Frankenstorm, that’s what they’re calling it.
On Twitter, someone referred to it as a “Stephen King” kind of storm.
Hurricane Sandy is a trickster. As it left the Caribbean and was predicted to make a close swing toward Florida, the National Hurricane Center put most of the east coast of Florida under tropical storm warnings. In the tri-county area that includes Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach County, school for Friday, October 26, was promptly cancelled. We were warned that we would experience 1-3 inches of rain, high winds just under 75 MPH, and that we should take the usual storm precautions.
I didn’t trust the prediction. Isaac, back in August, wasn’t supposed to do much of anything to us, yet it dumped 14 inches of rain on South Florida in a period of about 24 hours and caused such widespread flooding we couldn’t get out of our neighborhood for two days. But okay. I listened to the forecast.
Sandy, they said, was going to impact South Florida seven years and one day after 2005 Hurricane Wilma, the last time we got walloped by an actual hurricane. The synchro of the timing and the late October storm bothered me, so I made sure we had plenty of food and water, Rob checked the propane tanks, we had plenty of pet food. Good to go.
Sandy proved to be pretty much of a nonevent for us. We got some rain, some wind, but we have worse summer thunderstorms. Now Sandy is forecast to be a Cat 2 when it slams into New Jersey and affects more than 60 million people who live in the northeast. Some of the descriptions of this storm are frightening:
From Jeff Masters, director of Weather Undergound, a private weather forecast service: “This storm is so dangerous and so unusual because it is coming at the tail end of hurricane season and beginning of winter storm season, “so it’s kind of taking something from both – part hurricane, part nor’easter, all trouble.”
From Louis Ucellini, the environmental prediction chief of NOAA – National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminsistration – meteorologists: “The total is greater than the sum of the individual parts. That is exactly what’s going on here. This storm as it grows and moves back to the coast on Monday and Tuesday, the circulation of this storm will extend all the way from the Midwest, the Ohio Valley, toward the Carolinas up into New England and southern Canada. It’s really going to be an expansive storm system.”
The writer on a Wall Street Journal blog says it best, I think. You have a combination of unusual weather that could result in the worst storm NY has seen since the hurricane of 1938. NOAA forecast Jim Cisco is the one who tagged it Frankenstorm and he and others have referred to Hurricane Sandy as “unprecedented.”
Now: is this hype?
I went through my first hurricane in 1963 – Cleo – the year my parents moved to the U.S. from Venezuela, and I have been fascinated by them ever since. Over the decades, they seem to have grown in intensity and size, and gradually, they are hitting much farther north. They have figured prominently into several novels I’ve written. At some level, I feel they are sentient beings. Yes, I know how wacko that sounds. But when you watch these suckers form, when you watch how they set their sights on a particular area, when you study them, it’s not a stretch to recognize a kind of consciousness in them that responds to something in us.
If we are as interconnected as quantum physics suggests, as the Hindus believe (Indra’s Net), then there’s a rather puzzling synchronicity happening with this storm. It will begin to move inland on the night when the moon is full (scientific fact the tides are higher under a full moon) and will merge with another weather system about a week before the presidential election, November 6, when Mercury (communication) will turn retrograde.
If NOAA is right, if these meteorologists are correct, then election day across much of the country could be a mess because the massive power outages expected with this storm could persist to election day – and beyond. The media itself will be focused on Sandy – not on the election.
Lots of ifs here. But people are paying attention. One writer friend wrote today that her son is at a wedding in Tampa, and is scheduled to fly back to NY on Sunday, October 28. If his flight is cancelled, could he drive across the state and stay with us?
Gypsy, currently living in Delaware, dropped us a line about what she and her family were doing to prepare. Her description of the scarcity of supplies in grocery stores is interesting. The shelves are practically bare. Bottled water is scarce.
Yes, there’s a certain hype in buying that rides tandem with the hype in the news. That said, I’m a big believer in how the collective is acting. What does the collect consciousness tap into? Are the shelves of bottled water empty? Are the canned goods and flashlights and batteries gone? Are the lines at the gas pumps impossibly long? What do you feel in your gut?
So now we’ll wait and see. Sandy will either be a nonevent or something unprecedented. I don’t think there’s much middle ground here. Either/or, just like our choices in this election. And oh, not exactly a PS: what are planetary empaths feeling about all this?



















