Hurricane Irene is on a course that will take it up the East Coast from the weekend. While there is still uncertainty about where it will hit and when, the forecast models increasingly suggest some parts of the greater New York area will face some type of storm or hurricane impact.
Hurricane Irene pounded the North Carolina and Virginia coasts with fierce winds and heavy rain Saturday, killing at least nine people, including two children, and leaving nearly two million people without power.
If Irene hits Long Island or southeast Massachusetts, the storm has the potential to be a $10 billion disaster,” Weather Underground’s Jeff Masters said in a blog post Wednesday.
If Masters is right, that would make the insured losses from Irene some of the worst in history, at a time that insurers are already stretched by record-breaking natural disasters around the world.
Given how compact Manhattan is, even tropical storm-force conditions could do seriousdamage in such a confined area. “The water’s got to go somewhere and the wind is going to hit something,” said Lou Gritzo, research manager at insurer FM Global. “New York City becomes a wind tunnel when the wind whips between the buildings, so that’s going to be a force that intensifies how projectiles are moving.”
New York Shuts Down
The nation's largest subway system and arriving flights at the five main New York City-area airports were preparing to shut down Saturday as Hurricane Irene began spinning its way up the Eastern Seaboard, forcing more than 300,000 evacuations and dimming lights at Citi Field and on Broadway.
More than 300,000 residents have been ordered to leave waterfront neighborhoods and the city was poised to shut down its vast transit system, two unprecedented precautionary steps forced by the size and energy of Irene.
On Wall Street, sandbags were placed around subway grates nearest the East River, which is expected to surge as the hurricane nears New York.Aviation officials said they would close the five main New York City-area airports to arriving domestic and international flights beginning at noon on Saturday. Many departures also were canceled.
Is a $100 Billion Disaster Possible
According to scientists who model catastrophes for a living what it would take to create a $100 billion natural disaster, and their list will almost always include a major hurricane (Category 3 or higher) hitting New York City.
“We haven’t had a storm in this area for quite some time and it’s difficult to say how tested some of these buildings are against hurricane force winds,” said Matt Nielsen, product manager for the U.S. hurricane model at catastrophe modeling company RMS.
According to New York City’s Office of Emergency Management, the last hurricane to pass directly over the city was in 1821 — and it caused tides to rise 13 feet in one hour, flooding all of lower Manhattan to Canal St.
But for Long Island, the threat is much worse. People still talk about the Long Island Express of 1938, a Category 3 storm that the U.S. government has said would cause $40 billion in damage if it hit today.
Meteorologists say the risk appears most acute for areas like the Hamptons, an eastern Long Island playground for New York’s rich. The damage costs there alone could reach into the billions.
“If the storm followed the exact track of it, there could be considerable wind damage and tidal flooding out in those areas,” said James Aman, senior meteorologist with WeatherBug. ”There potentially could be some storm surge problems out around the eastern tip of Long Island, Rhode Island, Cape Cod, some of the areas around Boston that face Massachusetts Bay.”
Historic sites could be devastated, much like the Virgina earthquake earlier this week and the damage impacts it had in historic Williamsburg and Fredericksburg.
