I cannot remember the last severe weather event that lived up to the hype that preceded it in the local media here in Washington, D.C. Even with a significant storm such as Sandy, the hype just appeared to intensify accordingly. Not content to be a category-one hurricane poised to disrupt 60 million lives and six percent of our oil-refining capacity, Sandy was reportedly a “perfect storm” that would meet up with a cold front from the West, the jet stream up above, and the tidal implications of a full Moon even farther up above to create a cataclysm close to home.

The typical District resident is particularly susceptible to this meteorological mumbo-jumbo and is easily panicked. By early Saturday afternoon, the grocery-store shelves were already emptied of their milk, eggs and D batteries. (As one savant pointed out to me, what is the good of milk and eggs when the power goes out and the refrigerator stops working and the latest advice is to pitch the contents after four hours?) I was surprised to find bread in the baked-goods aisle but I suppose there are items which go in and out of fashion when provisioning. When I was a kid, securing an adequate supply of toilet paper was a big thing; nowadays, perhaps with the advent of big-box stores and big-box quantities, many households maintain yearlong caches of TP.

By Sunday evening it was reported that the nation’s capital would be shutting down on Monday. (For those keeping score, this shutdown did not include the U.S. Congress which was already in recess.) Area airports remained open but all the flights were canceled.

For a biggish city, the District boasts an impressive arboreal canopy. When the soil becomes saturated with moisture and the wind blows hard, as happens with severe weather, falling trees become the preeminent danger to persons, property, and power lines. So far, the District has received 4.76 inches of rain. In the thick of it, there were wind gusts up to 60 mph. The worst was over by late Monday night. Even if the storm did not live up to its advance billing, it was prudent that schools and the federal government were closed and that mass transit was suspended. It is impossible to know what additional increment of precipitation or blast of wind could cause a tree or pole to topple on a car, a head, or a high-voltage wire—and more than 280,000 area households were reported as being without power. It was not, however, a major blackout, although there remains anticipatory dread of the predictably inept response of the District’s universally reviled utility company, Pepco.

There were no camera crews documenting any swells on the Potomac lapping at the floodwalls in Georgetown. Old Town Alexandria wasn’t even under water. Sure, there was that evacuation in Huntington by Cameron Run (but everybody knows by now that simply urinating in Cameron Run is sufficient to make it crest). The anchors manning Washington’s news desks began to speculate that perhaps the ground was unseasonably dry. Or maybe the derecho of last summer had already culled the District of its vulnerable trees. The local coverage did include the Federal City’s seaside playgrounds, where the real havoc was being wrought: Ocean City, MD; Dewey Beach, Rehoboth Beach and Lewes, DE. Whatever one calls it (hurricane, extra-tropical storm, post-tropical cyclone) and whatever it became, Sandy was about storm surges, the confluence of high winds and high tides, a coastal calamity in the main.

The big stories are along the Jersey shore where Sandy made landfall last night, in New York City, and on Long Island, where the devastation is severe and widespread.