmingdale or Farmingville area (but they're not that far apart). Guin lives on a spit of land sticking out into the Atlantic Ocean near Boston.

Although the eye of the storm passed pretty much right over me, we got little damage around here. Some minor flooding, lots of trees down. Folks farther to the north -- in BigRR's region in particular -- got a lot worse, from what I have seen on the news. Several electric generating stations along the major rivers in North Jersey were flooded out, knocking out power. And of course the Jersey Shore, where we go for summer holidays (not the awful TV show), was devastated. I'm sure you've seen the pictures. New York City looks like it got hit pretty hard with flooding, especially in the subways and in lower Manhattan. My brother in Brooklyn had a tree fall on his car, and there were lots of large trees down in his neighborhood. I am concerned for oldr, since there was severe flooding in parts of Long Island, but I think he may be inland enough to have avoided the storm surge.

[Lord Jim]

Thanks for that excellent update on the locale of the Plan Ber's Sue....

My brother in Brooklyn had a tree fall on his car

Well, I guess that's one tree that's no longer growing in Brooklyn....*








*(Yes, I know that was terrible; I'm already embarrassed I wrote it.... )

[Guinevere]

i get very confused with where people live - I am somewhat dyselxic when it comes to geography matters, so I find it very hard to 'place' the locations and to remember where they are. So I was generally worried about anyone who was living anywhere in America until I started to get more of an idea of who was in the worst hit areas from the comments being made.

So you know who's where, I live in southern New Jersey about 50 miles northwest of Atlantic City and just outside Philadelphia. Big RR lives in northern New Jersey, about 25 miles west of New York City. oldr_n_wsr lives out on Long Island, I can never remember if it's in the Farmingdale or Farmingville area (but they're not that far apart). Guin lives on a spit of land sticking out into the Atlantic Ocean near Boston.

Although the eye of the storm passed pretty much right over me, we got little damage around here. Some minor flooding, lots of trees down. Folks farther to the north -- in BigRR's region in particular -- got a lot worse, from what I have seen on the news. Several electric generating stations along the major rivers in North Jersey were flooded out, knocking out power. And of course the Jersey Shore, where we go for summer holidays (not the awful TV show), was devastated. I'm sure you've seen the pictures. New York City looks like it got hit pretty hard with flooding, especially in the subways and in lower Manhattan. My brother in Brooklyn had a tree fall on his car, and there were lots of large trees down in his neighborhood. I am concerned for oldr, since there was severe flooding in parts of Long Island, but I think he may be inland enough to have avoided the storm surge.

Well, technically it's a penisula, not a spit, and it sticks out into Massachusetts Bay not the open Atlantic, but other than that I adopt Sue's descriptions.

[Sue U]

Looks like some spit in the ocean to me.

[Econoline]

Just an addendum--IIRC RayThom lives in the Philadelphia area. And Jarlaxle lives somewhere in New England (MA? RI?), I'm not sure exactly where. (I don't think he's ever specifically said, and I don't think he wants us to know.)

SPOTTED: Shark swimming in the streets of Wildwood, NJ (View #2) #Sandy #hurricane

[Insert random generic lawyer joke here.]

[Lord Jim]

Yes Econo, when I first saw that picture, I was inclined to make the obligatory lawyer joke...("looks like one of the local attorneys decided to go for a swim"...)

(But since at the time we weren't sure of Sue's well being, good taste got the better of me.... )

[Lord Jim]

And with 2.1 million households still without power, the Jersey Shore more or less decimated, and an estimated 20,000 people stranded in Hoboken alone from the flooding, I'm also observing a personal moratorium on New Jersey jokes....

[rubato]

Isn't Martha Stewart from Nutly NJ? Maybe its a relative looking for a hand out!

yrs,
rubato

[Sue U]

SPOTTED: Shark swimming in the streets of Wildwood, NJ (View #2) #Sandy #hurricane

[Insert random generic lawyer joke here.]

There aren't that many lawyers in Wildwood, and I know most of them. Hey,.that's Joe Grassi!