New Yorkers helped re-elect President Barack Obama last week, but not without some technical difficulties.

The damages wrought on the city by Hurricane Sandy prompted New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to issue an order that residents who had evacuated their homes could vote at any poll site in the state by using affidavit ballots. Many sites failed to get word of the order, which went out only the day before the election, however, and some city polls quickly ran out of the 250 affidavits that the city printed for each election district.

Jammed ballot scanners added to the confusion of relocated polling sites and affidavits, which together resulted in lines that stretched blocks. At some sites, voters waited three hours or more to cast their votes.

The city’s Upper East and Upper West sides were particularly burdened with delays. Many storm-struck New York residents fled to friends’ and relatives’ homes in the city’s less-damaged neighborhoods last week, so these polling sites were disproportionately crowded.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg criticized the Board of Elections for failing to be organized. The Board of Elections, in turn, argued that it did not have enough time to train poll workers following Cuomo’s order.

LANGONE MEDICAL CENTER REOPENS OUTPATIENT FACILITIES

After a backup generator failure and subsequent full evacuation during Hurricane Sandy, New York University’s Langone Medical Center made progress last week toward fully reopening by resuming outpatient care on Friday.

The award-winning medical center, which includes the NYU School of Medicine and three hospitals, re-launched its ambulatory care centers and faculty group practices earlier in the week, and by Friday was fully equipped to take on short-term (non-overnight) patients.

The medical center’s First Avenue location near East 32nd Street made it particularly susceptible to East River flooding, which knocked out the backup generator and caused extensive damage to the buildings’ lower levels. The medical center predicts that it was hit by a storm surge of close to 14 feet. Hospital workers spent hours on Oct. 29 moving patients out of the buildings during the storm, some down many flights of stairs. Patients were moved to other hospitals in the city, including St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital, Mount Sinai and Lenox Hill.

As of Monday, the Langone Medical Center’s inpatient (long-term) services, labs, pharmacy and emergency department remained closed. NYU was still assessing the extent of the damage to the building and its facilities caused by the storm, and no official full reopening date for the medical center had been set.

CITY RATIONS GASOLINE

In its second week of fuel shortage following Hurricane Sandy, New York City began rationing gasoline last Friday in an attempt to restock its dwindling supply. Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced on Thursday, Nov. 9, that gas stations would begin restricting sales to vehicles with even-numbered license plates on even days of the month and odd-numbered plates on odd days. (Taxis, buses and emergency vehicles were exempted.)

The rationing came despite Bloomberg’s and Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s earlier assurances that fuel supplies would return to normal shortly after the storm. Hurricane Sandy jeopardized supplies by cutting power to gas stations across the city, damaging refineries and crippling the fuel distribution network of ports and terminals. Last week’s nor’easter delayed replenishment efforts by interrupting petroleum terminal repairs and further slowing fuel shipments.

In his announcement, Bloomberg noted that the shortage could last another week or more. He also said that only a fourth of the city’s roughly 800 gas stations were in operation at any given time. The NYPD assigned police officers to all open stations last week to keep order. At some stations, waits in line stretched beyond three hours.

Hurricane debris near the damaged ConEd power plant on 14th Street and Avenue C. Photo by Laura Mishkin.

This week power returned downtown, kids went back to school and the crane dangling 74 stories above West 57th Street was secured. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, however, New York City is far from fixed.

More than 70,000 residents remained without power on Monday. The inundated Brooklyn-Battery and Queens-Midtown tunnels remained closed. Ruined homes and businesses along the city’s shores left thousands of New Yorkers in emergency shelters. The city faces billions of dollars in damages and billions more in lost economic activity.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg summed up the city’s recovery on Oct. 30, the day after the storm: “This is going to take a while.”

Looking down the long road ahead, though, New Yorkers are also looking back, and asking big questions about the city’s readiness for a storm of Sandy’s magnitude. Did we see it coming? What more could we have done to prepare?

The threat of a massively debilitating hurricane in the city, it turns out, is nothing new to local weather experts. In fact, many have anticipated—with near-faultless accuracy in regard to damages—a Sandy-sized storm in the city for years.

