>> we want to protect people and protect people's lives. >> this was the best scenario. we took the appropriate precautions. >> i'll ask a woman who may be new york's next mayor if the city get it done and cory booker from the front lines. and maverick billionaire mark cuban is not afraid to say what he thinks about the economy, sport, politicians, just about anything. tonight he says he'll raise hell. watch out, america. this is "piers morgan tonight." good evening. of all the places to be hit by a tropical storm who expected vermont to take such a pounding? the creeks and rivers are a raging torrent tonight, one the governor fears will take many more lives. 27 people in nine states have died in hurricane irene. millions are still in the dark and irene's price tag could go as high as $6 billion. in the wake of the storm administration officials will visit virginia, north carolina, and vermont tomorrow. all of this six years to the day after the massive tragedy of katrina. joining me is gary tuchman in brattleboro. what's the latest there? it seems vermont has taken a real kicking. >> reporter: hey, piers. they are shocked in vermont. this is a state known for skiing, for mountains, not tropical systems. in parts of vermont you have rivers crest right now. this is the winewski river waters, but the river is a quarter mile down the road. it's cresting now. we expect by tomorrow there will be no more water here, but there will be mud in homes. particularly in southern vermont now, the waters are gone but the mud remains. there is so much tragedy here. three people have been killed here, one person is missing. there is shock because the creeks and brooks turned to raging rapids. even old timers have never seen it before in vermont. >> it would be pertinent about the discussion we are having about the media and warning. were the warnings substantial enough or regular enough in vermont? did people know what may be coming? >> first of all, there is a lot of resentment in vermont when people say this was hyped. this is the worst tropical system they have faced. people died and there are tens of millions of damage. regarding the preparations in vermont, what you had was an incredible system. we are used to covering hurricanes where it hits one or two places and ukt evacuate north or west and get out of the way. the entire state of vermont was liable to get hit. most people here live near brooks, near creeks that they know could be raging rapids and there is nowhere to go. that's one of the problems. everyone in the state would have to evacuate and that's not practical. >> are you expecting the death toll to rise in vermont? what's the general feeling about the scenes we are witnessing and the possible casualty toll? >> we don't think it will go much higher but we think it will go higher. i talked to the governor and they said they wanted to keep information quiet before they don't want the public to know before the families knew. they said they were searching for several missing people. it could climb. they believe the one person who is missing has probably perished, too. that person was with one of the people they found. they think it could go above the number of four. >> it's been a catastrophe for the people of vermont. we wish them the very best in their recovery. thank you very much. my next guest is one of the few people who saw it coming. friday night on this show he said new england could bear the brunt. joining me is brigadier general duke deluca. thank you for joining me. you called it pretty accurately. when you see what's happening in vermont, what do you feel about it? >> obviously our heart goes out to the victims who are in the affected areas on the west side of the state and tributaries like the winewski that feeds into lake champlain and in the east in the connecticut river basin. i mentioned a concern about the connecticut river basin. we were concerned with it farther south. when the hurricane expanded, the hardest hit river basin in new england was in the whole storm was connecticut river basin. 10 to 14 inches fell in that basin which was already saturated in a period of less than 18 hours. that's a tremendous volume of water. i think i mentioned the watersheds in new england and eastern new york clear in 24 hours. that's a lot of water moving rapidly. i think you are showing video of that now. >> what do you say to those who say the media including cnn and others hyped up the hurricane and that it wasn't as bad as everyone said it was going to be? >> well, i think it's a partial truth but is fundamentally inaccurate at its base. this is a storm that affected over 65 million people. 5 million businesses and homes without power even now. 24 people and the count still is rising in terms of people that lost their lives. there is a tremendous amount of economic and physical damage. they were still frankly assessing and we won't know the final numbers for some weeks. i don't think it was hyped. the storm did spread out and that was a lucky break for the northeast. that meant wind velocities were reduced which saved a great many lives and a great much damage. >> general, thank you very much. i want to bring in chad myers from the hurricane center. you have heard the debate today. you have been doing an astonishing job for the last few days keeping us informed about all this. really spectacular. in terms of how the power and the strength and therefore the threat of hurricane irene changing in that very crucial last 24 hours, could that have been predicted at all or can the authorities only really ever go on what's right in front of them at any given moment? >> the problem with irene is for wind it was an underachiever. for rain it was an overachiever. for flooding, obviously. this storm had the potential to be a category three storm at any time in its history and in its life even after north carolina. the pressure was low enough that if this storm got an eye and the winds spun up, we