I decided to cancel the trip after reading about the rip tides. Sorry.
"NYC will buy homes to protect its water; City would target upstate flood zone" by Michael Hill | Associated Press May 30, 2014
ALBANY, N.Y. — Wary of more big storms washing out towns and churning up debris around its reservoirs, New York City will buy homes and businesses in distant flood zones and reduce local hazards.
The one-two punch of tropical storms Irene and Lee in late summer 2011 has prompted an additional $70 million of spending by the city to combat flood hazards. Though not universally embraced among the rural upstate communities, city officials say the programs will protect the water consumed by 9 million people while helping the towns that participate.
‘‘There’s a growing recognition that the frequency of severe storms may be increasing. We certainly anticipate that storms — if not exactly like Irene and Lee — but damaging storms are going to be coming again,’’ said David Warne, assistant commissioner for the city’s Department of Environmental Protection.
Related: Two big storms could make landfall this hurricane season, forecasters say
Of course, they got it wrong last year.
The city agency will earmark at least $15 million through 2017 to buy vulnerable homes and businesses, including those not eligible under the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s flood buyout program. Local communities must sign off on any city purchases.
The city also will provide $17 million to the Catskill Watershed Corp., which implements protection programs, for flood hazard mitigation in those communities. The money could be used to complement the buyout program by helping buy land in the community.
The flood-related programs were finalized this month under changes to a federal waiver that allows New York City to avoid filtering its drinking water from reservoirs west of the Hudson River. The city wants to avoid spending an estimated $10 billion or more on a filtration plant. New York City already spends more than $50 million a year to protect its water through strategic purchases of undeveloped land and other programs.
Eric Goldstein, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the new measures strike a balance by helping watershed homeowners in dangerous flood zones while addressing the needs of the city.
‘‘It’s obvious that if future storms are damaging. . . and sending oil burners, automobiles and what have you into the streams that feed our reservoirs, that’s a water quality threat,’’ he said.
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Also see: $2.5b in Sandy aid goes to N.Y., N.J.
Too little, too late, but the mouthpiece makes it sound like the government is doing so much good for you.
This is going nowhere, folks.
"Ernesto Butcher, Who Managed Port Authority After 9/11, Dies at 69" by Paul Vitello | New York Times May 24, 2014
NEW YORK — Ernesto Butcher — a soft-spoken Panamanian immigrant who effectively took over management of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as its most experienced surviving operations officer — died May 15 in Maplewood, N.J. He was 69.
He apparently suffered a heart attack while jogging near his home, his wife, Kristen Peck, said in confirming the death.
Among the more than 2,700 people killed that day at the World Trade Center, where the authority had its headquarters, 84 were agency employees. One, Neil Levin, the executive director, was Mr. Butcher’s boss.
As chief operating officer, Mr. Butcher marshaled thousands of managers and employees scattered across the region, took charge of closing the gateways to the city, and established a temporary headquarters for the agency in Jersey City on Sept. 11.
Two days later, while taking phone calls from frantic relatives of 150 authority employees initially reported missing and with a go-ahead from the police, Mr. Butcher gave the signal to reopen the system: resuming operations at Kennedy, La Guardia, and Newark International airports; the George Washington Bridge; two Hudson River tunnels; the shipping terminals of Brooklyn, Newark, and Jersey City; and a dozen other facilities run by his agency.
“I’m here today to assure the people of New York and New Jersey, and throughout the world, that the Port Authority is open for business,” he said at a press conference on Sept. 13.
Ronald Shiftan, who as Levin’s deputy was later appointed acting executive director, ceded operational authority in the following months to Mr. Butcher.
Mr. Butcher delivered eulogies at 84 funerals and memorial services for authority employees. Fearing that exhaustion could compromise the system, he urged agency employees to not volunteer in their off hours during the workweek at the site of the collapsed towers.
