Hurricane Sandy
By: Jacob Wahl
The Economic Impact of Sandy and Why Its Not Good!
On October 19th 2012, Hurricane Sandy started its journey of destruction just above Venezuela and would make its way to Jamaica and the Bahamas and eventually up the Eastern Seaboard of the US. After November 5th, when the super storm dissipated, families behind the hurricanes path were devastated with homes torn away and infrastructures of homes and buildings were ruptured with New York and New Jersey taking the biggest hits. Countless cities were flooded with many many feet of water. This is a problem for many different reasons. First of all, this makes transportation almost impossible, with the roads flooded and especially the subway systems in New York City swamped. Another issue that the storm brought on was the lack of "outside contact." By this I mean, tourism is brought down to minimal, getting goods in and out is hard with the water blocking the way right after the storm, and getting medical relief during the storm was very difficult. Though, one of the most prominent problems is how it affects business, schools, and hospitals. One hospital was described like this, Backup generators were washed away in the city hospitals, requiring crews to carry out newborns, aging patients and post-surgical patients to uptown facilities. Hospital floors were flooded, equipment destroyed and walls contaminated. This just wasn’t any water, this was salt water that corroded every piece of metal it touched and contained oil, gas, raw sewage and everything that came into the water’s path. This paints a picture of just how bad the damages were and this is expected to be the condition of other buildings.
Flooding along a beach after Sandy
Fire Island After Sandy
A view of a neighborhood after the storm
Info About Sandy
Basic Info.
Hurricane Sandy was classified as a Category 1 Hurricane but not even a hurricane when it hit New Jersey and New York. It gave off about 13 inches of rain but brought in much more water from the ocean. It reached wind speeds of 95 MPH and unfortunately, killed a total of 117 people in the US and 69 in the Caribbean and Canada combine. Most of the damage came from flooding and the high wind speeds of the storm. These damages were estimated to cost about 20 billion dollars in repair.
What could we do to better ready ourselves?
The best way you can prevent this and help reduce damages later on, is to educate how bad it can destroy the surroundings. When you educate the public, you can better think of ways to prevent things like this disaster from happening. Besides that, we could start the building of better ways to stop water from coming in such as a levee type object. Maybe, we could create a way for the boardwalks along the beaches to better withstand the water and deal with the flooding.