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Sandy One Year Later, Foxwoods Drops MGM Name

Hartford Courant business columnist Dan Haar talks about what we’ve learned in the year since Hurricane Sandy struck Connecticut as well as the news that ...

Hartford Courant business columnist Dan Haar talks about what we’ve learned in the year since Hurricane Sandy struck Connecticut as well as the news that Foxwoods is ending its partnership with MGM.

According to Haar, here are 11 lessons we learned. Click here to see an interactive photo gallery with more information and observations.

  1. Really big storms, like other moments of shared adversity, give people a sense of time, place and history.
  2. When it comes to predicting storms, maybe the Europeans have us beat.
  3. Preparing for extreme weather is about more than just public safety and electricity restoration. As climate change happens, we need to think more about protecting natural resources.
  4. There are ways to maintain power even in enormous storms but they all cost huge bucks or level the landscape.
  5. Public agencies hand out recovery money slowly. A year later, the state is still opening relief centers.
  6. The government can clean up after a storm and it can help find jobs for unemployed people, but it’s nearly impossible to do both at the same time.
  7. It would be very bad if a big storm hit during a government shutdown.
  8. Massive storms show the positives and negatives of carving the state into 169 fiefdoms.
  9. Electric utilities can communicate better, but when it comes to actually turning the lights back on after a huge storm, it takes as long as it takes.
  10. The old flood insurance program with subsidized coverage doesn’t work anymore because 100-year storms happen more than once a century.
  11. Compared with New Jersey, we don’t have much to complain about. This is true about a lot of things, including Sandy.

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