The Sinking of the Bounty

This time last year, the Northeast began to pick up what was left from Hurricane Sandy. There was a lot of rain, a lot of wind, flooding, and electrical outages. But not all the damage was ashore. In an excellent long-form narrative piece, the Tampa Bay Times covered the story of the Bounty, a functional replica of HMS Bounty from that famous story of a mutiny. This Bounty was used in the 1960s movie and had sailed ever since until it sank off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.

A diagram of the Bounty
A diagram of the Bounty

The piece doesn’t makes use of some charts and graphics to explain positioning and familiarise the reader with terminology. It’s a fascinating though ultimately tragic story. And like so many of these long-form pieces, the credit list is extensive.

Credit for the piece goes to Michael Kruse, Don Morris, Maurice Rivenbark, Carolyn Edds, Caryn Baird, Barbara Moch, Mike D’Andrea, Bill Duryea, Alexis N. Sanchez, and Lee Glynn.

Which Beaches Are Open for the Start of Summer?

Last year Hurricane Sandy wrecked swathes of the Jersey Shore and Long Island. Since then, authorities and officials have been busy preparing and rebuilding the shore for the unofficial start of summer: Memorial Day Weekend. This interactive map from the New York Times looks at what will be open for Memorial Day from Connecticut through Long Island to as far south as Margate.

What beaches will be open along the shore
What beaches will be open along the shore

Once you find your preferred beach, you can see the details of what will be open, closed, or otherwise different. This is the view for Atlantic City, nearest to the southern New Jersey shore towns where I spent so many years but are left off the map.

What will be open in Atlantic City
What will be open in Atlantic City

Credit for the piece goes to Jenny Anderson, Lisa W. Foderaro, Tom Giratikanon, Sarah Maslin Nir, Robert Davey, Christopher Maag, and Tim Stelloh.

Sandy’s Winds

Hurricane Sandy also brought quite a lot of wind. Before the storm landed just south of Atlantic City I was travelling east on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. And as the map below from the New York Times illustrates, I was driving through not insignificant winds (with quite a few more powerful gusts). In the first few hours after landfall, the winds within 100 miles of Sandy’s centre—which was due to pass within miles of my hometown—continued to whip everything exposed to the environment. Thankfully after those first few hours, things began to calm very quickly.

Sandy's Forecast Wind Speeds
Sandy's Forecast Wind Speeds

The link through the image above is an animation of sorts of the timeline of wind forecasts.

Credit for the piece goes to Mike Bostock and Shan Carter.

Electrical Outages from Sandy

Hurricane Sandy hit the Jersey shore before moving northwest through southeastern Pennsylvania. These were two maps from two different electric utility companies providing information on the number of outages. This first and smaller graphic is from PECO. The second and larger is from FirstEnergy. The graphic from FirstEnergy breaks into the township level when zoomed in sufficiently. Clearly from being able to post this, I am among the fortunate with my electricity still up and running.

PECO Outages on Tuesday
PECO Outages on Tuesday
First Energy Outages on Tuesday
First Energy Outages on Tuesday

Clearly these are not all outages, only the outages reported by these two electrical utilities. At the time of writing some 1.3 million people were without electricity in Pennsylvania and over 7 million in the Northeast while Sandy—now an extra-tropical low pressure system—continues to dump rain and snow on the interior reaches of the area.