NYC hurricane expert: “Sandy wasn’t the Big One”

http://grist.org/cities/nyc-hurricane-expert-sandy-wasnt-the-big-one/

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One year ago today, Superstorm Sandy was just a twinkle in meteorologists’ eyes. The storm, which kicked up from a low-pressure area in the Caribbean Sea on Oct. 22, wouldn’t become an official hurricane for two days still. Even after it gained official hurricane status, raking across Jamaica and Cuba and soaking the Bahamas, U.S. weather models predicted that it would spin off into the North Atlantic and peter out, as most such storms do.

But Sandy did something different. After briefly losing steam, it rolled northward along the Eastern Seaboard and then veered left like a car that had just lost a wheel, barreling into the Jersey Shore and pushing storm tides through the streets of New York City. When the skies finally cleared and Wall Street opened back up, at least 159 people were dead, and the storm had caused $65 billion in damages and relocated the city’s rat population.

It was a shocking turn of events. Hurricane Irene had given New York a good scare (and New England a thorough drubbing) in August 2011, but the last time a major hurricane had hit the city was 1938. That storm killed 600 people, according to a New York Times report. But after decades of relative quiet, many New Yorkers doubted it would happen again. It’s easy, in those canyons of concrete and brick, to imagine that nothing will change.

There was one man, however, who saw Sandy coming. Nicholas K. Coch, a professor of coastal geology at Queens College, had been warning for almost two decades that a major hurricane could take out New York. The habit earned Coch the nickname “Dr. Doom” — a sobriquet that he didn’t take kindly to. (“No serious scientist wants to be called Dr. Doom,” he says.)