In 2005, Aaron Naparstek, a writer for New York Press (this paper’s predecessor, now online at nypress.com), interviewed emergency preparedness and response coordinators and weather scientists to find out just how likely it was that the city would soon be struck by a large-scale hurricane. The resulting article was prescient.

“A storm of that magnitude may repeat every 70 to 80 years or so,” said Mike Lee, then-director of Watch Command at New York City’s Office of Emergency Management. He spoke with Naparstek about the infamous 1938 “Long Island Express,” a near-Category 4 hurricane that hammered West Hampton and decimated parts of the East Coast. “Do the math,” he said. “Whether it happens this year, next year or in five years, it’s going to happen.”

Naparstek’s article lays out the evidence for Lee’s claim: The city’s location at the apex of Long Island and New Jersey’s right angle is ideal for collecting water; its shallow continental shelf acts as a funnel for storm surges(New York City, Naparstek mentions, has some of the highest storm-surge values in the country); wind shear and sea-surface pressure are low; and climate change is only making things more tempestuous.

“In the event of a direct hit by a Category 3 hurricane,” Naparstek writes, “surge maps show that the Holland and Battery tunnels will be completely filled with seawater, with many subway and railroad tunnels severely flooded as well. The runways of LaGuardia and JFK airports will get flooded by 18.1 and 31.2 feet of water, respectively.”

The article is all too convincing in light of the devastation Sandy wreaked, but there never was an opposing argument. Naparstek said he began interviewing weather experts for the article when he received a standard-issue Hurricane Emergency Evacuation Map at his western Park Slope apartment and saw, to his disbelief, that parts of his own home would be underwater in the event of major storm.

“A lot of people say, ‘How can you come up with these numbers? Thirty feet, that’s ridiculous. It’s science fiction.’ ” Lee told Naparstek. “Actually, it’s science fact.”

The question that motivated Naparstek is still relevant today. “How can it be that nobody’s talking about this?”

“I think people are aware of the threat of flooding,” says Professor Nicholas K. Coch, a coastal geology expert at Queens College who once bore the nickname “Dr. Doom” for being the first scientist to widely publicize the city’s hurricane history and vulnerabilities. “But there are political negatives about forcing people to do things.” He said that people are reluctant to spend money on infrastructural defenses against disasters that are unlikely or infrequent. The installation of storm-surge barriers along the city’s coastline, for instance, could cost $10 billion.

When major storms do hit, though, Coch emphasized, huge amounts of money are lost in reparations, as made clear in Sandy’s aftermath.

“There’s a lot of blindness,” Coch lamented. “There are too many people refusing to face the reality of the situation.”

Ross Dickman, the meteorologist-in-charge at the National Weather Service’s New York office in Upton, agreed that New Yorkers, like all East Coasters, have a dangerously complacent mindset when it comes to the risk of natural disasters.

“People have a mentality that they’ve lived through this before,” he said. “There is this ‘home’ mentality that needs to be overcome.”

Dickman noted that his team predicted Sandy’s severity well in advance, and gave presentations to emergency managers that detailed the storm’s anticipated behavior and effects. “From an outreach perspective, we did everything that we possibly could,” he said.

Professor Coch and Naparstek both acknowledged that the city’s immediate emergency response certainly went better than it could have, applauding evacuation notices and subway closures. It was the city’s big-picture infrastructural and planning decisions, though, that both questioned.

“Our defenses against flooding are abysmal,” Coch pointed out.

Local politicians also have identified numerous flaws in the city’s preparedness for severe storms, and have begun suggesting changes that need to be made.

“The construction of this city did not anticipate these kinds of situations,” said New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in a recent radio interview. “We are only a few feet above sea level. As soon as you breach the sides of Manhattan, you now have a whole infrastructure under the city that fills.”

Congressman Jerry Nadler has been outspoken about the city’s need to invest in more comprehensive protection from extreme weather conditions. He supports “looking into barriers, levees and other infrastructure and making the necessary federal investments to ensure that cities and communities are protected,” a rep from Nadler’s office told Our Town. “And we should do such a review keeping in mind the effects of climate change, rising sea levels and the growing frequency of intense storms, as well as other areas of the country that are vulnerable.”

Coch and Dickman asserted that money spent on storm preparation would not be wasted.

“With expected climate change over time, we definitely need to prepare for events like these,” Dickman said.

