Sandy

Sandy's devastation in the US northeast is clear. (Here is a great but scary series of photos from the NY Times.) With more than 40 people dead in the US and Canada, as well as huge issues with power failures and transportation paralysis, there is tragedy for many.

We wish all those who have been impacted peace and safety going forward.

This is the second major flooding issue in Manhattan this year, which makes me wonder about the future and how increasing weather volatility will continue to impact the major seaboards of the world. There isn't a month goes by where I don't think how luck we are in Ontario. While there are some natural disasters here from time-to-time, relative to most of the world and even most of North America, we are very fortunate. The impact from even the worst blizzard isn't a fraction of the devastation that we have watched from hurricanes.

I've had a few inquiries from Appleby people abroad asking about how badly we were impacted by Sandy. Oakville experienced a very bad rain storm with high winds, but not much more. At Appleby, we had a few trees go down in our forest and a number of large branches, but no power outages and no major flooding. Yesterday, the wind shifted and I snapped a few photos of the big wave action on the beaches by the Inukshuk. You will see them on the rolling slide show to the right of this post. I think you could almost surf some of them if you were so inclined!

It was also a good time to remind the students of some of the most devastating storms of all time:

1) 1970 Bhola Cyclone (Bangladesh – 300K to 500K dead mainly from storm surge); 2) Un-named Typhoon that hit Vietnam in 1881; 3) Typhoon Nina (China – multiple dam failures killed 100K+)