Diane Ackerman Quotes

I grew up in the Northeast; I've seen hurricanes before and trees down and cars destroyed.

Being in the bands of a hurricane, it's not like a tornado that's going to pass very quickly. It's the most serious thing that you will ever experience next to, I'm sure, an earthquake.

Hurricane Sandy was one of the most vicious storm systems to hit the New York City area in nearly two centuries.

Hurricanes are dangerous things, and they're no fun to go through. And if you come out of it in one piece and your house comes out of in one piece, it's no fun living with no electricity for a day or a week, a month, whatever it is. And I speak, unfortunately, from personal experience on that matter.

The 2012 superstorm known as Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc beyond the Eastern Seaboard and reached Northeast Ohio as well, with heavy rain, wind gusts of nearly 70 miles per hour and waves on Lake Erie reaching 15 to 18 feet.

Reports of a hurricane are unfounded.

Anyone who says they're not afraid at the time of a hurricane is either a fool or a liar, or a little bit of both.

We sat here during Irene in '99 with the back door open. We drank and watched all the stuff fly by.

After Hurricane Sandy, my family and I stayed in our apartment in lower Manhattan before things normalized. We're lucky enough to live on a bit of high ground, so we weren't flooded... but it was intense. Since there was no light, water, or electricity, I spent a lot of time playing acoustic guitar in the evenings.

I have lived through many major hurricanes during my lifetime: Camille, Frederic, and Ivan, to name just a very few. However, never have I seen destruction, panic, and fear on this massive scale.

Hurricane season routinely strikes the Caribbean harder than the U.S.

I've been through quite a few hurricanes. I worked in North Carolina, where there's a housing development whose name was Landfall.

Reader, persons who have never witnessed a hurricane, such as not unfrequently desolates the sultry climates of the south, can scarcely form an idea of their terrific grandeur. One would think that, not content with laying waste all on land, it must needs sweep the waters of the shallows quite dry to quench its thirst.

I'd always thought hurricanes were romantic, with pretty feminine names like Celestine.

Superstorm Sandy inflicted havoc and heartache throughout the Northeast, hitting the Big Apple and its surrounding coastal towns hard.

I was living out on Long Island in Baldwin, New York when Hurricane Sandy hit. With the storm surge, the whole first floor of our house was under about three feet of water. We lost a lot of valuable stuff - sentimental stuff like pictures and Christmas ornaments. Nobody expected flooding that bad.

I was in middle school when Hurricane Hugo hit in 1989. I still remember the sounds from that night and the challenges of recovering.

Raindrops the size of bullets thundered on the castle windows for days on end; the lake rose, the flower beds turned into muddy streams, and Hagrid’s pumpkins swelled to the size of garden sheds.

While Hurricane Katrina demonstrated the dangers of failing to evacuate hospitals from the path of a storm, Hurricane Gustav demonstrated that moving thousands of sick people has its own risks. Gustav also highlighted a critical vulnerability of American hospitals - an inability to withstand prolonged blackouts.

Where I am they can smell out a hurricane. My house survived Hurricane Hazel, but it didn't get past Hugo.

Flooding damage is not customary for New York, especially downstate.

As you know, Hurricane Sandy has affected thousands of families, leaving them without electricity, without household goods and, in the worst cases, without a home.

As hurricanes Katrina and Rita raged through the southeastern United States last summer, much of America's energy infrastructure based in the Gulf of Mexico was damaged or destroyed causing gas prices to soar.

As a 9-year-old child, I vividly remember the day Hurricane Andrew touched down in 1992. My family was living in the Upper Florida Keys at the time, and we soon realized its utter devastation to South Florida, with entire blocks leveled by Andrew's vicious winds.

We have seen levee breaks and flooding in the wake of storms, some of which have caused the loss of life, and USDA is ready to assist in any way we can.