 Report: Superstorm Sandy Not "The Big One"; East Coast Must Plan for $100 Billion Storms
Nearly two years ago, Superstorm Sandy slammed into the U.S. East Coast with a ferocity that left more than 100 people dead and some 650,000 homes destroyed, and knocked out power to more than 8 million, weaving a path of destruction estimated to cost more than $65 billion. But as damaging as it was, Sandy was far from the worst that nature can deliver, according to a new report from insurance giant Swiss Re which warns that the U.S. needs to prepare itself for storms that can cause $100 billion in damage or more—because they've happened here before.
While Sandy was an unusual storm—it's been called a one-in-500-years event, largely because of the ways in which it interacted with the atmosphere and high tide, and its strange perpendicular, westward track—it wasn't a particularly intense one, the report notes. Though it reached Category 3 on the Saffir-Simpson scale while over the ocean, making it officially a major hurricane, Sandy had weakened significantly by the time it made landfall along the coasts of New Jersey and New York, when it was classified as a post-tropical cyclone. As a result, it lacked the kind of widespread strong winds and intense rainfall that often accompany hurricanes that hit the Northeast, the report adds. Read more from The Weather Channel |