Coch was more direct. When asked if New Yorkers should expect more frequent storms of Sandy’s intensity, he turned the question around. “The sea levels are rising, and parts of the city are sinking. What do you think?”

It’s been an exhausting couple of weeks. You were evacuated. You lost power – in all senses of the word – for so long that you debated eating your pumpkin-scented candle and only source of light or heat. You saw cars floating by and started imagining yourself with the Waterworld-inspired cornrows of Spring Break 1996. You never wanted to go back there. Ever.

And then at last the sun came out, the water receded, electricity was restored, and, if you were lucky, not too much damage was done. But then it was time to vote! You saw Facebook friends battling Facebook friends, partisan on-lines being drawn. It got ugly.

Now your fingers are tired and you have a hollow feeling inside that even the largest Obama-shaped-pancake-face won’t fill.

How to post in a post-Hurricane Election world.

1. Don’t rush it.
2. The right tweet/photo/status will present itself in time, but you can’t force it.
3. Put your filter back on because the rapid fire sharing of news and experiences that may have made you a Hurricane Sandy star will not do the same moving forward.
4. Imagine, for example, if you treated the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday with the same level of urgency and importance: “The turkey JUST hit the table, but the mashed potatoes aren’t ready, and we’re all out of serving spoons. #DIDSOMEONEFORGETTHECRANBERRYSAUCE?”
5. Nobody wants to see, or read, that.
6. Instead, take a few breaths. Go ahead and eat your turkey. Enjoy it.
7. Take a photo if you must, but – like the bird itself, or a freshly baked pie – let it sit for a bit before posting. Otherwise, if you cut it too soon, all those delicious juices and glorious pie gooeyness will spill out into the dish and be lost forever.
8. Nobody wants a hollow, goo-less liquid mess of a pie for a Facebook friend. And nobody wants to follow your dry turkey ass on Twitter. Regain your composure. Let it cool, and chew carefully so you don’t bite your tongue.
9. Now, as for the election and those of you who voted on the “losing” side, do a few angry push ups and let it go.
10. Hell, “Like” some cute pictures of Bo already and be the bigger (wo)man.
11. If you start to swell up with the desire to post an angry retaliation comment, try and look on the bright side – at least now Mitt Romney can finally blink.
12. As for Sandy, if you were in the blasé bunch posting pictures of yourselves outside chugging beers in Battery Park until Sandy o’clock, tweeting “Hurricane Blackout here I – ” until you lost power and ate nothing but your unrefrigerated words for the next five days, now would be a good time to start posting some links to Red Cross relief efforts.
13. Make amends with the big guys (at the weather station) before the next nor’easter rolls in.
14. The hidden benefit of taking some time is that you may even give the illusion, whether it’s true or not, that you do in fact have a life.
15. So, go for a walk or something. Read anything that doesn’t require charging, downloading, or sharing. If you do feel the need to share, do it in person. You’ll be amazed at how quickly – or alarmingly slowly – live human interaction comes back to you.
16. Whatever you do, do not post about that empty feeling in the post-Hurricane Election social media lull. That is, unless you’re under the age of fifteen – in that case, convince your parents to take that Thanksgiving Caribbean Cruise, get yourself some cornrows, and start posting!

A tree blocks two lanes of traffic on Bedford Avenue at Avenue T in Brooklyn.

Their offices were flooded, their phones were down and the power has been out, but that hasn’t stopped lawmakers in Zone A from helping their constituents.

—

Imagine the following: It’s a beautiful Labor Day weekend. Sunny, cloudless, 80 degrees. Backyard barbecues are fired up all over the metropolitan area, and the beaches of New York City, New Jersey and southern Long Island are jam-packed with bathers. The only sign that something unusual is happening is the relatively big waves rolling up on Coney Island. It’s a surfer’s paradise.

Mike Lee isn’t enjoying the long weekend. For the last two weeks, Lee, the Director of Watch Command at New York City’s Office of Emergency Management, has been observing a series of weather systems form off the western coast of Africa, organize themselves into the familiar swirling pattern of tropical storms, and line up like airplanes coming in for a landing on the Caribbean.

One of those storms, a category-4 monster hurricane with sustained winds of 140 m.p.h., is violently churning the ocean 350 nautical miles off the coast of Georgia.

