The winds picked up and the rain fell harder. Still going by the popular appellation, "hurricane" Floyd had been downgraded to a tropical storm after tearing up the Bahamas and then the North Carolina coast. It hit New York City, shutting down schools and freeways in the Big Apple for most of Wednesday. People gleefully took a day off work. Kids played in flooded streets. In Rockaway and Long Island, the surf looked bad and they had to evacuate Fire Island. New Jersey got it worse, flooding so bad that on Friday phone calls to friends in the Garden State couldn't be completed. Floyd was a serious storm, yes. But in New York City, it was mostly just serious hype. It rained, yeah, but left no real trauma.

But we saw it on the news, updates every fifteen minutes on the local network. New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, clad in a white polo shirt, personally oversaw operations at his makeshift emergency headquarters in the World Trade Center. 20 shelters were opened throughout the five boroughs. A citywide state of emergency had been declared.

A little overstatement and panic is understandable, given the pictures from the Bahamas, and given the footage from North Carolina just one day before. Given that just three weeks before a surprise storm caused major flooding and shut down the subways, effectively paralyzing the city, it was understandable that Giuliani wanted to seem prepared, that he would spend a lot of time on televisions explaining that Floyd would bring more rain than the last storm, but that it wouldn't overload drainage systems for it would bring a steady rain, and not the flash flood conditions of the previous downpour. There was some flooding, of course, but all minor and all cleared up by the next day.

Floyd panic also hit the city at a bad time. New York was just getting over a mosquito-scare. Certain biting bugs, it seemed, were carrying a deadly disease, prompting the city to spray pesticides all over the place, aggravating respiratory diseases in some citizens and causing alarm for those uncomfortable with breathing insecticide. Those were an uneasy few, however. We all keep roach spray in our apartments around here and during the mosquito scare, there was a run on insecticide and insect repellent resulting in lines of angry consumers desperate to know when that next shipment would come in... Mosquitoes, a flood, and now a hurricane, it did seem as if New York had been besieged with crises, as if it were Sodom under the angry gaze of God.

Floyd came and went rather quickly, and it was followed by a clear and sunny day, with a bit of wind and a slight nip in the air to signal the start of Autumn. Floyd was a turning point for New York, which had endured one of the hottest summers on record, where residents overloaded the electrical grid by cranking up their air conditioners. The city is a rancid place during humid heat - the smells of the street carry into the air and the subway tunnels (always hot from human warmth) become unbearable. Moving into and out of refrigerated air environments tends to set off summer colds and everyone gets a bit irritable. So the cold rains of Floyd gave the city a much needed shower.

The evening of Floyd, around 6 p.m. after a full day of hurricane coverage and a full night to follow, NBC news with Tom Brokaw leads with: "Hurricane Floyd - Are People Overreacting?" By that point in the day many New Yorkers were wondering why they didn't go to work and why their children hadn't got to school. Except for the worst hit areas, everyone seemed to be able to go to the grocery store or the movies and sure they got a little wet but did they really need the day off? Floyd seemed like a joke and even President Clinton noticed tried to address this, telling Americans that we basically lucked out with Floyd but that we should all heed weather advisories and not assume all the climatic catastrophes will fizzle. Good advice, it seems.

Floyd could have been bad. It could even have been so bad that all the news coverage would have been useful. The local news gave it way too much time, though. Their stories were mostly repetitive and useless. But their hearts were in the right place - by sticking with Floyd they might have snared the blood and guts content that gets ratings. The city was right to be cautious and people staying home from work, or leaving early, was probably a good idea since there's no telling what calamity a normal rush hour commute might have caused.

But Floyd left me a little disappointed. Hell, I bought candles and bottled water. Around mid-evening we shut off all our lights and lit the candles just for effect as a steady, but by no means horrible, rain fell outside and the clouds reflected the lights of the city.

Michael Maiello isn't taunting the hurricane. He's just having fun with 20-20 hindsight.