Forget the notion that a storm like Hurricane Sandy comes along every 100 years: Start thinking a “storm of the century” will hit every 10 years.
That’s the warning from the author of a book on the Halloween hurricane in 2012, as well as a recent Psychology Today article saying heart attacks spiked 22 percent in New Jersey after Sandy hit.
Kathryn Miles, an environmental science professor and journalist, said in the magazine that a third of the storm-stressed heart attack victims died, sometimes because they couldn’t get to medical care.
His opponents didn’t like that there was no mention of it last week in Gov. Chris Christie’s State of the State address because, as Miles said, “you’d think this still would be foremost in his mind because New Jersey has far from recovered.”
Days of rain and wind and oceanic surges splintered shore houses from Cape May to Sandy Hook, flooded out the New York City subway system and killed 268 along a swatch from Jamaica to Canada.
Victims are still fighting insurance companies claiming Sandy wasn’t an official hurricane when it hit the Jersey coast, though as an “extratropical” storm it was disastrously damaging.
“There are those kind of things blocking people, nomenclature and zoning issues and issues of remediation,” said Miles, who is writer in residence at Green Mountain College in Vermont.
Subtitled “Nine Days Inside Hurricane Sandy, Super Storm” details the growth of the maelstrom from a speck of storm in the Caribbean that only some computer models predicted would get big and, unusually, hit the U.S. eastern seaboard.
Miles said the hero of her book is Gary Szatkowski, the National Weather Service meteorologist based in Westampton who put out a personal evacuation order for the Jersey coast when it became clear not all local officials were as concerned about the approaching storm, which by then had engulfed more than 800 miles of America’s Middle Atlantic seaboard.
Because Sandy was not an official hurricane when it hit Jersey, Miles noted that the National Hurricane Center in Miami stopped issuing warning and alerts about it. Since the storm, the NHS has been told to keep issuing warning regardless of storm category.
Miles said storms have combined in the past, as with Sandy and the system named Tony that she gobbled up, to devastate the Jersey shore – in recorded history and before.
She said examples are the Nor’easter of 1964, which moved buildings off foundations and floated them all over North Wildwood, and Hurricane Hazel in 1954, which killed 1,000 in Haiti alone and also flooded Toronto.
Miles argues in her book that authorities and elected officials need to pay closer attention to storms as they develop and to think “the storm of the century is now the storm of the decade.”
The focus for the future, she said, should be readiness to help people evacuate dangerous areas and improvements in medical access at times of emergency.
Whatever the debate among scientists, Miles thinks global warming is a factor in America’s weather. She said Sandy was fed by extra warm water in the Atlantic and noted that the U.S. continues to set records for warmest year ever.
“There will be another superstorm. And it will undoubtedly bring all kinds of damage, including medical emergencies,” Miles said. “Whether or not we survive them shouldn’t be a matter of chance.”
Editor’s note: This story has been modified to correct Miles’ title and location to writer in residence at Green Mountain College in Vermont.