Sarasota News Leader

11/02/2012

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Sarasota News Leader November 2, 2012 Oct. 29, 5 p.m.: Sandy now has formed an eye, about 20 miles across, just prior to land- fall at the Delaware Bay/New Jersey border later this evening. This track will put the en- tire northern Chesapeake, Washington, D.C., and Annapolis areas under hurricane-force winds tonight. Pressure and top sustained wind speed remain unchanged. The storm is still moving northwest at 28 mph. And it is cold there, with temperatures in the 40s to- night under hurricane horizontal rain. Tropical-storm-force winds are being experi- enced from South Carolina to Maine. This is one huge storm, and we are getting gusts to 30 mph here as part of this zany hurricane-cold front mash-up. Oct. 29, 8 p.m.: Sandy is ashore just south of Atlantic City, NJ. Central pressure is up a tad to 27.93; sustained winds now are 80 mph. The hurricane barely made it to shore. The dry air it has been fighting for days has stripped the southern and eastern quadrants of moisture. More than a million people are without power, the majority of them in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Tidal gauges are setting re- cords in and around New York City. An 1821 record of 11.2 feet at the Battery (southern- most Manhattan) was broken with a record of 11.25 feet and still rising. In northern New Jersey, a Sandy Hook record of 10.1 feet was superseded by a 12.0 reading … and water is still rising. Sandy is no longer a hurricane, and the Na- tional Hurricane Center is saying goodbye. But before the federal agency leaves the scene, it offers an image of the wind swath that just grew and grew and ended up sending a big punch right into the midriff of the East Coast. Page 34 Lower Manhattan is flooding tonight, millions are without power and there is more to come as the system slows and merges but retains its strongest winds. 30 Oct. 11 p.m.: Twenty-four hours have passed since landfall. Watching Hurricane Sandy was like seeing a piece of Celadon porcelain falling from a shelf to a tile floor. Concentration went into slow motion, as inch by inch we watched a shattering catastrophe unfold: six million people without power; Wall Street under water; a century-old New York subway system flooded; property losses in the billions; economic losses yet uncounted. What can be counted is rainfall. The big win- ner was Easton, MD, with 12.5 inches, fol- lowed by Georgetown, DE, with 10.2 inches. Kitty Hawk, NC, on the oh-so-vulnerable Out- er Banks, received 5.9 inches. New Jersey was soaked, with totals between 6.2 and 11.9 inch- es across the state. Virginia was in the 7- to 9-inch range, Pennsylvania had 5 to 7 inches and Ohio saw 3 to 6 inches. Washington, D.C.'s Reagan National Airport got 4.78 inches. The damn storm is not done. Central baro- metric pressure is at 29.18, and the maximum sustained wind is 45 mph. It is in southwest- ern Pennsylvania and headed into Canada — and for all I know, the North Pole — on a due north projected track. The storm touched millions and millions of lives. In four days, the nation goes to the polls to elect a president. In the political campaign, nobody once mentioned global warming or cli- mate change. Records two centuries old were broken this week. Leave it to Mother Ocean to remind us.

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