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In responding to questions from The Daily Voice about the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Irene, North Salem Town Supervisor Warren Lucas recalled his childhood in town and how things have changed:
When I was a kid in town it was all open fields, with cow corn growing in every one of them, and we just didn't have this many trees. As Drew Outhouse is happy to remind us, "They didn't build stone walls in the woods."
I know it is hard to believe, but there are fields I used to mow with a tractor 45 years ago that are fully covered with trees today.
We have also become more tied into the communications grid. Fifty years ago you lost your phone for a few days, and sometimes that even worked when the power went out.
Now [when the power goes out] you can't work from home as many people do, you can't communicate with anyone, you can't charge your cellphone. In a world so intricately connected, it is harder to deal with these outages.
Come to think of it, we just didn't have these outages 50 years ago. Maybe it was because we just didn't have this many trees around.
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