The good news...Hurricane Irene is greatly weakened, down to a Category 3 Hurricane, it is lumbering along at around 14 miles per hour as a Cat 1 Hurricane as it makes its way up the East coast toward New York. That said, lets not get lulled into a false sense of security...this Hurricane is still packing wind gusts at over 80 MPH, and is some 500 miles wide carrying a whole lot of rain.It is easy to assume we have dodged a bullet, and in some ways we have...especially the folks in New York City...a Cat 2 or 3 Hurricane hitting lower Manhattan and other low lying areas in the five boroughs of New York would have been catastrophic...a Category 1 still does not look pretty, and is going to do a whole lot of damage. Above is the most recent map, the red showing the areas targeted for Hurricane damage...New York is smack dab in that red area, and if you go out from that center 250 miles (diameter of storm), Sullivan County and our small hamlet of Mountaindale are going to be seeing almost 12 hours of gusting winds, heavy rains and all that comes with those two dangers, such as falling trees, snapped power lines, and flooding.
Get your Hurricane Readiness kit ready, and prepare to hunker down...who knows, maybe we will all wake up on Monday after this storm has passed, and have a good laugh over so much ado over nothing, be thankful that Hurricane Irene passing us by without doing much harm.
