Storm Aftermath Quotes

Last year, when we were in Mobile, Al., covering Hurricane Ivan, we heard the stories of poor people, many of them black stranded downtown because they had no way out.

Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.

Hurricane Katrina was the storm of the 21st century. It devastated an area the size of Great Britain. More than 1,800 Americans died. Three hundred thousand homes were destroyed. There was $96 billion in property damage. I served on the Louisiana Recovery Authority. I saw Congress write one big check and then skip town.

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.

Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay. You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web.

We have been abandoned by our own country. Hurricane Katrina will go down in history as one of the worst storms ever to hit an American coast, but the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will go down as one of the worst abandonments of Americans on American soil ever in U.S. history.

The pale and quiet moon Makes her calm forehead bare, And the last fragments of the storm, Like shattered rigging from a fight at sea, Silent and few, are drifting over me.

It was the first time I was looking, really, right after the storm, that I saw maybe the amount of devastation that had happened in the Lower Ninth Ward. Where my friends lived, which was about six blocks from where the industrial canal was, houses was smashed into houses, and there were, like, four houses smashed together.

During Hurricane Sandy, we expended billions and billions of dollars, literally. In the handling of the emergency and the construction and the aftermath, trying to get people to come back to the affected communities. So I'm very proud of what the state did.

So are all the kids on the East Coast repeating school next year? Get ready to see a lot of hairy eighth graders. Storm brain drain.

Music in New Orleans has always been the heartbeat that drives the city. It was that even before Katrina, and that's what we had to rely on after the storm.

I won't ski in the backcountry the day after a big storm anymore. The mountains are so humbling. As soon as you think you're on top or crushing it, that's when you need to be really careful.

The storm is ended! The impartial sunLaughs down upon the battle lost and won,And crowns the triumph of the cloudy hostIn rolling lines retreating to the coast.

When a hurricane thrashes the mid-Atlantic, my hilly town often reaps the fringe of the storm. The rain starts blowing sideways, and sometimes we see hail the size of purie marbles.

As more information becomes available, and the magnitude of the storm's impact becomes even more apparent, it becomes clear that this recovery will be lengthy.

War seems to come out of nowhere, like rust that suddenly pops up on iron after a storm.

I love the smell right after a storm.