Hurricane Irene Prepares To Devour US East Coast

How Do You Evacuate Atlantic City? How Do You Evacuate New York City?


NASA satellite image

From the Weather Channel :



This is the most serious hurricane threat to the east coast of the United States in more than five decades :

- Irene is a hurricane that poses an extraordinary threat and is one that no one has yet experienced in North Carolina to the mid-Atlantic to the Northeast and New England.

- We can now narrow the projected path corridor. Confidence is growing that locations from eastern North Carolina and the eastern Mid-Atlantic states to Long Island to southern New England are all in the potential path of Hurricane Irene.

- It is becoming clear that Irene's future track will NOT be a Hurricane Earl (2010) scenario where a hurricane barely brushes the Outer Banks of North Carolina then stays well offshore.

- History tells us that no category 4 hurricane has made landfall north of the South Carolina/North Carolina border. That said, some computer guidance indicates a category 4 landfall over eastern North Carolina and this solution can NOT be ruled out.

- There is historical precedence for a hurricane impacting the major metropolitan areas of the

- ...with a population explosion along coastal areas of the Northeast during the past several decades, there is little to no precedence for a hurricane of this potential magnitude making landfall over highly populated metropolitan areas such as New York City.

- Regardless of track and intensity, confidence is growing that Hurricane Irene will cause extensive tree and power line damage. Electricity infrastructure will be greatly compromised for millions if not tens of millions of Americans.

A warning from 2008 blasts unimaginable, beyond nightmare scenarios of destruction (excerpts) :

...big storms have hit the New York area in living memory and will undoubtedly strike again, experts say, with the potential for immense damage.

The dense development of towns on eastern Long Island in the decades since the 1938 storm could mean tremendous losses in a future storm. “Property values make it very vulnerable” to large-scale losses...more than $1.9 trillion worth of insured coastal property in the path of a storm and the risk to the population.

Loss of life can be minimized in a storm if people evacuate — and know how dangerous it is to try to ride out a storm.

Even if people on Long Island had a storm on the way and got the message, an orderly evacuation might be difficult if not impossible. People may think they will evacuate upon notice of a hurricane, but “that’s not going to work,” Dr. Leatherman said. “You can’t get people out of there on a Sunday night in the summer.”

...hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico tend to travel at 10 to 15 m.p.h., but a storm coming up the Eastern Seaboard might hit 60 m.p.h. because of interactions with fronts that occur in the middle and higher latitudes.

The storms move so quickly that “we’d have maybe eight hours by the time it leaves North Carolina to the time it hits the Long Island shore”...

“Even if you did know it was coming, how the heck are you going to evacuate Atlantic City?” he said. And as a storm neared and its surge rose, the waters would cover some of the low-lying evacuation routes in the hour or so before it hit.

“New York City is often on the list of ‘hot spots’ for hurricane catastrophes because the shorelines of Long Island and New Jersey could funnel a large surge into Manhattan if impacted by a major hurricane.

Even storms that do not strike directly can bring rains that cause extensive interior flooding...

...a storm that travels up through New England may hammer Cape Cod and Rhode Island, but a second wave of damage will come with rainwater swelling the Connecticut and Hudson Rivers, among others.

And then there's the storm surge projections :




MORE TO COME

UPDATE : Actually, no more to come. Hurricane Irene thankfully turned out to be a bit a of non-event, at least in the mega-destruction stakes set by Hurricane Katrina.