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Column: Dodging disaster — this time

Karl Grossman
Karl Grossman

Looking at the westward track of Hurricane Florence on TV last month we worried about the consequences if it hooked to the north and struck the upper portion of the Atlantic Coast. That possibility was suggested by some forecasters, but Florence’s track was unswervingly westward, hitting North Carolina head-on.

Florence was a Category 1 hurricane when it hit the Carolinas after days of being at Category 4 and still was a “monumental disaster” for North Carolina, as its Governor Roy Cooper put it. What was routinely referred to as a “monster storm” did equivalent damage in South Carolina.

What would be the consequences if a Category 4 hurricane — a level that’s become far more frequent due to climate change producing warmer water for hurricanes to feed on — smashed into this area?

Professor Scott A. Mandia of Suffolk County Community College has analyzed Long Island hurricane impacts. He’s a meteorologist with a master’s degree in meteorology from Pennsylvania State University and teaches weather and climate change. Professor Mandia is assistant chair of the college’s Department of Physical Sciences.

His conclusions are not pretty.

Click to see Professor Mandia’s analysis at sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/38hurricane/storm_surge_maps.html

For Shelter Island — hold your breath for this — a Category 4 hurricane “inundates” the Island “except for a few high points,” Professor Mandia says in his analysis.

“Inundates” is a term widely used by meteorologists to describe severe flooding. As to other places on the East End, Professor Mandia says in his analysis that a Category 4 hurricane “inundates” “entire” communities, including the two villages that sandwich Shelter Island — North Haven to the Island’s south and Greenport to the north, and “inundates” Westhampton Beach, Montauk and Orient as well as Plum and Gardiner’s islands.

In western Suffolk County, a Category 4 hurricane “inundates,” among other places, the “entire” communities of Amityville, Lindenhurst, Babylon, West Islip, Bay Shore.

But it doesn’t need to be a Category 4 hurricane to produce devastating damage. A Category 3 hurricane would put “much of the North and South forks entirely under water,” states Professor Mandia in his analysis.

And it would only require a Category 1 storm for Montauk Point to be “completely cut off from the rest of the South Fork.”

Professor Mandia’s analysis is part of a series headed “The Long Island Express, The Great Hurricane of 1938, Long Island Hurricane Climatology.” He is an expert on the Hurricane of 1938 which ravaged this area and much of New England exactly 80 years ago last month. The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, which sets the categories, wasn’t in use then, but today the Hurricane of 1938 is considered to have been a Category 3 hurricane.

Professor Mandia doesn’t make projections for the top category of hurricanes on the Saffir-Simpson Wind Scale, Category 5 with winds of 156 miles per hour and stronger, because there is no evidence that a Hurricane 5 hurricane has struck this area. But, he said in an interview, “I wouldn’t be surprised with warmer water here that at some point this century a Category 5 hurricane will hit…”

Here, as in the Carolinas, the key issue regarding loss of life and much of the damage would not be wind speed but storm surge. Storm surge is defined by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as “the abnormal rise in seawater level during a storm, measured as the height of the water above the normal predicted astronomical tide. The surge is caused primarily by a storm’s winds pushing water onshore.”

It would be, in the case of a Category 4 hurricane, well over 20 feet, as high as 28 and 29 feet, in some areas of Suffolk and Nassau Counties. Click on the map on Professor Mandia’s analysis and you’ll find the estimated storm surge where you live.

Professor Mandia said: “Hurricane storm surge causes approximately 90 percent of all storm deaths and injuries and much of the damage, therefore it is important to residents … to be aware of the areas that will be affected by the storm surge.”

More next week.