A hurricane like this one can usually be counted on to curve eastward and die a harmless death over the Atlantic. But with a large area of high pressure hovering just off the east coast, the computer models at the National Hurricane Center in Miami are largely in agreement: This one is heading north, tracking a direct hit on New Jersey somewhere north of Atlantic City.

Like the legendary “Long Island Express” of 1938, the fastest-moving hurricane ever recorded, it’s moving quickly. While no human or computer can ever be completely sure what a hurricane is going to do, this is looking like a worst-case scenario for New York City, the kind of scenario ”that gives emergency managers serious gastrointestinal distress,” says Lee. Because of its counter-clockwise rotation, the right side of a hurricane is the most powerful part of the storm.

The right side of this storm is fixing to land a haymaker on New York Harbor. If it makes landfall during high tide, the devastation will be unprecedented.

With the storm expected to hit within 24 hours, Mike Lee is in constant communication with Mike Wyllie, meteorologist-in-charge at the National Weather Service’s New York office in Upton. The OEM’s emergency operations center, meanwhile, is buzzing, while the mayor and his chiefs are hunkered down in the situation room. They have an incredibly difficult decision to make, a decision that has never before been made in New York City. They are preparing to order the evacuation of 900,000 New Yorkers whose homes are in the path of catastrophic flooding in the event of a category-4 hurricane. They will provide shelter for nearly a quarter million.

And while the storm is still far enough away that it could drift off course and miss New York City completely, a full evacuation may take up to 18 hours. They need to decide now. The fact that a mayoral election is only two months away doesn’t make the decision any less complicated. An unnecessary evacuation could be a political catastrophe.

—

Though it sounds like science fiction, the above scenario is all too plausible. “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 on their neighborhood,” says Mike Lee, before pausing to let you think about three stories of ocean water roiling through your own neighborhood.

“They’ll laugh at you—absolutely laugh at you,” he says. “I mean, I barely even believe it.”

I met Lee at this year’s Long Island/New York City Emergency Management conference and spent some time with him at the OEM “bunker” in Brooklyn. It turns out that the region’s emergency managers aren’t only worrying about terrorism these days. The big topic of discussion at the Melville, Long Island, Hilton was hurricanes. And the strong consensus is that the metropolitan region is due for a big one. Overdue, in fact.

The 1938 Long Island Express, a borderline category-4 hurricane that plowed into West Hampton, causing widespread death and devastation across New York, New Jersey and New England, was the last major hurricane to hit the region. Statistically speaking, “a storm of that magnitude may repeat every 70 to 80 years or so,” Lee says. “So, do the math. Whether it happens this year, next year, or in five years, it’s going to happen.” And with this year’s hurricane season forecasted to be even busier and more dangerous than last year’s record-setter, “It’s just a matter of time,” Lee says.

Though it is rare for big hurricanes to hit the New York metropolitan region, there are a variety of “oceanographic, demographic and geologic characteristics that greatly amplify any hurricane” that comes our way, according to Nicholas Coch, a professor of coastal geology at Queens College. In many ways, Coch explains, “The New York City area is the worst possible place for a hurricane to make a landfall.”

New York’s first vulnerability is psychological. This is a city where children playing in the dirt are told by their mothers to “get up off the floor.” We tend to forget that we have any connection whatsoever to the natural world. The vast majority of the city’s eight million inhabitants simply have no idea that a hurricane can happen here.

“We live in a complacent coastal city,” Lee says. “A lot of people don’t even think that there are beaches here,” never mind 478 miles of coastline. In fact, New York City is behind only Miami and New Orleans on the list of U.S. cities most likely to suffer a major hurricane disaster. Compounding the problem is the fact that many of the New Yorkers who lived through 1985′s Hurricane Gloria believe they’ve experienced the worst of what nature has to offer. “That wasn’t a hurricane,” meteorologist Wyllie says. The storm was billed as a category-2 that weakened before it hit and came in at low tide. “Gloria was nothing.”

New York’s second vulnerability is demographic. During the decades of calm between major hurricanes, the city grows and forgets. During the great hurricane of 1821, only 152,000 people lived in New York City. When the next major, direct hit came in 1893, the city’s population was 2.5 million. At the time of the 1938 storm, Long Island wasn’t a densely populated suburban sprawl; it was a rural home for oyster fishermen, potato farmers and wealthy industrialists. The same storm today would wreak incredible havoc. AIR Worldwide Corporation estimates $11.6 billion in New York losses alone.

