NYC DOC: No Damage at Rikers Island

No big news here, but wanted to note this. NYC Department of Corrections says there was no damage at Rikers Island. Via email Tuesday afternoon, DOC spokesman Matt Nerzig says power was never lost at any of the Rikers jails. As for other DOC facilities, the Manhattan House of Detention and Bellevue Hospital Prison Ward are within the blackout area in lower Manhattan, and were put on backup generators.

Nerzig says that in advance of the storm last year, inmates were moved from one facility to another due to concern of the impact of high winds on the first facility. This year, no inmates were located at that first facility, so no transfers were necessary.

To be clear, I don't mean this as a "stuff didn't go bad, so therefore the preparation decisions were necessarily all correct." As far as I know, the latter is true, but it's not that the former proves the latter; that's not the way risk management works. For example, when the subways were shut down for Hurricane Irene, but did not flood, that in no way means the wrong decision was made.

(Similarly, to note a hot topic in the last 24 hours: if Nate Silver says there is a 2/3 chance Obama wins and a 1/3 chance Romney wins, neither election result by itself proves anything favorable or unfavorable about Silver's predictions).

That said, that DOC says everything went alright deserves noting for the record. Though it's not a very flashy headline.