While we lucked out with Irene where I am in the Mid-Hudson Valley, Central Vermont took it hard. If we hadn’t gotten out in advance of the storm, we’d probably only be getting out of the state now. Facebook became a makeshift disaster recovery system in a really fascinating way (someone should really study the emergence of that, it’s pretty damn impressive).

There are lots of pictures of this event, but these Helicopter Survey images are some of the most striking, as you can see the damage at scale.