More than 20 million people live in the greater metropolitan region. Many live on coastal land, reclaimed swamp and barrier islands. Much of Lower Manhattan is built on landfill. Places like Rockaway, Coney Island and Manhattan Beach “are stretches of land that nature has created to protect the mainland from hurricanes,” Lee says. “In our civilization this is also the most desirable land to develop and build on. We’re not going to undevelop it. So we now have to deal with the threat.”

Coch, the six-foot-seven-and-a-half professor once nicknamed “Dr. Doom” because he was the first scientist to widely publicize New York City’s hurricane history and vulnerabilities, put it more poetically in a 1995 New York Times interview: The only difference between now and then is that “now we have millions of people to offer the God of the Sea.”

New York City’s biggest vulnerability is the most unyielding geology. The New York bight is the right angle formed by Long Island and New Jersey with the city tucked into its apex. “Hurricanes do not like right angles,” Lee says. “[They allow] water to accumulate and pile up.”

Couple this with the fact that New York resides on a very shallow continental shelf, and as a big storm pushes north, New York Harbor “acts as a funnel.” As storm surge forces its way into the harbor and up the rivers, it has nowhere to go but onto land. New York City, it turns out, has some of the highest storm-surge values in the country.

“When we see a category-3 storm making landfall in Florida, it may only have a 12-, 13-foot storm surge,” Lee says. “For us here, a category-1 storm can give us 12 feet of storm surge.”

Storm surge is the dome of seawater that is lifted up and pushed forward in front of a hurricane. It acts almost like a mini-tsunami, causing sea levels to rise rapidly and violently. Most people believe that high winds and rains are the main dangers of a hurricane. In fact, inland flooding caused by storm surge is the big killer. In 1821, stunned New Yorkers recorded sea levels rising as fast as 13 feet in a single hour at the Battery. The East River and Hudson Rivers merged over Lower Manhattan all the way to Canal Street. According to Coch, the fact that the 1821 storm struck at low tide “is the only thing that saved the city.”

—

To get a sense of the damage that storm surge can do to New York City, call 311 and ask them to send you a full-color copy of the New York City Hurricane Evacuation Map. It is a truly mind-boggling document. If a storm like the Long Island Express makes a direct hit on the city, everything below Broome Street will be inundated, some parts under as much as 20 and 30 feet of water. Chelsea and Greenwich Village are completely flooded, with the Hudson spilling over all the way to 7th Avenue. Likewise, the East River and East Village become one, with ocean water surging all the way to 1st Avenue. If you haven’t evacuated before the storm, forget it. During the storm, Manhattan’s east- and west-side highways vanish. Tunnels and bridges become unusable.

The outer boroughs also get hit hard. Opposed to that new Ikea being built on the waterfront in Red Hook? Don’t worry. There’s a decent chance it won’t be there after a moderate-size hurricane. Residents of Williamsburg-Greenpoint should seek out a male and female of each species and get in their arks. In a kind of one-two-punch effect, a major hurricane will push ocean water down from the Long Island Sound into the Upper East Side, South Bronx and northern Queens, flooding those areas severely. Vast stretches of southern Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island will be devastated. The map shows Atlantic Ocean storm surge reaching as far inland as Flatbush, just south of Prospect Park, with 31.3 feet of water atop Howard Beach.

“A lot of people say, ‘How can you come up with these numbers? Thirty feet, that’s ridiculous. It’s science fiction.’ Actually,” Lee says, “It’s science fact.” Hurricanes in the southern U.S. have proven the Army Corps of Engineers’ storm-surge calculations to be accurate within a few inches.

For a taste of what will happen to the city’s infrastructure, we can look at the damage wrought by the great nor’easters of the early 1990s. During those storms, the L train had to be backed out as the 14th Street tunnel began filling with water, and the FDR highway was so badly inundated that 50 motorists had to be rescued by dive teams. In the event of a direct hit by a category-3 hurricane, surge maps show that the Holland and Battery Tunnels will be completely filled with sea water, with many subway and railroad tunnels severely flooded as well. The runways of LaGuardia and JFK airports will get flooded by 18.1 and 31.2 feet of water, respectively.

