By MARY SAYDAH and OLIVIA IANNONE
Assistant Features Editor and Staff Writer
“I opened up my back door and it was a river outside,” said junior Michaella Burke of Middletown. “It sounded like there were 10 faucets on.”
Burke was one of many New Jersey residents who chose to stay home during Hurricane Sandy, even with the mandatory evacuation in place. She asked her parents to evacuate, but said her parents “were stubborn.”
The family eventually evacuated.
“We jumped into the car and left,” she said. According to Burke, they had to drive on the sidewalk to get down their flooded street.
Superstorm Sandy was the strongest storm to make landfall north of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, in recorded history, according to Accuweather.
The record-breaking “superstorm” blasted through eight Northeastern U.S. states Oct. 30, killing dozens of people, battering coastal neighborhoods and forcing mass evacuations. The storm destroyed the famed boardwalk in Seaside Heights, along with several others along the coast. Estimated damages in New Jersey amount to $29.4 billion, according to Gov. Chris Christie.
Algebra II and Statistics teacher Ellen Judge of Sea Girt said that the worst she had previously seen in New Jersey was the Nor’easter of 1992.
Many students and residents alike said that the hype around the milder Hurricane Irene in August 2011 led to a lack of urgency for this storm. Though Irene did cause extensive property damage, residents of Monmouth County, like senior Julianna Robinson of Asbury, got off easier than they expected to, in many cases causing them to expect their good fortune to repeat itself.
Robinson, who lives 300 feet from the beach, said she was going to “stick it out.”
“The media overreacted with Irene. It made us think they were over the top,” she said.
Robinson’s family left after much prodding from concerned friends and family. Judge left under similar circumstances, though she had not been been in NJ for Irene.
She was living in Wisconsin at the time of Irene. She said that she remembers “the hype.”
Freshman Christina Noll of Hazlet did not have a mandatory evacuation for either storm, but overall said that there was more time to prepare for Irene.
“When Irene hit they evacuated people days in advance,” she said. “For Sandy, people were only evacuating hours before.”
Chemistry and Forensics teacher Erin Wheeler lives in Brick on the Metedeconk river in Ocean County. There was no mandatory evacuation for her neighborhood during the hurricane, but only for the snow storm that followed a week later.
“I think there should have been more mandatory evacuations for homes on the water,” she said. Her home was only one of a handful to be left unscathed in her neighborhood, she said.
“But how were they supposed to know?” she added.
During Irene, the water reached only up to her bulkhead, but this defense was not enough during Sandy, a storm noted for the severity of storm surges along the New York and New Jersey coast. On Sandy Hook, for example, the surge reached 13.31 feet, and in Kings Point, N.Y., it was recorded at 14.31 feet, as reported in Scientific American.
Irene’s storm surges reached a maximum of 8 feet.
Rainwater proved to be less of a problem during the superstorm, the 94 mph winds recorded by the National Weather Service wreaked havoc.
When Judge went to check the beach near her house, she had to duck to hide from the force of the wind and possible debris in the air.
“That wind was the strongest I have ever lived through,” she said.
But other hurricanes located further south, such as the famed Hurricane Katrina of 2005, outdid Sandy’s wind speeds. The Scientific American put Katrina’s winds at 125 mph, more than 30 mph faster. Sandy was a Category 1 storm, and Katrina reached Category 3 by landfall.
Burke was in New Orleans at the time of the storm. Her family took their vacation rental car from the airport and drove back to New Jersey.
Robinson said the mildness of Irene and media hype kept people from fleeing.
Cooper, whose family stayed for Irene, said last year’s hurricane helped the state be more prepared for Sandy.
Sandy’s costs were just updated to $36.9 billion by Governor Christie. That is $29.4 billion of repairs and $7.4 billion in prevention costs. In comparison to Katrina, the damage was a fractional amount. The storm left New Orleans with $80 billion in damage.
According to Judge, though, New Orleans already had impending doom with the levies.
“I don’t think the situations are comparable. We don’t get snow [storms] or hurricanes. This was an anomaly,” she said.
This story was published in the print edition of The Inkblot on December 19, 2012.