Fortunately for us all, Hurricane Irene had some of the fight taken out of her before she got to New Jersey on Sunday. Thanks, North Carolina.
While Irene lacked a lot of the wind and rain we were threatened with, she did pack a healthy dose of irony.
For instance, a friend’s beachfront house — battened down with plywood and duct tape on the windows — rode out the storm just fine, while his Radnor home was without power all day Sunday.
An Egg Harbor Township family seeking safety in Middlesex County found it couldn’t get back Sunday night. The storm was over, but so many streets were flooded up there that they couldn’t reach the Garden State Parkway.
A Seaville family that evacuated to Sewell spent Saturday night huddled in a basement — 10 people and two dogs — forced there by a leaking roof and reports of a tornado.
But my favorite bit of irony is that the Postal Service and other delivery services carried on business as usual in Cape May County’s evacuation zone Saturday. Yeah, I know the “Neither rain nor sleet” thing, but I think in this case the determination to deliver was misplaced.
If the entire county has been told to get out, doesn’t it make sense to suspend mail and package delivery? Sure, for most of the day, Saturday was just gray and dreary. But folks who obeyed the mandatory evacuation order were already gone Saturday, and delivery people should have known that. There was no one home to bring packages in from porches and important papers in from mail boxes.
If Irene had slammed into us as a Category 2, that would have meant a lot of missing mail and packages. (What would have happened to my raisins from Fresno?)
It just seems a whole lot smarter not to deliver in an evacuation zone.
