It Was Too Late

Another heartbreaking Sandy story:

A retired city schoolteacher died Monday alongside her husband during Hurricane Sandy trying to escape her Staten Island neighborhood after initially dismissing her daughter's pleas to evacuate.

Marie Colborne, 66, loaded her ailing 89-year-old husband into their 2010 Lincoln SUV as the storm hit Monday night.

The vehicle was found the next day just a couple blocks away from their Harbour Ct. home, filled with water and empty.

The engine was still in drive with the keys still in the ignition.

The couple's bodies were only found two days later - close by the SUV, but hidden under a power boat that had washed ashore.

Marie Colborne's daughter had urged her mom to get out.

"I was like, ' Mom, get out of there - this one is not a little storm," Jeanne Mikkelsen told the News.
"She said, 'Nope, we're staying.'"

"She was a very strong-willed woman," added Mikkelsen , 47, a human resources consultant in Florida.

Marie Colborne refused to evacuate because her husband, Walter Colborne, didn't feel well enough to travel, Mikkelsen said.

Walter Colborne ran a successful Staten Island BMW dealership before selling the business about 20 years ago.

"He was very elderly and frail and he said, 'I'm not leaving,'" Mikkelsen said.

Mikkelsen was flying to Paradise Island with her mother 27 years ago when her mom first met Walter Colborne by chance on the flight.

The strangers immediately hit it off, and Mikkelsen barely spent time with her mother the rest of the trip.

"They've been inseparable ever since - including in death," Mikkelsen said.
The couple drowned to death, autopsies found.

Mikkelsen believes if they'd stayed put once the storm hit they may have survived.
"I can't understand why she left when they did," she said. "She ran out real quick. She left the garage door open."

Maybe if our mayor hadn't downplayed the storm for two day straight days, saying that Monday would be "just a regular work day" and school would be opened and Sandy was a "less dangerous" storm than Irene, maybe more people would have taken it seriously and left before it hit.

Maybe.

We can't know that, but we do know that the Mayor of Money downplayed this storm until it was too late.

Nick Greogry on FOX and Bryan Norcross and Jim Cantore of The Weather Channel all questioned the mayor's downplaying of the storm and late evacuation call for Flood Zone A.

Somehow the rest of the media have forgotten all that pre-Sandy stuff when they cover these horrific loss of life stories.

I'm not saying the Colborns would be alive if the mayor had acted differently in the two days leading up to the storm.

But you can bet some people would be alive had he taken the storm more seriously.

Yes, I am directly saying that the mayor is responsible for some of the deaths caused by this storm.

Directly.

By not calling for the mandatory evacuations on Saturday, by needing Cuomo to push him on the evacuation call on Sunday morning, by saying as of Friday night that storm day Monday was going to be "just another regular work day" and by saying more than once on Saturday that Sandy was a "less dangerous" storm than Irene and wouldn't make landfall near us (he was wrong about that, btw, and the storm models were showing that even as he made that call), Mayor Michael Bloomberg directly contributed to the deaths of New Yorkers who did not heed the seriousness of the storm until it was too late.

Frankly it's a shame Mayor Michael Bloomberg wasn't on Staten Island or the Rockaways when the storm hit.

Then maybe he would have gotten a taste of the horror that was Sandy.

But he was safe in his Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn bunkers and so he did not get a first hand look at the horror that he could have mitigated by telling people to take the storm seriously.

I don't know if Bloomberg will ever be held accountable for the mixed messages about the storm that came out of the his mouth until it was too late.

But Cantore, Norcross and Gregory know he could have done more to get people to take this seriously before the storm and they are on record saying that before Sandy hit.

While they may not want to go so far as to blame Bloomberg for some of these deaths, I will.

And make no mistake, had David Dinkins been in charge when this happened, the media would have happily blamed him for these deaths.

Same goes for Ray Nagin.

Bloomberg, billionaire businessman/media mogul, gets a pass from the press on this.

But not from me.

People died during Sandy who would have been saved had Mayor Michael Bloomberg handled the pre-storm the way he should have - with an early evacuation call of Zone A, a stern warning to people in Zone B that flooding could happen there as well, and a call to all of the city that Sandy was "more dangerous" than Irene because the tides made it so.