Then there are the winds. The city’s two million trees will be a huge problem.

“New York City’s trees haven’t been stressed in years except for an isolated severe thunderstorm or two,” Wyllie says. They’ve had plenty of time to grow and wrap their roots around underground phone, electric, gas and water lines. As they are uprooted in the heavy winds, a lot of infrastructure both above and below ground is going to get wrecked.

As for skyscrapers, “The impact of catastrophic winds on high-rise buildings is still a little vague,” Lee says. “We don’t feel we have enough data on that.”

We do know that hurricane wind speeds multiply at higher altitudes. At 350 feet, the height of high-rise buildings on the Battery and the towers of the George Washington Bridge, hurricane winds will be twice as fast as they are on the ground. Newer, glass-skinned towers are not likely to do well in those conditions. Neither will human beings caught outside amidst flying debris. To give a sense of the unbelievable force of hurricane winds, Lee shows a photo from one of the four storms that struck Florida last year. It depicts a blunt piece of two-by-four driven straight through the trunk of a palm tree.

“It would be nasty,” Wyllie agrees. “If you get sustained winds going 80 to 90 miles per hour in the city—whoa, you can’t believe the destruction. We’ve never seen that. And as you go up 200, 300 feet,” he considers that for a moment. “That’ll be 100, 110 mph winds. Watch out.”

—

Professor Coch, whose business card reads “forensic hurricanologist,” believes that the best way to understand New York City’s hurricane future is to study its past. He became New York City’s leading hurricane historian virtually by accident.

After the nor’easters of December 1992 and March 1993 devastated Rockaway, Coch sent a group of his coastal-geology undergrads to observe the Army Corps of Engineers replenishing beaches with sand dredged from the sea. The students reported back that “the beach was covered in garbage. Coch remembers telling them, “Get used to it. This is New York City.” But they said, “No, this is funny garbage.” In the dredged-up sand, Coch’s students found hundreds of artifacts – plates, whiskey bottles, teapots, beer mugs, lumps of coal and, what proved to be the most telling clue of all, an old hurricane lamp. Mystified at how a treasure trove of 19th-century objects could have wound up underwater hundreds of feet off the coast of Rockaway, Coch and his students began investigating.

It took them about two years to unravel the mystery of Hog Island: New York City’s version of Atlantis.

It turns out there was once a small, sandy spit of an island off the southern coast of Rockaway. In the years after the Civil War, developers built saloons and bathhouses, and Hog Island became a sort of 1890s version of the Hamptons. During the summers, the city’s Democratic bosses used Hog Island as a kind of outdoor annex of Tammany Hall. That all ended on the night of August 23, 1893, when a terrifying category-2 hurricane rolled up from Norfolk, Virginia, and made landfall on what is now JFK airport.

The storm 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” and the damage it wrought throughout the region. Dozens of boats were sunk, and scores of sailors perished. In Central Park “more than a hundred noble trees were torn up by the roots,” and thousands of sparrows lay dead on the ground. “Gangs of small boys roamed through the Park in the early hours of the morning collecting the dead sparrows and picking their feathers.”

At the brand-new Met Life building at Madison Avenue and 23rd Street, a heavy-iron fence was torn away by the wind, plunging 10 stories and crashing through a stained-glass dome before landing on a mosaic “including quantities of costly Mexican onyx.” In Brooklyn, at Wyckoff and Myrtle Avenues, “the water in the street was up to a man’s waist,” and residents used ladders to get in and out of their houses. Most of the boats moored at the Williamsburg Yacht Club were “sunk, driven ashore or demolished.” The East River rose “until it swept over the sea wall in the Astoria district and submerged the Boulevard.” At Coney Island, 30-foot waves swept 200 yards inland, destroying nearly every man-made structure in its path and wrecking the elevated railroad.

“Hog Island 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.”

Hurricanes, Coch reminds, “operate on a geologic scale.”

