Hurricane in NY????

This weekend we saw Hurricane Bill make its way up the East Coast. Luckily it stayed out to sea until it hit Canada as a Category 1 Hurricane. The only deaths that I have heard of so far were in Maine and were a result of people getting to close to the wind driven ocean and were swept out to sea.

This storm should reinforce in our minds that Hurricanes are not confined to the southern US. Some years ago I sat through an excellent presentation given by a representative of NYC Office of Emergency Management on hurricane potential in the NY area. As an example he used the Great Long Island Hurricane of 1938. The damage estimates were staggering. We have to remember that when this Hurricane hit Long Island in 1938 that area of the state was small towns and farmland unlike the busy suburb that it is today.

As with many types of disaster, we here in NY take our continued lack of events for granted. This past weekend's "flyby" by Hurricane Bill should give us a little bit of a wake up call.

For more information about the 1938 Hurricane you can visit this site. The Great Hurricane of 1938 - The Long Island Express

And for an excellent reference for disaster tracking, I will remind you of the site that I posted in my last post. NESEC - Real-Time Hazard Monitoring On this site is an awesome set of links to multiple Hurricane Tracking sites for real time updates and forecasts.