Henri's miss a prep for future

It is always a strange sensation to have prepared, physically and mentally, for disaster, and have the disaster pass you by. Henri spared Long Island the worst this weekend, though that rotating eye, aimed dead center at us for many hours, was a scare.

But the preparations we did make for a direct-hit hurricane are a good lesson for what’s to come. Counties, towns, and villages, not to mention the lumbering apparatuses of state and federal government, will need to be even more nimble in a future of rising sea levels and more intense storms. That may mean a more significant shelter network for catastrophic events, more buried power lines, and places to charge phones and cars and a communications system that can send lifesaving messages when the power is out.

Elected officials and their teams were eager to show themselves addressing the immediate threat this weekend, calm and in control as danger approached. That's the drill and it was appropriately executed. But the real deal will surely hit Long Island soon, and even this miss of a storm had strength enough to scramble life for tens of thousands, with torrential downpours, flooding, and windy gusts — including historic levels of rain just west in New York City.

There’s a parable here. It is second nature for many Long Islanders to do their private preparations before a storm hits — stocking up, buying flashlights or food or filling up on gas, dropping sandbags and hunkering down — even if we roll our eyes when the storm ends up being weaker than anticipated and the danger has passed. All of that is important, but so are the longer-term, public preparations necessary to make Long Island livable in a climate-changed future: adapting our homes and buildings to floods, bolstering natural barriers, prioritizing alternate forms of energy like wind and solar, and reducing our own carbon footprints, including with a new focus on mass transit.

Because we won’t always be able to luckily roll our eyes at dire forecasts: Remember the likes of Irene and Isaias and, especially, Sandy, which reconfigured our shoreline and exposed our vulnerability.

Hurricanes and their consequences will play increasingly larger parts in our lives. Imagine if the waters surrounding us in the ocean, bays, sound, rivers and canals all surged to the frightening estimates for Henri. Remember, there are still a few months left in this storm season.

Perhaps we were due to get away with something, after a year-plus of the deadly pandemic that hit Long Island hard, and that continues to infect and endanger residents as the delta variant spreads. Good news is savored, given chaos in Afghanistan; wildfires and extreme heat in Europe, the West Coast and beyond; and deadly flooding hitting Tennessee even as Henri missed its mark.

The respite was welcome — because we can’t expect it next time.