Well, I must say that the last week has been very very interesting. A 5.9 earthquake in central Virginia. I felt my office building moving in Brooklyn NY. At first I thought it was an unusually heavy truck going by but then it didn’t stop in 5 seconds. I immediately knew it was an earthquake. I rushed to bring up several social media accounts to announce what was going on, and to begin instantaneous tracking of other people responding. Contact in Cincinatti said ‘he felt it”. Another in Chicago said “nope, didn’t feel a thing”.
Certainly my biggest concern was to contact and hear from my friends and relatives in Virginia because I’m from the Richmond area. No phone calls were going through but SMS was working and so was the Internet. Everyone was okay.
Then came Hurricane Irene to ‘spice’ things up even more. Having read and analyzed the ‘studies’ done on the ‘impact’ that a hurricane hitting New York City would have, I knew what we might be in for. I certainly have to applaud Mayor Bloomberg for the preparatory steps that the city took. I’m positive that neither he or any of the other chiefs of emergencies authorities in NYC would want to be caught sitting on their hands if even a CAT-1 hurricane were to actually hit the city. People should remember that it has been ‘decades’ since a hurricane actually ‘directly’ hit NYC. LUCKILY for us, this one loss a lot of power in the hours just before hitting NYC, and so once again “NYC dodged a bullet”
As prepared as I am personally and even with the amount of training I’ve had, I would NOT want to have to go through an incident like this. IT would not be pretty. On a more business note. I’m still surprised at the level of preparation or I should say ‘lack of’ preparation that many businesses took as this hurricane moved up the East Coast.If nothing else you know that travel throughout the area would be affected and so you might’ve taken steps to ‘stage’ your critical employees for start of business Monday morning. Assuming you’re in the sort of business where it would be necessary to be in business first thing Monday, otherwise you wouldn’t need to.