The Capital Region and most of New York are bracing for a widespread soaking and gusty winds from a developing storm that will hit Thursday into Friday. It happens to coincide with the anniversary of the fifth-costliest U.S. tropical cyclone on record for the United States. Superstorm Sandy killed at least 147 people, nearly half of them in the Middle Atlantic and Northeast in late October 2012.
Sandy was another type of perfect storm
Superstorm Sandy was dubbed “Frankenstorm,” a fitting nickname for a scary storm that developed just prior to Halloween 13 years ago. It also reflected the patchwork nature of Frankenstein’s construction. This was a monster storm that was part tropical cyclone and part winter storm. It morphed from a Category 3 hurricane at its peak into an intense extratropical cyclone — the term the National Weather Service uses to describe a cyclone that has lost its tropical characteristics.
The complex construction of the storm involved the merger of a hurricane and a “hybrid vortex” over the Mid-Atlantic, “inviting perhaps a ghoulish nickname for the cyclone along the lines of ‘Frankenstorm,’ an allusion to Mary Shelley’s gothic creature of synthesized elements,” noted Hydrometeorological Prediction Center’s Jim Cisco in his discussion of the storm.
Hurricane Sandy was the 18th named tropical cyclone of the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season. Sandy’s track took it from the central Caribbean northward through Jamaica, eastern Cuba, and the Bahamas. It then moved northeast along the East Coast of the U.S. before taking an abrupt turn to the west, making landfall near Brigantine, New Jersey, on the night of Oct. 29.
The impacts from Sandy were significant and widespread. The storm produced a record-breaking storm surge of 13.88 feet at Battery Park in New York City. The Rockaways, Staten Island and portions of both Brooklyn and Queens were inundated by coastal flooding. Several communities on Long Island, including Long Beach and Lindenhurst, were damaged by storm surge and saltwater intrusion. More than 2 million customers in New York lost power.
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