—

Will New York City get hit by the Big One this season? It’s impossible to say. But we do know this: The risk of a major hurricane hitting the metropolitan region is significantly greater than it has been in a long time. Meteorologists have observed that Atlantic Ocean hurricanes tend to wax and wane over roughly 20-year cycles. Nineteen ninety-five marked the beginning of a period of above-normal hurricane activity. We are now in the middle of that cycle. The same climate conditions that made last year’s hurricane season so active are in place and even augmented this year. Low wind sheer and sea-surface pressure and a favorable African easterly jet stream all create ideal conditions for Atlantic hurricanes. El Nino, the unusually warm current that appears in the tropical Pacific off the coast of Ecuador every three to seven years, tends to dampen hurricane activity in the Atlantic. This year there is no El Nino.

Additionally, scientists say that man-made global warming is increasing the odds that tropical storms will dump on New York City with greater frequency and intensity. Tropical Atlantic sea-surface temperatures have steadily risen over the last decade. Hurricanes are essentially gigantic steam engines; they gain power from warm seas.

“With global warming there is more moisture in the atmosphere,” says Dr. Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “This moisture is the main fuel for hurricanes and tropical storms.” This year, tropical Atlantic sea-surface temperatures are the warmest they have ever been in recorded history, about two degrees Fahrenheit above normal. And while there is debate within the hurricane research community as to how much impact global warming ultimately has, there is no longer any question that global warming is contributing to more extreme weather events around the world.

Whatever the causes, forecasters are confident that 2005 will be a busy hurricane season, busier even than last year’s. Meteorologists are forecasting 15 named storms, eight of them hurricanes, four of them “intense” hurricanes. In an average year, about 10 storms get names, six become hurricanes and two become intense.

New York City’s hurricane season runs from August to October, peaking around September 10. To prepare for a storm, Lee suggests that New Yorkers call 311 or go online, find out what evacuation zone they’re in, and develop a plan. If a storm comes rolling in and the city tells you to evacuate, take heed. “People who decide to ride out a storm need to know that in the middle of it they can’t call 911 and say, ‘All right, come get me. I’m ready,’” Lee says. “We will not be able to come and get them. Once they’ve made the decision to stay, they’ve made that decision for the long haul. That’s a very serious decision.”

If the Big One hits this season, Lee may be taking his own advice. The first OEM “bunker” was located in the World Trade Center—in hindsight, a lousy location. A new OEM building is currently under construction on the bluffs of Brooklyn Heights. Until its completion, the city’s emergency managers are working in a converted warehouse on the Brooklyn waterfront.

In the event of a direct hit by a category-3 hurricane, New York City’s Office of Emergency Management will find itself under 22.4 feet of storm surge.

Lee’s not too worried about it, though. The city has a duplicate Office of Emergency Management in an undisclosed location.

The Village Halloween Parade, a 39-year tradition, is just another check on the list of Hurricane Sandy’s victims, which includes the destruction of much of Atlantic City, Long Island, Downtown Manhattan and the New York City mass transit system.

“For the first time in our 39 year history, the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management and the NYPD have CANCELLED the Parade,” read the official website of the Village Halloween Parade, which was scheduled for Halloween night.

Serra Hirsch started piecing together her costume Sunday evening, moving the tree and the bear around to see where she wanted them. Photo by Sophia Rosenbaum

Instead of intricate costumes and mobs of people taking over 6th Avenue in the Village, clean-up crews will be working to remove fallen trees and bring power back to the millions in the dark since Monday’s super storm.

Destruction around the metropolitan area evoked images of doomsday. A spooky coincidence, perhaps, but this year’s Halloween parade featured an end-of-the-world theme: “Tick! Tock!,” a poke at the Mayan calendar’s prediction of the end of the world in 2012.

Jeanne Fleming, the producing director of the parade, sent an email Tuesday evening to participants and media alerting them to the cancelation of the parade after Mayor Michael Bloomberg made it official on Tuesday afternoon.

Fleming is working diligently to reschedule the parade, but said it is only possible if the organization’s small budget allows for it.

“It seems at the moment as if we cannot afford to do it a week later,” she said.

Meanwhile, Serra Hirsch, a puppeteer who has been active in the parade since 1994, remained hopeful Tuesday evening that the parade will be rescheduled sometime next week.

Hirsch said the cancellation was a “huge bummer” for her, but said mass transit is crucial to the return of pre-Hurricane Sandy New York City.

