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I was wondering if NYC is a dangerous place to live because it can be struck by a hurricane like Sandy.
Or was there enough warning time for the inhabitants to safely evacuate? Or was the building structures and windows of the various apartments strong enough to withstand the wind?
Which one is worse? The west coast with danger of earthquake or the east coast with danger of hurricane?
From a Maryland perspective New York isn't an unsafe place to live due to the chance of a hurricane. Look at where hurricanes usually hit, it's not New York.
Scientists have been saying for a long time that NYC is extremely vulnerable to a hurricane. Parts of SI, Brooklyn, & Queens face the ocean, and parts of lower manhattan consist of landfill. Outfits like the Discovery Channel do a story about this every couple of years.
While this storm was barely a category 1, the strange nature of how it was transforming itself into a winter storm, the fact we were in its nothern quadrant, and the fact that the brunt of the storm hit us right at high tide with a full moon made this more like a category 2 or 3 storm in terms of storm surge. The news had been reporting how potentiallly dangerous this storm could be for days, yet people still didn't prepare themselves and get out of the evacuation zones.
I guess some of them thought that since Irene wasn't that bad, that this storm couldn't possibly be that bad. People are so stuck up today that they think if something doesn't happen in their little sheltered lifetimes, that it will never happen at all. Bad move to play around with Mother Nature and hurricanes.
West coast gets earthquakes, mudslides, wildfires. East Coast gets hurricanes, noreasters, blizzards. Middle of the country gets blizzards so often they're not even remarkable, plus fires in some areas. Midwest is prone to river flooding. Annerk has it right, you get natural disasters everywhere. Some places more than others; I bet New York is fairly safe all things considered. Take Galveston for the opposite...
Oh, I forgot tornadoes. Concentrated in the South and southern plains, but do hit NYC occasionally.
You can mitigate your risk by living away from the water - it is that simple. Make sure you live at least 20 feet above sea level and your risk of storm surge is next to nothing.
You can mitigate your risk by living away from the water - it is that simple. Make sure you live at least 20 feet above sea level and your risk of storm surge is next to nothing.
There are plenty of people in the Orlando area who would laugh in your face at that comment. They didn't flood due to storm surge, but they got 3-6 feet of water in their homes after Frances dumped 14" of rain in under 24 hours when the storm sewers couldn't handle the torrential rain and flooded many areas.
There are also many in this area who had their roofs torn off during Charley's winds. We are about an hour to the coast in any direction, and many of the damages homes were newer construction, not 40 year old shacks.
There are people half an hour north of me who lost their homes during the Valentines Day tornadoes a few years ago.
Again, there is no place on this earth immune from natural disaster.
Neither. Major east coast storms and major west coast earthquakes are both infrequent. But there's probably a government agency that has comparative data on per capita loss of life.
Then, what about mid-west tornados?
Then what about danger not from mther nature - like crime?
New York is relatively well designed to withstand storms because so many buildings are masonry construction and many of the power lines are underground. The key vulnerabilities are a handful of low lying areas, especially the subways in lower Manhattan.
The worst hit areas, the Rockaway Peninsula and Coney Island, are actually barrier islands that are Mother Nature's way of protecting the mainland. They fulfilled their purpose, but unfortunately we built huge housing projects on them. This was a profoundly stupid idea (thank you, Robert Moses) that has come back to haunt us in many ways.
It was also stupid to build a power station at the end of 14th Street in a known flood zone. If that station had not exploded, or if the breaker system had worked, most of lower Manhattan would not have lost power and the storm's overall effect would have been much less dramatic.
Staten Island is another issue. The homes there are very suburban (more like Florida than NYC) and subject to the same vicissitudes of detached, single-family homes in a storm.
There are multiple vulnerabilities that need to be addressed, but, in the end, I would rather be in Manhattan during a hurricane than San Francisco during an earthquake.
From a Maryland perspective New York isn't an unsafe place to live due to the chance of a hurricane. Look at where hurricanes usually hit, it's not New York.
Earthquakes occur almost daily on the West Coast.
NYC gets way more hurricane landfalls than MD, DC, DE, and NJ. In fact, you can combine all those states and you'd still have way less hurricane landfalls than NY.
The regions where Hurricanes land most are:
South east
NYC-Long Island
New England
Mid-Atlantic
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