Sandy extends our weekend

As I anticipated we never made it back to Bermuda tonight as our flight was cancelled due to Hurricane Sandy passing Bermuda at it’s closest point around about our expected arrival time and American Airlines unsurprisingly were not prepared to run the gauntlet.

The good bad news is that the solitary daily flight from Miami to Bermuda tomorrow (if it goes) and Tuesday are fully booked, so we will have to slum it here in Palm Beach for another 3 days. I am having great difficulty convincing my 3-year old daughter that not every birthday entails a week in Florida!

I can clear my calendar and work remotely although I am supposed to have some U.S. visitors arriving in Bermuda on Tuesday to meet me, that’s if they make it as the whole of the North-East is now on hurricane lock-down. Already more than 6,000 flights have been cancelled and all public transport systems in New York, Philadelphia and Washington DC have been closed and President Obama himself has declared state emergencies in New York, Maryland, Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. There is after all an election riding on this.

CNN keep announcing that they are not being alarmist, even though I think they are being massively over the top. We just spent 2 or 3 minutes looking through a street camera wobble a little in the wind in Atlantic City.

Sandy itself at the present still hasn’t veered toward the United States and is centered 485 miles south-southeast of New York and 280 miles east-southeast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, which as the nearest landmass to Bermuda, means Sandy currently sits between the U.S. and our home.

The storm has a massive tropical force wind field of 900 miles and the best estimates are that Sandy will make landfall complete with hurricane-force winds around 8pm Monday near the Delmarva Peninsula, which occupies three states – Delaware, Maryland and Virginia – hence the name.

The biggest concern looking at the models and trying to avoid the hysteria is that the combination of an extremely dangerous storm surge and the tide will cause normally dry areas near the coast to be flooded by rising waters. The water could reach as high as 12 feet in the Long Island Sound and New York Harbor.

For us here in Palm Beach, we endured a pretty crappy weekend of weather but fortunately we will now get to see it improve although there are still some very big swells out in the water and it was bloody cold in the pool this afternoon! We did make it to Spookyville, although the scariest thing was some of the people out there and it was hard to tell what parents were in fancy dress or just in ‘normal’ wear. Florida can be very scary sometimes and not just at Halloween.