“We can’t return to normal until the subway returns,” she said. “The city is crippled with no subway, and the police, sanitation, and other services aren’t really available to make the parade run smoothly and safely.”

Hirsch said she understands the decision to cancel the parade, as safety is an issue to begin with because people’s costumes cause obstructed views, and drunk audience members sometimes become aggressive.

“I don’t think they had a choice,” she said. “The light’s are out still throughout the parade route. It’s just not safe.”

Jennifer Weidenbaum, 34, has gone to the parade with Hirsch for five years and started working on her ski-costume in August. She attempted to get into the city Tuesday from her home in Jersey City, but said too many roads were closed. On her drive home, she was able to breathe a sigh of relief.

“I was actually happy when I was listening to the radio in the car when they said the parade was cancelled,” Weidenbaum said. “I don’t want any of the city’s resources to be directed towards a parade when there’s so many other important things going on.”

Sunday afternoon, Hirsch was busy at work on her elaborate campfire costume scene of two girl scouts at a campfire roasting marshmallows with a bear lurking behind them. Hirsch’s plan was to act as the head of one of the girls and said she planned on pretending she had no idea there was a bear behind her.

While Hirsch is working on her costume at a much more relaxed pace now, she is still set to appear on Kelly and Michael’s live Halloween show, which was moved to November 5 due to the storm. If she wins the costume contest, she could win a $10,000 gift card to Home Goods.

Weidenbaum is still planning on celebrating Halloween this evening in her Jersey City neighborhood. Her costume of an Olympic skier racing down a mountain to the finish line is almost complete, and she plans to use it for next year’s Halloweenparade in the West Village.

“I’ll have a leg up next year,” she said. “I’ll put it in storage.”

Homes in Zone A weren’t the only places affected by flooding at the height of Hurricane Sandy. An Upper East Side apartment building in Zone C also flooded Monday night.

In the aftermath, residents of 555 East 78th Street were evacuating after about five feet of floodwater surged into the building around 8:30 p.m., creating a chaotic scene, according to neighbors who hurried past with their belongings in trash bags.

A building on East 78th Street faced unexpected flooding. Photo by Meredith Rosenberg.

Barry Skipp, 30, was one of the residents directly impacted. His apartment faces the FDR and East River, and is also just off the lobby. He recalled watching the water surging over the highway around 8 p.m. “I started trying to prepare my windows as best I could, I duct taped them, I had towels there,” he said.

Skipp said the water started to breach his windows around 8:30 p.m.

“I tried to stop it and then it just came to a point where it flowed so much, the whole place flooded, and the entire lobby was flooded up until first landing step,” he said. “I grabbed what I could and I ran out.”

Skipp pushed open his door as far as it would go and revealed the damage the floodwaters left behind.

“If you look there’s a stool in my apartment. That’s not mine,” he said, noting he didn’t have homeowners’ insurance. “My wall got breached and my neighbor’s stuff came into my apartment, and I assume vice versa. I don’t even know what’s what anymore.”

Gerry Sirio, 44, is one of the building’s doormen. He was working last night when the flooding started. Standing in front of the building, he pointed out how the water entered through air conditioning vents below windows. Sandbags that had been placed in front of apartments facing FDR and the East River did nothing to stop the flow.

At first, the water was only a couple inches, Sirio said, so he simply pushed it back with a broom. “But then the river was right inside the building. We couldn’t do nothing anymore,” he said. “The first apartment, LK, was destroyed completely,” said Sirio, referring to the apartment closest to the lobby. He said many of the apartments on the first floor were also flooded.

Around 9 p.m., a power transformer on the block exploded, Sirio said, and neighbors described the panic of evacuating flooded apartments in the dark. The power has yet to be restored.

“It was worse here then Battery Park because I was watching CNN, and they said it just breached the walls. It breached the walls 30 minutes ago up here,” said Skipp, who didn’t think of evacuating because the building is located in Zone C.

“We didn’t expect this,” said Sirio. “I know a guy who’s lived here more than 30 years, and he said nothing like this ever happened.”

Both Skipp and Sirio agree that going forward, areas closest to the East River on the Upper East Side should be changed to Zone A.

By early afternoon, building maintenance had pumped out the floodwater, but the cleanup was far from over.