Hey Jerry,

...She was still a hurricane when she came ashore near Little Egg Inlet at around 0230 on Sunday, and passed within a few miles of my location on Barnegat Bay... Granted, she was quickly falling apart by that time, but I think to suggest that by Saturday afternoon the media was still "making a big deal out of nothing" is a bit off the mark... Surely, Irene was not the catastrophe it might have been, but as one who has lived on the Jersey Shore for most of my life, she still produced about as high a storm surge as I have ever seen, just a bit less than the "Perfect Storm" of Halloween, 1991...

I was actually feeling the most powerful effects of the storm when the eye was down around the Delaware Bay Entrance, over 100 miles south of my location... That was perhaps the most impressive aspect of this storm, how huge it was, and over how widespread an area the storm force winds were felt... The fact that she finally degraded rather quickly on final approach to New York City is a bit misleading, IMHO... And, I'll stick with the NHC's official records of the storm's intensity, rather than whether a particular Eyewitness News reporter happened to choose a location for a stand-up that did not appear all that dramatic to the viewer... (grin)

Interesting piece on the hype from the NYT's Nate Silver:

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/how-irene-lived-up-to-the-hype/

This was still a pretty big storm, and as of tonight, more people have been killed as a result of Irene than from Hugo... First hurricane to make a landfall in NJ in over a century, and the first to directly target NYC - the largest and most densely populated center in the entire US - in who knows how long... suffice it to say, this was a very threatening storm, and its track very unusual, which affected tens of millions of Americans, and caused tens of billions of dollars in damage... How does the massive West coast storm you cite compare in that regard? Thousands of people affected along the west coast of Vancouver Island, tens of thousands of dollars in damage, perhaps? (grin)

One thing's for sure, I certainly don't envy the sorts of decisions that public officials like Michael Bloomberg or Chris Christie have the responsibility of making in this sort of situation... Hell, I agonized for a few days over whether or not to take my little 30' POS sailboat up the Hudson, for chrissakes! (grin) To make the sort of call that Bloomberg did, I can't even begin to imagine having to do that...

One final distinction between these East coast storms, and those you see in the PNW... What you might be overlooking, is the necessity to evacuate large areas that cannot be evacuated quickly, places like the Florida Keys and the Outer Banks come to mind... Such decisions have to me made well in advance, before the forecasters have as much information as they would often like, and the need to err on the side of caution often looks silly in hindsight... That's one thing you don't have to consider to such an extent out West, it's so much easier for residents and vacationers to flee the coast quickly...

best regards,

Jon