could have had 110 mile per hour storm right over manhattan. we wouldn't be having this conversation. so that potential was there. it's like having a can of gas next to a fireplace and you say, oh, don't worry about it. it's never exploded before. well, the potential was there. we had to warn you that the potential was there. i think the potential was always there that this could have been much more catastrophic to the city. we focused a lot of time on the city. i understand that. there are four times more people living in brooklyn than in the entire state of vermont. so this is how you have to think about it. 13 times more people in new york city than in the state of vermont. so we had to protect the mass of people. the people of vermont had historic flooding. you think the guy who built that bridge in rutland, vermont, ever thought water would go high enough to knock it down? i don't think so. the people in vermont never thought this was possible. >> was there any stage on saturday or sunday, chad, when the authorities led by the president presumably and fema could have officially downgraded it properly and said, look, it's not going to be as big as we feared? new york, you don't have to panic so much. would that have been a prudent thing to do? one of the specific criticisms is when they saw the hurricane diminishing in power they still said everybody had to be on red alert. >> if you have ever watched an ice skater in the olympics and she has her arms out and does this thingcalled a scratch skin you bring the arms in and the ice skater goes quickly around, that's what this storm did. this was the ice skater with the arms out. it never brought the arms in, but the potential for bringing the winds and arms in was there. let me tell you this. montreal, canada, lost windows in sky scrapers. that was 300 miles from new york city. the storm was on shore for 300 miles and windows were knocked out well north of there. it was always possible for the same type of damage to happen in new york city. it was just a sheer stroke of luck that it didn't do that. >> well, chad, again, thank you for your sterling work on this. i'm sure that contributed to many people getting to safety when they needed to. i appreciate that. i'm sure many people do. new york city's mass transit system shut down completely the day before irene hit. was that politics ahead of safety? joining me is a woman who may be the next mayor of new york. city council speaker christine quinn. you have heard the debate today. i have to say from where i sit, in the end, people are complaining about having their lives markedly disrupted -- what is your view from an official point of view? >> from an officially point of view we had to make decisions based on what we were hearing from the national weather service and other hurricane and governmental experts. remember, we're talking about new york city here. right? we asked people in an area where there are about 300,000 people to evacuate. we needed time to do that. so we had to make the call for this early. it was important to remember that when the decision was made by our mass transit authority to shut down subways and buses. we needed eight hours to do that. then we needed time to move our train and bus equipment out of where we store it. it just happens we store it in low lying areas in the rockaways. moving the equipment out, closing down the subways enabled us to get them back up and running at 6:00 a.m. today. the fact that the mta had to respond to was if there are sustained -- not gusts -- sustained winds of 39 miles an hour or more, the subways cannot run. on friday, all indications were that that was likely to happen. you need time to move people and shut the system down. based on what we knew, with all due respect, not from the media, but from weather services and governmental agencies on friday we had to make that call. >> i was in new york towards the end of last year, late december, when there was this 18-inch blizzard overnight. coming from england where an inch of snow renders the country incapacitated for years i couldn't believe mayor bloomberg was hammered by the media within 48 hours for not clearing the streets up. but he was being hammered. it was clear to me then after i did a bit of research that seeing politicians in america get fired regularly for not reacting quick enough to the extremes of weather that you get in this country, there is a cynical view and it may or may not be cynical, that mayor bloomberg this time was determined not to get caught in the trap again. so went overboard on hurricane irene. how would you respond to that? >> you know, the snow response was absolutely unacceptable. the city simply didn't do its job delivering service to new yorkers. no question about it. that's why we had very aggressive oversight hearings on that in the council. that said, what we put in plan with the mayor put in place this past weekend was a hurricane coastal plan developed in 2006. this wasn't a political plan. this wasn't a response to the snow. this was a plan that was developed after katrina and implemented based on all of the weather data that we had. it really wasn't about politics. it was about what we could do to keep people safe and protect the mass transit system based on info we had on friday knowing we needed well over a day to get everything implemented. >> christine, let me hold you there. stay with me. i want to bring in people on opposite sides of the debate. one is a new york times media reporter and another is from the washington times. i believe you are in the it wasn't overhyped camp. >> i was in nags head feeling the winds and i was still finding sand in my hair and ears this morning. it is not good to be out in winds like that. we're lucky it wasn't worse in new york. the idea that it was hyped seems ludicrous to me. >> joe, you're ludicrous apparently. how do you responsibility? >> i don't want to argue that there shouldn't have been a tremendous response to this and preparations with the worst case scenario, but stay flexible. we do it with snowstorms. 