GEOG 458/558 Hazards and Risk Management Sandy Dr. Christine M. Rodrigue Department of Geography Environmental Science and Policy Program Emergency 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.