If you live on the east coast you just learned how much luck or fate has to do with your life. A week ago we were told about a storm that was going to hit the east coast from Florida to Maine, maybe. The maybe had to do with the various weather models that were all possible. I‘m not a psychologist but I assume that the study of how people behave when they are faced with a potential crisis, not a known crisis would be exceedingly interesting.
I had just returned from a trip to Florida to see my family and started the process of storm preparation. As the computer models began to create a consensus of similar routes the potential for a terrible storm increased. A year ago we (in New York’s Mid Hudson Valley) had what was called the “storm of the century” with Hurricane Irene and for many of us a storm bigger and badder seems both impossible and inevitable. I still can remember watching the pumps in my basement barely keep up water flow. Now we're now seeing predictions of a much worse storm. One Thousand miles in diameter was the size of Sandy.
Having business in western New York I still pass through towns like Prattsville that are all but gone. Was it possible that our hundred year storm was going to be an annual thing? This new monster had hundred mile an hour winds and I was more fearful of those winds then even the expected high rainfall amounts. For the first time ever I decided that my usual preparedness was not enough. I took anything that could become a projectile and put it away. I tripled the tie downs on my greenhouses and upped the inflation pressure in hopes that when Sandy hit, I was ready. Lastly, I got my son to help me put up huge sheets of hard corrugated plastic on my large windows.
Then we hunkered down. We had an emergency generator for the expected power loss and had unplugged the unnecessary appliances. The storm was to hit at 8 PM. The photos and videos of the devastation in Virginia were morphing into the same but worse for the Jersey shore. OC (as we called it in Philly), or Ocean City was underwater. Scenes of roof rescues in seaside New Jersey were looped on The Weather Channel, along with those ridiculous pictures of weather reporters standing in knee deep water in Battery Park and parts of Brooklyn.
By 7 PM we could see the computer models changed to predict the the storm going further west, not north and up New York. By 8:30 PM we still hadn't lost power and although the winds were 25-30 MPH, it was clear that we had lucked out. The rain was much lighter than expected. The water was coming in my basement in a small stream, not an overwhelming flow. We were not going to have a bad day. Instead we would begin the survivors guilt that comes with “getting away with one.”
All I could think about at that moment was a book I had read years ago called The Black Swan, by Nassim Taleb. The book was one of the most important in my life. A Black Swan is described as “an event, positive or negative, that is deemed improbable yet causes massive consequences.” It was written primarily about economics, but deals with any improbable event and how these events changed all of our lives, either in a positive or negative way. Almost by definition giant weather events are classic black swans. As I sat holding my wife I knew that we had just, by luck or by chance, been on the positive side of a black swan. As the pictures and video’s continue to come in and are splashed across our TV screens we should feel empathy for the hundreds of thousands whose life has changed forever, on the negative side. The only known fact is that there will be more black swans in our lives.
TO HELP WITH HURRICANE SANDY RELIEF, CLICK HERE.
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