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Coles Hurricane Sandy And The Drowning Of New York at Village Green Shopping Centre in Vernon, BC
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On the night of October 29, 2012, the Atlantic Ocean rose fifteen feet above normal and swallowed the most densely populated corridor in North America. Seven subway tunnels flooded with over a billion gallons of corrosive saltwater. A hundred and thirty homes burned to the ground in Breezy Point while the streets were still underwater. Nurses in a pitch-black neonatal ICU hand-pumped air into the lungs of premature infants for hours while the hospital was evacuated by flashlight down nine flights of stairs.
None of it was supposed to be possible. For four hundred years, the Northeast had watched hurricane destruction on television and changed the channel. The infrastructure beneath New York City — tunnels, power stations, hospital generators, communications cables — had been buried underground because nobody ever seriously considered what would happen if the ocean came looking for it. Fourteen months before Sandy, Hurricane Irene had been declared a bust by millions of residents who confused a lucky break with a permanent condition.
The storm that hit was something meteorologists had never seen: a hurricane that turned left instead of right, merged with a winter system, and arrived on a full-moon high tide in a region that had no institutional memory of the last comparable disaster in 1938. The computer models had been screaming about it for a week. The forecasters issued the most specific and confident warnings in the history of the Northeast. A significant portion of the population shrugged.
What followed was a catastrophe measured in seventy-two American lives lost, sixty-five billion dollars in damage, and a recovery so uneven that some Manhattan neighborhoods had power back in days while public housing residents went weeks without heat or water. The full story reaches back centuries — to the colonial fleets sunk by Caribbean hurricanes, to the drowned veterans in the Florida Keys, to the buried dead of Galveston — and forward into a future where the ocean is still rising and the next storm is already overdue.
On the night of October 29, 2012, the Atlantic Ocean rose fifteen feet above normal and swallowed the most densely populated corridor in North America. Seven subway tunnels flooded with over a billion gallons of corrosive saltwater. A hundred and thirty homes burned to the ground in Breezy Point while the streets were still underwater. Nurses in a pitch-black neonatal ICU hand-pumped air into the lungs of premature infants for hours while the hospital was evacuated by flashlight down nine flights of stairs.
None of it was supposed to be possible. For four hundred years, the Northeast had watched hurricane destruction on television and changed the channel. The infrastructure beneath New York City — tunnels, power stations, hospital generators, communications cables — had been buried underground because nobody ever seriously considered what would happen if the ocean came looking for it. Fourteen months before Sandy, Hurricane Irene had been declared a bust by millions of residents who confused a lucky break with a permanent condition.
The storm that hit was something meteorologists had never seen: a hurricane that turned left instead of right, merged with a winter system, and arrived on a full-moon high tide in a region that had no institutional memory of the last comparable disaster in 1938. The computer models had been screaming about it for a week. The forecasters issued the most specific and confident warnings in the history of the Northeast. A significant portion of the population shrugged.
What followed was a catastrophe measured in seventy-two American lives lost, sixty-five billion dollars in damage, and a recovery so uneven that some Manhattan neighborhoods had power back in days while public housing residents went weeks without heat or water. The full story reaches back centuries — to the colonial fleets sunk by Caribbean hurricanes, to the drowned veterans in the Florida Keys, to the buried dead of Galveston — and forward into a future where the ocean is still rising and the next storm is already overdue.
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