Idiot for the day

Amy S. Rosenberg and Frank Kummer have an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer about the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy:

Lester Kaplan was a swimmer and a gambler. At times he would swim so far out into the ocean from the beach in front of Resorts Casino-Hotel that his wife thought he wouldn't make it back. "He always made it back," Atara Kaplan said. But a hurricane proved too much for the 73-year-old former lawyer with the long gray ponytail.
Despite a bad heart and a house on flood-prone Lafayette Boulevard in the north end of Brigantine, Kaplan refused all pleas that he leave before Hurricane Sandy landed.
Fire rescue workers found Kaplan on Friday, four days after Sandy hit, lying on the floor of his living room, hypothermic and near death in an unheated and flooded house. It was one day after President Obama and Governor Christie had visited Brigantine, while Kaplan's friends and relatives were still barred by state order from returning to the island to check on him.
He died in an ambulance on the way to AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center in Atlantic City. State police listed him as one of New Jersey's two dozen official victims of Hurricane Sandy. The others include an elderly couple living without power and a woman who fell down stairs while groping in the dark.
Kaplan, who married a woman thirty years younger than he was, and spent the next two decades playing blackjack and running a limousine company and boardinghouses, had made it through the worst of the storm.
His wife said she had last talked to him Thursday. "He said he was okay, but that he was cold, very cold," Atara Kaplan said. "After that, it was nothing."
Inside his two-story, yellow-sided house, flooded with three and a half feet of water, firefighters found his unclothed, nearly lifeless body.
Brigantine Fire Chief Jim Holl said fire crews were on Lafayette for hours Monday afternoon as the storm closed in and streets and houses began flooding. They fought a car fire about a block away and floated an aluminum boat to a house a few doors down to rescue a family just before conditions made any more rescues impossible. "We were right there if he wanted to leave," Holl said.
Two doors down, in a house identical to Kaplan's, Steve Gorman also rode out the storm. He had no idea Kaplan, who had been taken out repeatedly by ambulance because of heart problems in recent months, was in the house until fire rescue personnel brought his body out Friday afternoon, Gorman said. "He would have been the last person I'd figure to still be here," Gorman said.
The state police list of Sandy fatalities shows widespread destruction from the top to the bottom of the state over a number of days. It also shows an aftermath as deadly.
As the storm made landfall on 29 October into last Tuesday, falling trees and limbs posed the most danger, according to the list. The first death was that of a man who died in Hawthorne in Passaic County, when the storm hit land on the evening of 29 October.
Six deaths were attributed to trees or falling limbs. Ocean, Middlesex, and Essex Counties recorded the most deaths, four each. Five drownings were recorded, although some might have been the result of hypothermia as millions lost power just as Sandy was ushering in a steep drop in temperatures. Three or four people may have died as the result of generator-related carbon monoxide poisoning or fires. Two people fell to their deaths in the dark.
A fire in Willingboro that killed a husband, 73, and wife, 70, now is attributed to Sandy. Power was out when the fire began, and the couple may have been using a generator, according to law enforcement reports.
In Brigantine, Holl could not explain why Atara Kaplan could not get through to police, as she said. Emergency calls to police so overwhelmed the system that people were calling the Brigantine Firehouse directly, he said, but he said he did not believe that was the case after the storm.
As to whether Kaplan's wife or friends should have been allowed back on the island, Holl said: "We had to follow what the Governor put down as an edict. It was county officers at the bridge. We didn't have a whole lot of control over who could or couldn't get back on the island." Holl said he hoped the death would serve as a warning to those who defied the evacuation order. "We need to get the message to the people, those of you who stayed here," he said.
Atara Kaplan was trying to straighten things up at the house, where three and a half feet of flooding would require major rebuilding. Digging out a photo of her husband, she could only shake her head at the loss of the carefree Jerry Springer look-alike who married her in Sharon Zheng's Chinese restaurant on the Black Horse Pike, adopted her two children, and always won at the blackjack table.
Kaplan met his wife after her brother, working as a security guard at one of Kaplan's rental properties, arranged for his sister to meet his boss. When she arrived, as a joke Kaplan was yelling at her brother. She was then 21. He was 51, but told her he was 32. She said she believed him until two years later when he had a heart attack and hospital records revealed his real age.
Kaplan was born in Winthrop, Massachusetts, and once owned restaurants in Boston. He owned and operated Tropical Limousine in Brigantine for six years. His death notice said he favored Harrah's, the Golden Nugget, and Jeopardy!, and was a fan of the New England Patriots and Boston Red Sox. He is survived by his mother, Ruth; two sons, Eric and Richard; two daughters, Rhonda and Shakiera; and four grandchildren.
Atara Kaplan said that she tried everything to get her husband to leave, but that she was away in Connecticut, where she was attending nursing school for about a week before the storm.
Like Holl, she said the lesson from Kaplan's death was clear. Riding out the storms is risking your life, no matter how many times or how far you have swum into the ocean and made it back. "You know what I would say to everybody? Don't risk your life, your health. It's not worth it."

Rico says the guy was dumb, but made it to 73, even after conning a younger woman into marrying him, so we'll say he lived a full life...