I'm in touch with co-workers in Wilmington, and they are preferring Sandy to Irene. One guy said that last year he had a lake in his basement but this year it was just a pond. OTOH, further up the coast definitely seems to have gotten it significantly worse with Sandy that with Irene. And all that snow...that is just...out there.
It's all bad, really, and there will be probably be more to come. We'll need to keep that in mind as more "storms of the century" come along, plenty of meteorological/scientific predictions out there that this is the "new normal", and I'm not seeing any real reasons to be skeptical.
You can't break or totally tame Earth. You can try, but sooner or later...