Impact
When Diane brought heavy rain through New England, flooding was immediate and devastating. Compounding the problem was the fact that Diane was, and still remains, the wettest tropical cyclone on record for the Northeast. Many small rivers rose above their banks from mountain run-off and flooded towns throughout New England. Flood records were numerous throughout the northeast, and damage was high. Many areas in Connecticut were flooded once more, including Putnam, Winsted and Waterbury, as well as East Granby, where a former housing subdivision sitting where Grandbrook Park is today was completely swept away by the floodwaters.
At a creek near Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, fifty people drowned when they were unable to escape the rising water.
The Northampton Street Bridge crossing the Delaware River from Easton, PA to Phillipsburg, NJ sustained major damage when floodwaters, 44 feet (13 m) above normal water level, topped the roadway of the bridge on August 19, 1955. Repairs carried out by Bethlehem Steel over the next two years made the bridge usable but the flood damage left a readily apparent sag in the center span that remains today.
An estimated 184–200 people died because of the direct effects of Diane (on top of the 25 killed by Connie).
$831 million (1955 USD) in damages is attributed to Diane (although separating damage from Hurricane Connie and Hurricane Ione is difficult). Accounting for inflation, Diane is the 12th costliest hurricane in U.S. history (as of 2005), with total damages of $7 billion (2004 USD).
Read more about this topic: Hurricane Diane
Famous quotes containing the word impact:
“As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice—there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists.”
—Thomas S. Kuhn (b. 1922)
“If the federal government had been around when the Creator was putting His hand to this state, Indiana wouldn’t be here. It’d still be waiting for an environmental impact statement.”
—Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)