Between the Relief and a Storm of Criticism

For the majority of the North Americans threatened, yesterday’s apocalyptic announcement resulted in merely a gray morning with a few raindrops on the window, so timid that, shortly before midday, they had already dried, leaving a tempting invitation to go outside. Where was Irene, the storm that was supposed to make history and to wreak its daunting wave of destruction along the East Coast?

By midmorning the sky had cleared up, but the hurricane, already degraded to a tropical storm, persisted in the political televised speeches. Newscasters wearing rain coats broadcasted with a serious face, paradoxically surrounded by people wearing shorts who strolled by at ease and waved at the cameras while the politicians continued their frightening speeches.

The soothing messages from official meteorologic and catastrophe monitoring agencies were worthless.

“Things look better than we anticipated,” admitted FEMA on that same day, changing their speech radically from the one the Friday before when they had talked about between 3 and 6.5 feet of water in the sidewalks of Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Soon the debate about whether the politicians, from Barack Obama on down, had overreacted about the risks.

A large part of those accusations fell upon New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who paralyzed public transportation hours before the first raindrop fell.

Social networks were on fire. Thousands of retailers and businessmen complained about the losses resulting from the inactivity of the weekend.

“Do you believe there was an overreaction from the authorities on the storm?” was the main question of [many] poll[s] launched yesterday.

At a political level, the debate was bound to the past: Republicans could say little, trapped, still, by the stigma of former President George W. Bush’s delay in his reaction to the disaster of hurricane Katrina. Meanwhile, the Democrats were relieved by the saying that claims, “It’s better to be safe than sorry.”

The whole weight of the issue was upon their shoulders. Bloomberg had already been criticized for being somewhat inactive during last winter’s huge snowfalls, while Obama was blamed for his slow reflexes on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Just like hundreds of community leaders, they were not willing to trip over the same stone again. The next few days will tell if they have tripped over another one entirely. Meanwhile, without waiting for any special authorization, Broadway shows announced that they would return to their regular activities, the same as Wall Street.

But not everything was bad news. Many saw this hysteria as a chance to make a profit, among them insurance companies, whose sales rose, as well as cleaning services, which increased their publicity during the shows that described the [impending] horror. Taxi drivers also made their fortune because of paralyzed public transportation.

Much of the debate centers around the bid for public funds. In southern states, there is fear that the huge preventive operations surrounding Irene will delay funding for the reconstruction of cities actually hit by natural disasters. One example is Joplin, Missouri, which was struck by a series of tornadoes that left 123 fatalities.

Irene’s passing left a feeling of relief. Millions of North Americans went on a walk yesterday in a sort of “post-storm tourism,” wondering to what extent they had been blessed by luck or manipulated by exaggeration.