Published 2014, 332 pages, 8 color plates.
Maybe I should get the personal stuff out of the way first? Sandy was not our first weather catastrophe in 2012. South Jersey was hit hard by a derecho on June 30. It was a rogue thunderstorm with “straight line winds”, and it was not predicted. My husband and I woke around 1 am to an impressive display of heat lightning. A glance at the Rain-dar cell phone weather app showed that a storm was closing around us. The wind hit hard, thunder and lightning exploded, and we hurried downstairs, frightened. I don’t think the action lasted more than ten minutes. Our electricity was off. We wandered back to bed, relatively unconcerned. In the morning, we discovered the intensity and extent of the damage. Personally, we were lucky.
And regionally, we were (sort of) lucky. When Hurricane Sandy came lumbering through five months later, the weaker trees had already fallen down and lots of utility poles and wires and transmission towers were newly repaired.
Hurricane Sandy was very different from the derecho. Sandy was predicted. We listened to days and days of analysis. Remembering our 48 hours without power after the derecho, we stocked up on batteries, water and food that wouldn’t require cooking. Institutions made plans and battened themselves down. The local college closed its dormitories and sent the students home. Sandy was not officially a hurricane when it hit the East coast. The eye passed over us almost innocuously. The colossal storm surge did much of the damage, and the worst winds and rain missed our neighborhood.
The book Superstorm is a detailed, comprehensive discussion of the storm, with emphasis on meteorology and forecasting. The book follows several interesting threads, like the sinking of the tall ship Bounty and the heroic efforts that saved all but two members of the crew.
Superstorm is organized chronologically and emphasizes science but reaches out into politics, history, psychology and other fields in order to deal with important questions about human behavior. How do you explain the uncertainty inherent in weather forecasting? What motivates people to evacuate, on the one hand, or to defiantly remain in the face of danger? How do you communicate when your audience is already saturated with internet and social media chatter that ranges from informative to just plain bizarre (like conspiracy theory)?
Read this book! I would really like author Kathryn Miles to tackle the issues that emerged after Sandy. Where should we rebuild? Are there parts of the coast that must be abandoned? How much money should be invested in putting houses and businesses back into their pre-storm condition? How much should be invested in infrastructure changes? How do you manage reconstruction to minimize fraud?
Another set of issues emerging after Sandy surrounded the definition of a hurricane. Criteria for wind speed, wave height and “eye” structure don’t tell the whole story. In the future, there will be more emphasis on storm surge prediction.
This book is another in a series of high quality “science for non-scientists” books I’ve read lately. (See my posts of June 19, May 3 and January 29, 2015.) Is this a genre? If so, it’s one of my favorites. This is the kind of book I could aspire to write.
AMG Reading Journal 