I live 70 miles inland and Rita left a big pine tree on my house; seven uprooted huge trees in my yard; we had no electrcity for three weeks.
I have expericenced hurricanes all my life.
Christie is acting like a big, fat sissie!
BTW, all names are retired after being used to name a hurricane.
In any case, this particular cyclonic weather phenomenon was about 1000 miles wide. That's just short of 800,000 square miles, which is 3 TIMES the total area of Texas!
Ike, in comparison, was about 1/4 the size of the total area of Texas.
That makes Ike 1/12 the size of Sandy!