Posted on 09/19/2005 5:38:42 PM PDT by rmlew
But our own hurricane history is more tumultuous than many New Yorkers might think. In 1821, when a major hurricane made a direct hit on Manhattan, stunned residents recorded sea levels rising as fast as thirteen feet in a single hour down where there’s now Battery Park City. Everything was flooded south of Canal Street. The storm struck at low tide, though, and, according to Queens College professor Nicholas Coch, a coastal geologist who calls himself a “forensic hurricanologist,” that’s “the only thing that saved the city.”
Then there’s Hog Island. The pig-shaped mile-long barrier island was off the southern coast of the Rockaways. After the Civil War, developers built saloons and bathhouses on it, and Hog Island became a Gilded Age version of the Hamptons. The city’s political bosses and business elite used the place as a kind of beachy annex of Tammany Hall. That all ended on the night of August 23, 1893, when a terrifying Category 2 hurricane made landfall on the swamp that is now JFK airport.
The hurricane was a major event. All six front-page columns of the August 25, 1893, New York Times were dedicated to the “unexampled fury” of the “West Indian monster.” The storm sunk dozens of boats and killed scores of sailors. In Central Park, hundreds of trees were uprooted, and gangs of Italian immigrant boys “roamed . . . in the early hours of the morning collecting the dead sparrows and plucking them of their feathers.” Apparently looting was not yet in vogue. The brand-new Metropolitan Life building on Madison Avenue was severely damaged. And a 30-foot storm surge swept across southern Brooklyn and Queens, destroying virtually every man-made structure in its path. These days, evacuation plans are in place, officials said last week. But “try to tell someone in Sheepshead Bay that they have to evacuate immediately because within the next 24 hours they’ll have 30 feet of storm surge,” says Mike Lee, director of Watch Command at the New York City Office of Emergency Management. “They’ll laugh at you. I mean, I barely even believe it.”
As for Hog Island, “it largely disappeared that night,” Coch says. “As far as I know, it is the only incidence of the removal of an entire island by a hurricane.”
Statistically, the New York area is hit by one of these monster storms every 75 years or so; “it’s just a matter of time,” says Lee. After Hog Island, the next big one came a little ahead of schedule, the “Long Island Express” of 1938, with 183-mile-per-hour winds. At the time, Long Island wasn’t a densely populated suburban sprawl. The same hurricane today would cause incredible havoc. Hurricane Carol, a Category 3 storm that hit eastern Long Island and came ashore in Connecticut in 1954, mostly missed the city (even as it inundated downtown Providence, Rhode Island, under twelve feet of water).
Were another Long Island Express to barrel in, AIR Worldwide Corporation, an insurance-industry analyst, estimates $11.6 billion in New York losses alone. On AIR’s list of “the top ten worst places for an extreme hurricane to strike,” New York City is No. 2, behind only Miami. New Orleans is ranked fifth.
Anyone know where I can go that has temperate weather, lacks hurricanes, tornados, floods, locust, earthquakes....
ping
Well, I live 45 Miles from a live Volcano, I can easily tell if she is steaming today or not! Not as it happens. Other than that, this is a great place to live. Oh yea, earthquakes every so often... Pacific Northwest! Gotta love it! Oh yea, and way, way too many liberals...
Hey, we were hungry! Sauteed in a little olive oil with garlic...
I wouldn't want to be in a modern light weight sky scraper during a hurricane. They may be designed to withstand 200 mph winds, but it would feel like being on a ship in rough seas.
We feel a rumble from that confused state (the one that can't decide if it belongs to the USA or Mexico) once in awhile, but that is about it.
Gets hot in the summer - can get real friggin' hot - but "it's a dry heat".
Giggle.
My "winter" gets mighty cold, too. 60's max, really pisses me off.
LVM
In 1893 the looters would have been toast of they stole from the stores or residents. There would have been no chance for them to show ID.
VOGUE I like the way the NYMag.com refers to todays looters. But what do you expect from a lib rag.
Atlanta.....
NeverGore :^)
Aside from poor bolting the load bearing structures are vulnerable. The combination of the cantilever (column instead of a wall) supporting the west side of the building and counterwieght make the building a perfect target for a car bomb. Had the Egyptian Islamic Jihad refugee terrorists hit the Citicorp building in 1993, instead of the World Trade Center, they could have toppled it.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2104742/
Well it was in 1900 after the Galveston storm of September 8 that killed between 6,000 and 8,000 people. Of course Texans knew what do do with looters back then; they shot them. They also shot "Kodak fiends" who took pictures of the nude corpses that washed up on the beach.
No one is going to tell you that. If there is such a place, it is either very secret, or a shack there costs $100,000,000. :-)
Actually, I have the misfortune of living in such of place where weather disaster is extremely rare. We've only lost power once for anything longer than a few seconds in the last seven years or so.
It's called Delaware, which is also a Blue state, by the way...
I wouldn't call Delaware weather "temperate", though.
And I must have been there in one of the rare storms years ago. I was with a group of young single people who thought a storm in Dewey Beach could be fun. You had to be drunk to enjoy it, and unfortunately, I wasn't.
"Anyone know where I can go that has temperate weather, lacks hurricanes, tornados, floods, locust, earthquakes...."
Eastern New Mexico would fit the bill better than most (just gets a little cold in the winter; the tornadoes that plague the Texas South Plains occasionally form there).
Why don't ya just e-mail 'em the blueprints....
Interesting article... thanks.
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