72 hours it will be a terrible snowstorm. the night before we say, hey, it dissipated. they knew this storm was losing -- unlike what chad said, they knew tf losing the central location in the eye wall. they knew it was weakening. it was a category three over the ocean. category one on land and got weaker and weaker. they knew it. they weren't flexible enough to tell people what was happening and how this was becoming less of a threat all the way through the entire process. >> with respect, joe, in vermont tonight they are not looking at this as overhyped. if anything they are looking at it as underhyped. isn't it the truth that new york city got very lucky that the hurricane didn't score a direct hit, wasn't as powerful at that moment it could have been but vermont has been hammered a lot harder than people imagined it would be. the idea that the overall look at hurricane irene is it was overhyped, tell it to people in vermont tonight. >> well, i agree with you. and the commander you had on as well. that's the point i'm trying to make. we have accounts that there were 13 million people in new york, a lot of response needed there. where was the coverage about vermont? i watched three days straight of wall-to-wall coverage. never heard vermont mentioned once. all i heard was new york city nonstop. >> as chad myers rightly pointed out the reason is that new york city has this vast population tightly housed. if there had been a direct hit, the devastation to life, limb, construction would have been tremendous. if you had been running fema or president obama would you have taken the risk? 27 people have been killed by this hurricane. how many have to be killed before you assess this as serious enough to take the measures they took? >> that's not what i'm saying. i'm not saying they shouldn't have had a response or prepared for it. the question was when it started to change how much information should the public have? if it's moving away from a category three. there was category five coverage for a category one storm. the last nine states it went through it was a tropical storm. >> let's go to chad myers. you have heard what joe has to say. he thinks basically you're wrong. what do you have to say? >> i looked at the other storms that were the same pressure. wilma, gene, ivan, charlie. i covered them all. i was on the ground watching those come on shore. when i saw the pressure was 955 headed to new york city i'm glad the hurricane center didn't let the guard down. >> brian, i will bring you back in here. we are on the sixth anniversary of what happened in katrina. i can only begin to imagine what would have happened if the media had underwarned people and had a katrina scenario in new york city. >> six years ago the media was late to find out about the flooding. that's a case like vermont actually where they were too focused on the coast, on the beach. that was the same -- the same was true in this story. too much attention on the beach. if we had more meteorologists, trained scientists in journalism they would have been looking at the inland flooding, the sound, places like vermont. that's why we need more chad myers on the air and experts who can do that for us. >> that's not the meteorologists told us. they were telling us it would be devastating along the coast. they were saying little mention of inland flooding. >> that's not true. that's not even close. >> i watched none of that. let's bring in chad. you're right to be exploding with rage there. you barely stopped mentioning it. >> i said this is not going to be remembered as a wind storm. i said this is a flood-maker. irene will never be remembered as a wind event. it will be a flood event. we said it 72 hours before land fall. >> that's the problem for television. pictures of wind are easier to do. it's easier to be on the beach. you quoted one of my twitter messages that water was being sucked out of the sound. there is a bias in television toward windy pictures. >> they are good points. finally to christine quinn again. you are one of the people in charge there. faced with the same set of circumstances would you do exactly the same thing again? >> absolutely. if the facts were what they were on a friday and we believed a storm was coming overnight into sunday i would absolutely have worked with city government to do the same thing. you know, the idea of being flexible, you need time to move people out of the biggest city in the world. then you're going to let the storm go. it could change in our favor. it could have changed back the other way. you are not going to bring people back to their homes or put the subway back up and running until the entire storm is done. once you have made the decision based on the facts with the time you need to implement it based on whatever area you govern is, you stay with that until the storm is done and hope it breaks your way. that's what happened to us in new york city. didn't happen in other parts of the country, unfortunately. >> thank you very much. it's an interesting debate. i have to say on balance, no offense joe curl, but i would rather take my advice on weather matters from chad myers than you any day. >> thanks, pooes, appreciate it. >> no offense, joe. >> coming up, cory booker. and the old man stopped and thought and said: free 'cause that's how it ought to be my brother credit 'cause you'll need a loan for one thing or another score 'cause they break it down to one simple number that you can use dot to take a break because the name is kinda long com in honor of the internet that it's on put it all together at the end of the song it gives you freecreditscore-dot-com, and i'm gone... offer applies with enrollment in freecreditscore.com okay, so who ordered the cereal that can help lower cholesterol and who ordered the yummy cereal? 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