Sandy

[Siddharth Rout]

For everyone on East Coast US and Canada... Trust you and family are ok and safe...

[dilettante]

I'm west of the secondary impact area but getting some real gusts of wind here. We'll probably see some high winds, rain, snow, and power outages but nothing like the misery being seen anywhere near the coast or even east of Ohio. It's a big system, with Ohio which is far inland being inside the secondary area.

I haven't heard from anyone I know in the Canadian Maritime Provinces yet, but it might only effect the most southerly parts of that region. Southern Ontario and Quebec will probably see some wind, rain, and snow as well as it moves in there and tapers off.

Hopefully most people heeded warnings and got to someplace safe with a way to get through the cold coming in the wake of the storm, since they may be without power for a long time.

[JuggaloBrotha]

We didn't get directly hit here in the Lansing, Michigan area. Yesterday was just cold and really windy, today it's cold, breezey and sleeting but the ground is too warm for it to stay ice so nothing is freezing shut.
I've been watching the news for New York and New Jersey, they've got massive flooding going on and I hear there's over 7 million residents without power all night.

[Shaggy Hiker]

A slow moving, really deep, hurricane hitting at high tide on a full moon is about as bad as it can get...unless you also count having an arctic low pushing down at it. I watched it come ashore on this interesting site. It's still pretty interesting at this time:

http://hint.fm/wind/

[Siddharth Rout]

Hopefully most people heeded warnings and got to someplace safe with a way to get through the cold coming in the wake of the storm, since they may be without power for a long time.

That was definitely a wise thing to do.

This reminds me of this thread.

It certainly is an awkward moment when u realize that in the movie 2012 the first thing that flooded was New York and now it is 2012 and New York is flooding!!

[dilettante]

I heard there were waves up to 20 feet on Lake Michigan yesterday. A very rare event there because it is narrow, runs north-south, and prevailing winds are westerly. Amazing how big this storm system was.

The Pacific Northwest (B.C., Canada?) had a good-sized earthquake (7.7?) Saturday too. What's next?

[thebuffalo]

Pfffft, Sandy was a Category 1 that spread 90 miles with a cold front attached to it..... Thats nothing to Floridians. We have Tropical Storms that spit out tornadoes destroying everything in their path. Man up northerners, man up.

But really, I hope everyone is safe and all is well up north.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Yeah, I was surprised that it was barely a category 1, though it got near Category 2 by landfall. The real key was a confluence of several events.

When I was living in the Florida Keys, I couldn't convince my landlady that she had to evacuate for a Cat 3 or greater. She felt that, living on the high ground, she'd ride it out just fine. She had the image that the storm surge was just big waves, which isn't the case. The surface of the ocean rises, and the normal barriers to high waves have nothing to do with that. Furthermore, the 'high ground' in the Keys meant that we lived at seven feet above sea level. Fortunately, no storms hit, and it wasn't an issue.

[thebuffalo]

That's what its looking like. Category 1. Hmmmm, looks like the northeast wasn't designed for hurricanes.

[Shaggy Hiker]

It wasn't designed for storm surge, not hurricanes. Look at all the houses in the middle picture: They are flooded, but they are still standing. Compare that to pictures of Florida after Hurricane Andrew back in 1992. The houses were put together so poorly that most of them were flattened. I remember seeing a picture that was blocks of rubble with one house in the middle that had only lost a few shingles. That one house had been built by Habitat for Humanity. In other words, the one house that was built with some care, survived the hurricane with little issue, while all the houses around it were flattened. In comparison, the houses in that picture survived the wind without issue, but the storm surge is a different matter.