When Mother Nature gets angry and unleashes her full fury – as she did early this week with Hurricane Sandy – the devastation and loss of human life can be truly catastrophic.
As predicted, Hurricane Sandy was one of the most powerful and devastating storms to hit the eastern seaboard of the United States in the past 50 years.
Not only was most of the entire eastern seaboard hit with devastating winds and massive flooding, but much of Ontario and Quebec was also hit incredibly hard. A woman in Toronto was killed when she was struck by a large sign from a Staples outlet that had been shattered and knocked down because of extremely high winds.
The final numbers on how many lives were taken and how much damage was caused won’t be known for a few days, but the final figures are sure to be staggering and heartbreaking.
Here in Osoyoos, we all know the weather has turned sour over the past couple of weeks after an extended run of amazing and beautiful weather that started in early July and continued until the second week of October.
We’re blessed in this part of the country to receive endless sunshine during the spring, summer and fall and relatively mild temperatures throughout the winter months.
That’s obviously not the case in many parts of North America as the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy was felt by millions of citizens in both Canada and the United States.
This was the worst storm since Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of the southern United States and turned much of the City of New Orleans into rubble and a mud pile. It has taken several years for that part of the country to recover from that truly horrific event.
We all hope that the damage and loss of life caused by Hurricane Sandy won’t be nearly as tragic and horrible.
An extremely strong earthquake rocked parts of the Queen Charlotte Islands this past weekend, so we’re not immune from the wrath of Mother Nature here in beautiful British Columbia.
Thankfully, there was no loss of life caused by that earthquake.
We sure wish we could say the same about Hurricane Sandy.