Remember Sandy? She (or he) was barreling down on us not so long ago. There were recommendations to stockpile water for three to five days, BGE was pre-emptively cutting tree limbs that threatened wires, and I’m sure there was a run on Old Bay and Natty Boh in the supermarkets.
Image credit: USGS
The reason Sandy is now just a memory of a disaster that could have been (for most of us in Baltimore City, anyway) is that things turned out very differently than they could have. The storm turned away from us and instead focused it’s attention on our neighbors to the north.
What I heard most often in the days afterwards were variations on “We were so lucky!” Homes and lives were destroyed in New York and New Jersey. Entire hospitals were evacuated. Billions of dollars in damages are still being assessed, repaired, and replaced. Part of the extent of the damage has to do with the sheer density of the regions affected, of course, but Fells Point and Canton aren’t exactly ghost towns, and the Inner Harbor is far from a dilapidated dump that can be written off for the insurance money.
“Lucky” might be a bit of an overstatement, though. It’s certainly good that we didn’t get a direct hit, of course, but there are massive atmospheric forces at work that dictate the speed, direction, and overall countenance of storms.
Last October, I was wondering a couple of things as Sandy traipsed along the coast.
1. Why is everyone in such a tizzy? Doesn’t this happen all the time? We’re right near the coast!
2. What is Natty Boh?
The answer to number two became clear before long, although it has yet to make a substantial impression on me. Cheap beer that isn’t terrible is good to have available, though, so I don’t have any objections.
Number one, regarding tizzies, has only started to make sense in the (almost) year since then. First, Baltimoreans like to have strong reactions to weather, whether it’s complaints about the heat, driving like a fleet of grannies in a quarter inch of snow, or stockpiling for the apocalypse when a big storm approaches. Second, like I said earlier, there are some macro factors that affect the behavior of hurricanes. Atlantic hurricanes that move up the East coast typically follow a consistent, if broad, path that dog-legs North and East as it passes the mid-Atlantic region. This is why there has not yet been a direct hit on the city, despite the storm surge from Isabel that I still hear about sometimes. So although that general pattern was still predicted (see image above), that dog-leg would mostly be over land, and pass right over us, which would be unusual. Needless to say, Sandy decided to follow protocol and headed North and East instead.
Changes in the behavior of the Gulf Stream have the potential for throwing many of our normal prediction models for a loop. Along with hypothesized frigid temperatures in Europe, there are many questions about how future storms will behave, and whether past prediction models are adequate to assess risk in various places. Due to the effects of a little “theory” about global warming, the 100 or 500 year storms are now storms of our time, not of the distant future or past, and their behavior is becoming less predictable. Even a hurricane such as Sandy – large, strong, but not record breaking by most measures — had a storm surge that would have put much of the downtown area underwater including City Hall, the police headquarters, and of course most of Fells Point, Federal Hill, Canton, and Locust Point, among others.
If those aren’t compelling reasons for some serious consideration about how we invest in infrastructure, housing, and tourist destinations in places like the Inner Harbor, I don’t know what would be.
