A moment of silence

I sat down to write a blog post, but nothing I was going to write about seemed as significant as the events that transpired on the east coast this week. In lieu of a business-as-usual post, I would like to take this moment to reflect on the tragedy that Hurricane Sandy brought to so many. The storm has passed, but in its wake is devastation and, for some, misery, that will take a lifetime from which to recover. With the official U.S. death toll reaching 74 at the time of this writing, and monetary damages initially estimated at $15-20 billion, now revised upward to as high as $50 billion, it’s clear that the eastern seaboard will never be the same.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/02/business/estimate-of-economic-losses-now-up-to-50-billion.html

Pictures, before and after:
http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/sandy-before-and-after-photos/957846

As more and more individual stories emerge from the superstorm, one stands out to me in particular. From the “what the heck was he thinking” file, the mind-boggling account of the captain of the HMS Bounty replica ship who decided to set sail from Connecticut bound for Florida on Monday morning with an inexperienced crew in a 50-year-old ship based on a 250-year-old-design:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-rt-us-storm-sandy-bountybre8a105d-20121101,0,2999707.story
The captain himself has still not been found, and one crew member is dead. The other fourteen crew survived after a risky rescue off North Carolina by the Coast Guard:

http://boingboing.net/2012/10/29/rescue-video-sandy-sinks-hms.html
I doubt that way back in 1789, when Christian Fletcher decided to wrest Her Majesty’s Ship from its captain, William Bligh, that 223 years in the future sailors would still be losing their lives at sea on the Bounty.
Wishing the best to all those affected by Sandy,

Rick