SuperstormsNYC should brace for the Big One -- Sandy was merely a freak: Scientists
Superstorm Sandy, the second costliest hurricane in U.S. history, caused $65 billion in damages, destroyed 305,000 New York City housing units, and left 117 people dead. The city is now fortifying its infrastructure against future storms because according to climate scientists, the 2012 storm was not The Big One which is expected to occur in future years. “Sandy was not the Big One,” says one climate expert. “Sandy was a freak, caused by an extremely rare confluence of events.”
Superstorm Sandy, the second costliest hurricane in U.S. history, caused $65 billion in damages, destroyed 305,000 New York City housing units, and left 117 people dead. The city is now fortifying its infrastructure against future storms because according to climate scientists, the 2012 storm was not The Big One which is expected to occur in future years.
The idea of a massive storm is purely speculative, but that has not prevented researchers from convincing the public and legislators to take such a storm into account as part of the city’s building resilience efforts. According to the New York Times in a 2014 article on storm-proofing efforts, the city’s new building projects assume that it “can no longer keep the sea at bay, but must by necessity invite it in.” Innovative plans include stone reinforcements along the sea and parks as buffer zones.
Nicholas K. Coch, a professor of coastal geology at Queens College, had been predicting for years prior to Sandy that New York City could be destroyed by a major hurricane; but his warnings were largely ignored. “People laughed at me,” the self-described “forensic hurricanologist,” told Grist in 2013. “They just thought that was the funniest thing they ever heard.” Coch now warns that Sandy was just a primer for “The Big One.” “Sandy was not the Big One,” Coch told Grist. “Sandy was a freak, caused by an extremely rare confluence of events.”
Bustle notes that Sandy had been demoted to a post-tropical cyclone by the time it made landfall on the east coast. The Big One, Coch predicts, will travel up the east coast, and into New York City. The next major storm touching New York City is likely to exceed the magnitude of Sandy. Climate change is strengthening the impact of big storms, taking future hurricanes to higher destruction levels. “We are going to see water levels like we have never seen before,” he said. “We can’t go by past experiences.”
Reinsurance firm Swiss Re, released a 2014 report concluding that New York City could face bigger storms. “Hurricane Sandy was obviously a terrible event for the Northeast United States, but it really was not the worst-case scenario,” Dr. Megan Linkin, a natural hazards expert for Swiss Re and author of the report, told the Huffington Post. “The East Coast is not immune to a hurricane that brings a Sandy-like surge and extreme winds over a large area.”
The big unanswered question is: when will the next Superstorm hit New York City? Certain parts of the city are demarcated as “100-year-flood zones,” areas estimated to have a 1 percent chance of flooding each year, but according to Bustle, Sandy eclipsed those areas, with much greater flooding than expected. Timothy M. Hall, a Columbia University professor, concludes that a storm with a similar trajectory has a 0.14 chance of hitting New Jersey on any given year (or a one in 700 years chance).
Still, scientists warn that storms with characteristics different from Sandy- coming from a different direction, for instance- could increase the probability of another devastating hurricane (considering the impact of climate change-induced sea-level rise) with destruction levels the likes of Sandy. “That will mean, all other things being equal, a 100-year storm will be a storm of just a couple of decades,” Hall said. “A 500-year storm will become the 100-year-storm.”