Ken Philmus, who was director of tunnels and bridges at the time, said in an interview: “My toll collectors were working a full shift, then going downtown to work on the pile, working around the clock. Ernesto understood it. But with him, the public interest always had to come first. Our job was to keep the system running.”
After being named chief operating officer in 1999, Mr. Butcher, a career civil servant at the authority, served under a dozen board chairmen, executive directors, and deputy executives, all appointed by either the governor of New York or the governor of New Jersey under a power-sharing arrangement. But beginning in 2010, he told his family, political appointees seemed to be pushing him toward the door.
Mr. Butcher complained to his boss, Christopher Ward, the authority’s executive director, that two appointees of Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey — Bill Baroni, the deputy executive director, and his lieutenant, David Wildstein — had excluded Mr. Butcher from meetings as they undertook to trim the agency’s roughly $8 billion annual budget.
Both Mr. Butcher and Ward found themselves blamed by unidentified Port Authority officials, quoted by newspapers, for cost overruns in the rebuilding of the World Trade Center, employee overtime expenses, and hefty 2011 bridge and tunnel toll increases.
Ward, who was widely credited with jump-starting development of the stalled World Trade Center site after being appointed in 2008, resigned in 2011. Mr. Butcher, who had planned to retire at the end of 2012, retired instead in April that year, ending a 41-year career at the authority.
“He had nothing to do with those budgets,” Ward said by phone Tuesday. “It is unconscionable for a man of Ernesto’s integrity to be forced to end his distinguished career under a cloud.”
Baroni and Wildstein, both of whom resigned from the Port Authority last year over their involvement in the controversy over the George Washington Bridge lane closings, did not respond to requests for comment.
“ ‘Bridgegate’ would not have happened if Ernesto had still been there,” Ward said.
Ernesto Leonardo Butcher was born in Colon, Panama, a Caribbean seaport near the Panama Canal. His father, Lorenzo, worked in canal operations. His mother, Naomi, died when Ernesto was 4.
Soon after his father remarried, Mr. Butcher was sent to live with relatives, ending up with an aunt in Brooklyn. He graduated from Boys High School (now Boys and Girls High School) in Brooklyn and Hunter College, where he studied psychology and literature.
After serving with the Peace Corps in South Korea, where he became fluent in Korean, he received a graduate degree in international affairs from the University of Pittsburgh.
Besides his wife, he leaves a daughter, Mijha Butcher Godfrey; a granddaughter; and three stepchildren.
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Looks like murder to me.
Related: U.K. Coin Flip
I always wondered how fire makes steel towers collapse at free fall speed; what questions could he have bridge.
Related(?): Traffic Clears For Christie Campaign
Now that Butcher is out of the way?
"Crime drops with new police force in gritty Camden" Associated Press April 29, 2014
CAMDEN, N.J. — A year after Camden disbanded its police department and brought in a new one with more officers on the street, reported crime has dropped significantly in a city that still ranks as dangerous by any measure.
After years of doing little more than responding to emergency calls, police are on intensive neighborhood patrols, a move that has sent drug dealers scattering. But residents, advocates, and officials agree that law enforcement alone can go only so far to heal a city that is also among the nation’s most impoverished.
‘‘To me, violence will always be around and so will the drugs,’’ said Melanie Andujar, who was visiting her mother in North Camden. She is still shaken by a shooting on her block a few weeks ago. ‘‘Has it calmed down? Yes. I don’t think it will ever stop.’’
Camden, a once-booming industrial city of 77,000 across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, has had decades of decline, with nearly all its manufacturing jobs disappearing by the early 1990s....
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"Man is charged in stabbing of wife
LODI — A man was charged Saturday with stabbing his estranged wife to death, then fleeing with their two young sons to South Carolina, where he was captured and the boys were found safe after a five-state Amber Alert. Police charged John Robert Jordan, 47, after finding Tracy Jor-dan, 39, dead at her home in Lodi on Friday night (AP)."
Related: Small S.C. town rallies for fired gay police chief
She captured him.
Look what else I found in the sands of the Boston Globe.
