Hurricane Sandy will live forever in the memory of New York City; and in some places, memory is not yet required to relive the storm. The unprecedented nature of the event itself coupled with the human tragedy associated with its landfall make Sandy a completely singular event. From a scientific perspective, nothing like Sandy had ever happened before. The storm’s interaction with a polar vortex that revitalized Sandy’s maximum windspeed, enlarged the storm’s radius, and changed its track to such an extent that it made landfall in New Jersey rather than being blown out into the North Atlantic was not predicted by the world’s most robust climate models and continues to spur research into the basic physical research behind hurricanes. The disastrous timing of the storms landfall, which perfectly coincided with ultra-high “spring-tide”, ensured that the resulting floods would engulf the low-lying areas north of where the storm center collided with the New Jersey coastline. Comparisons to science fiction disaster films (think “Perfect Storm”) are not unwarranted here; so many unlikely scenarios had to fall into place to make hurricane Sandy the disaster that it was, that it almost seems too improbable to have happened. The tragedy, of course, is that Sandy was no fiction.
New York City had seen hurricanes make their way up from the tropics before October of 2012, most notably the New England hurricane of 1938, which killed 60 people in the city and over 600 in total. While not unprecedented in terms of damage, Sandy’s coming 74 years after the legendary New England hurricane almost transcends the level of damage wrought by the great-depression era storm. 43 official deaths were reported, but the health effects on the 6,500 patients evacuated from hospitals and nursing homes could elevate that number. The direct human toll aside, Sandy is easily the most destructive and costly natural disaster in New York’s history. With 90,000 buildings in the inundation zone and a FEMA-predicted 70,000 homes sustaining some kind of flood damage, the cost passed on to individuals and their families that lay in the flood zones is almost incalculable. The official price tag associated with hurricane Sandy rests at $19 billion, but photos of flooded subway stations, taxi lots with only the neon yellow roofs protruding from the brackish water, and darkened city streets in downtown Manhattan lend a concreteness to that figure that a number cannot.
A storm like Sandy may not hit New York again in our lifetimes; but it would be a grave mistake to assume that it cannot happen again. The word “resilient” was co-opted by the city government in the wake of the storm to promote new policies aimed at picking up the pieces after the worst weather related disaster in the city’s history. However, for the residents of low lying neighborhoods in New York City, which are almost always low income neighborhoods occupied disproportionately by people of color, resiliency fails to address concerns about what happens next time, particularly with the threat of climate change looming over the entire scientific discussion of hurricanes and their relationship to an already warming climate.
This is part 2 of our series of reflections from our Fall Break 2015 trip. Check out the rest: