LiveScience reports:
Hurricane Sandy’s devastating storm track is a rare one among hurricanes; a new statistical analysis estimates that the track of the storm — which took an unusual left-hand turn in the Atlantic before slamming into the East Coast — has an average probability of happening only once every 700 years.
Except that New York City has an extensive history of hurricanes/flooding.
Close only counts in horseshoes . . . and hurricanes.
I think he is going overboard. Yes, Sandy’s specific path might be a once per 700 years track, but a hurricane hitting NYC is more of a once per 40 year event, and being affected by a hurricane is a once per 20 years.
Just as in statistics class. You don’t care how you get dealt a royal flush, you just care that you got one.
Yeah hurricanes never happen in New England
1938 Hurricane slams East Coast
1938 newsreel. A hurricane of 1938 (later dubbed “The Long Island Express) rips through the eastern states leaving behind a trail of devastation and killing 600 people.
How much of this is selling air time by hyping weather? The Richmond, VA, TV stations are breaking into prime time to track thunderstorms as if they were new and unusual.
Then there was the time when I-25 was under construction and a flash flood washed out a newly installed structure plate pipe culvert. The experts evaluated the situation and declared it was a 500 year flood, so they replaced it. About two weeks later another “500 year flood” took it out.
Storms have hit from the southeast before
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1903_Atlantic_hurricane_4_track.png
Doria: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Doria_1967_track.png
Agnes 1972 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Agnes_1972_track.png
1933 HURRICANE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1933_Atlantic_hurricane_6_track.png
I have done talks for years to insurance companies and blogged on why a storm from the se was going to happen, except that the biggest worry would be PHL and WIL. due to storm surge up Delaware bay, while flooding from river was coming coming down to meet it. This storm was long overdue and was caused by the same vigorous upper pattern that drove 1954 hurricane Hazel into the Carolinas, only that was a cat 4 when it hit
More hysteria from people who have not looked and are nothing more than climatic ambulance chasers
For an every-700-year event, it seems to have happened three or four times in the last hundred years.