GEOG 458/558

Hazards and Risk Management

Sandy

Dr. Christine M. RodrigueDepartment of Geography

Environmental Science and Policy ProgramEmergency Services Administration

What is Sandy?• “Category 1” hurricane/tropical depression/extratropical

cyclone

• Unusually large (~1,530 km) and slow-moving (the gift that keeeeeeeps on giving)

• Connected with moisture from a regular mid-latitude wave cyclone, which had given us some rain a week or so ago (itself pumped up with moisture from Hurricane Paul that hit Mexico's west coast)

• And with a polar outbreak bringing deep cold, low pressure, and high wind

• The combination of a wave cyclone with a polar outbreak is the core of an East Coast phenomenon called a “Nor'easter”

• This combination then combined with the Sandy system

• Basically, a category-buster of a storm

Some Impressions Loss of HMS Bounty (from the movie “Mutiny on the Bounty”) and

death of one crewmember and the captain not yet found

Some Impressions Surge

Some Impressions Precipitation and wind on steroids

Some Impressions Secondary effects: Fire

Some Impressions Secondary effects: Toxics (Shell diesel storage tanks, Hoboken NJ weird mix of heating oil and mud, stormwater + sewage in Gowanus

Canal in Brooklyn)

Some Impressions Secondary effects: Power outages/economic disruption, waiting for fuel, trying

to use mass transit along with everyone else, finding power for your cell phone/computers, trying to keep a data storage center going)

Disaster by Management?• I haven't heard much abut the kinds of emergency management glitches

that usually develop, but they may not come out for a few days

• Differential social vulnerability issues will take time to come out, too

• One interesting issue, though, affects risk communication:

Apparently, there was little “imagination” for how to get risk communications out when power is out (so much for the Internet, social media, and cell phones, as well as TV and radio) and so few people actually read the paper

And rumor-mongering is facilitated by social media (at least in areas that have power!): “And, it turns out, many of them (SM) were outright lies. They were apparently posted by a Wall Street analyst who doubled as campaign manager for a candidate for Congress. After a blogger exposed him, the analyst apologized on Twitter Tuesday night amid a flood of online scorn and left the campaign. An elected official is pushing for criminal charges.”