Guest column: preparing for disaster (2011)

Judy Torrieri, who ran a pet business and wrote as a guest columnist for the former group, wrote this column in spring 2011. The page showed no date, but the text refers to the first months of 2011.

She opened by noting that hurricane season runs from June to November and that the spring had been wild: the column quoted a news agency saying April 2011 had more than 900 tornado reports in the United States, and said Long Island saw wind and heavy rain.

She recalled the Category 3 hurricane that hit Long Island on 21 September 1938, which she said, citing Wikipedia, killed between 682 and 800 people. Her point was that since we cannot control the weather, we must prepare ourselves and our pets for hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or a house fire. She said, citing a book, that home fire is a likelier emergency than most other disasters.

The figures are as she gave them, and we have not checked them. The page is a column, not a news report.