Long Island is a coastal city made up of many different towns or suburbs adjacent to one of the largest, in scale of population and popularity, cities in the United States. It contains two different counties, Nassau and Suffolk, the richer areas of the Hamptons, home to many celebrities and wealthy individuals looking for a good escape from urban living, and two of the 5 boroughs of New York, Queens and Brooklyn. If it wasn’t already known, it is an Island. Long Island is connected to the city by an underground tunnel and the George Washington Bridge, which subsequently, are the only ways out of Long Island. The island includes relatively flat land with no mountains and with access to a beach being no more then an hour in any direction. Since …show more content…
The storm flooded whole streets in the suburban areas, shutdown subway lines, left millions of homes without power for weeks, closed major airports, and resulted in the evacuation of over 370,000 people in the city (Dolnick NYTimes). Experts believe that the storm also created mini-tornadoes causing even more untold damage that totaled to 15.8 million dollars in damages (Dolnick NYTimes). This storm, that stuck about one year before Sandy, was many New Yorkers’ first experience of a storm that violent. When Irene made contact with New York, it was downgraded to a tropical storm, not a hurricane. This storm is important because it resulted in many policy changes in New York’s legislation in terms of storm preparation and preparedness. Even after these changes were enacted, they were nowhere near the preparations needed to combat a storm as violent as Hurricane Sandy On October 29th, 2012, Hurricane Sandy made contact with the Northeast coast of the United States with over 80 mph winds, causing mass damage throughout the outlying areas along the coast. On this day, the New York Stock Exchange closed, a state of emergency was declared by Barack Obama for all areas that would come in contact with the superstorm, all forms of transportations including airplanes, trains and subway lines, and bus transportation were closed, and all low-lying areas of Long Island were ordered to evacuate their homes