Hurricane Irene had threatened New York City mightily but, in the end, she did not deliver her worst.
Despite days of dire warnings from Mayor Michael Bloomberg and from cable news channels that the island of Manhattan might face heavy flooding and power cuts, Irene had weakened sufficiently by the time it made its way up the east coast from North Carolina that it passed the city without catastrophe.
“It never got its eye back and it never got its mojo back,” said Chad Myers, CNN’s weather anchor, sounding slightly disappointed when asked by Anderson Cooper, the CNN presenter who made his name with hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005, why it had been less powerful than feared.