Meme watch: Nobody could have predicted

First, the obvious one.

For nearly a decade, scientists have told city and state officials that New York faces certain peril: rising sea levels, more frequent flooding and extreme weather patterns. The alarm bells grew louder after Tropical Storm Irene last year, when the city shut down its subway system and water rushed into the Rockaways and Lower Manhattan. 

On Tuesday, as New Yorkers woke up to submerged neighborhoods and water-soaked electrical equipment, officials took their first tentative steps toward considering major infrastructure changes that could protect the city’s fragile shores and eight million residents from repeated disastrous damage.

And then, Kevin points out in an earlier comment thread, some fine foresight on the part of Mike Bloomberg on Sunday. 

President Obama asked Craig Fugate from FEMA to call me earlier in the day and offer any help. I assured him that we had, we think, everything under control but we appreciate the effort.

No thanks, we're all good here!

All of these health care facilities are taking additional precautions to prepare – including bringing in more staff. A lot of them do have backup generators and any outages are not expected to be more than hours or at most a day or so, so they'll be fine, they think

They thought wrong. 

At a news conference Monday night at the city's Office of Emergency Management in Brooklyn, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the back-up power at the hospital had failed, prompting the emergency evacuation of patients.

"The one thing that we had not counted on, New York University's hospital back-up power—in spite of them making sure, ensuring us that it's been tested—stopped working. And we're working with them to help move people out," Mr. Bloomberg said

The one thing they hadn't counted on was the one thing nobody could have predicted. Oddly, they seem like they're still kind of counting on it even today.

The failed backup power generators that led to the evacuation of the New York University Langone Medical Center in Manhattan are adequate, a spokeswoman said Tuesday.

"Our generators are fully compliant with all state and federal regulations and, using good prudence, we test them all the time as we have to do anyway," Lisa Greiner told HuffPost.

So they stand by their failed generators. How long before they admit they were "generators in name only"?

Anyway despite what Bloomberg says above, this was not the "one thing they hadn't counted on." There was also this.

"We have visited every crane site and every construction site in the city, and with the winds that are expected we think they have appropriately tied down all of the equipment. But if there's a gust that's a lot more than anybody had counted on, things could start to blow."

The gusts must have been "a lot more than anybody had counted on"

A partially collapsed construction crane dangling ominously from the top of a unfinished New York City skyscraper is "stable," but the site's construction company and a crane expert worry that its heavy boom could smash to the street below.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said today that "the Department of Buildings has determined that the crane is currently stable," but winds remaining from superstorm Sandy remained too high at the top of the 90-story luxury high rise building for crews to work on it.

There's an awful lot here that Bloomberg said he was on top of just a few days ago and yet is suddenly turning out to be a heavy load of nobody-could-have-predicteds. Why isn't Bloomberg being subjected to the same heavy (and unfair) criticism others have received?