Two years ago tonight, Superstorm Sandy hit New York with a vengeance. Whatever
you call her: hurricane, superstorm, Frankenstorm, Sandy was a massive, monster
storm.
Sandy was the second costliest hurricane in recorded history. Only
2005’s Hurricane Katrina was costlier in terms of damages -- $68 billion and
counting as of the spring of 2014 – and Sandy was responsible for at least 286
deaths in seven countries.
Sandy’s storm surge swamped New York City, flooding tunnels,
subways, and streets; cutting off power to residents in and around the city.
At 49 feet above sea level in Park Slope, where we rode out
Sandy, we were relatively unscathed, safely ensconced in our apartment
building, tucked up on a little one-block, one-way Place, in city parlance.
Sure, we heard the howling winds and saw the rain ripping
sideways like an overzealous carnival shooter trying to win the prize kewpie doll. And in the aftermath of the storm, we saw the downed trees scattered
about the neighborhood, across blocks, on top of cars, or simply uprooted.
But down the hill – down the slope – in Gowanus and Red
Hook, across the bay in Staten Island, and out on Rockaway, the devastation was
stunning. While we had power, food, water, and even Internet access, many others
had barely anything, forced from their homes or unable to return. We had
shelters and help centers and volunteers. It felt far from the madness of the
storm’s wrath.
As the days unfolded after Sandy hit New York and New
Jersey, we began to learn about the devastation in her wake. We felt even more
fortunate. The images and stories that emerged were at times horrific: an uncontrollable fire
raging on Breezy Point, caused by rising sea water; a Staten Island mom who
lost her twin boys in the storm surge; cars floating in the flood waters outside the Battery Tunnel; a couple crushed by a tree while walking
their dog in Ditmas Park.
There were many other stories, as Kathryn Miles reveals in
her new book Superstorm: Nine Days Inside Hurricane Sandy, some familiar from the media coverage, others impossible
to know unless you were living it. Miles first wrote about Sandy for Outside Magazine; her story on the wreck
of the replica HMS Bounty was a powerful piece of magazine reportage.
But Miles proves, as she did with her previous book, All Standing: The Remarkable Story of the Jeanie Johnston, The Legendary Irish Famine Ship
that she excels at
long-form narrative. That earlier book was about the lone ship to sail during
the famine years without losing a single passenger where countless others had
failed. As in that earlier book, Miles writes well not just about the sea (she lives
in Maine and is an avid sailor), but she deftly brings to light the lives of
the people whose stories she tells.
Miles follows the storm as it first hits the radar of the
National Weather Service and then National Hurricane Center, and builds as the
storm itself metastasizes, swallowing up another storm to its north, and
eventually colliding with not just land, but with a nor’easter plummeting down
towards the coast from the north.
The result reads like an historical potboiler as she builds
the narrative of the storm out of the lives of the people tracking it, trying
to avoid it, and getting trapped in it.
There are the requisite colorful characters worthy of a
novel: the Hurricane Hunters, who fly a C130 into the hurricane to collect data;
Lixion Avila, torn between his two loves, storms and ballet, as he attends a
ballet convention in Cuba at the time Sandy starts to build; Chris Landsea,
whose name must have determined his profession; and Claudine Christian and
Robin Walbridge, the former a late-comer to the crew aboard the Bounty who died
at sea; the latter, the captain who is presumed to have gone down with his
ship.
Readers familiar with Miles’ previous book will recognize
her technique, which builds and swirls much like the hurricane it depicts,
time-lapsed glimpses of each character as they try to understand what this
storm will do and where it will go or how to avoid and get around it. Superstorm is a page-turner, as they
say, and I couldn’t put it down.
The end result is a remarkable chronicle of Sandy’s impact,
not just on the land, but on so many people, on the way such storms will be
reported in the future, and about the need for resilience measures for our
cities and coastal areas.
Superstorm is a
gripping read and, despite a few very minor editorial flaws -- she doesn’t
close the loop on a couple of stories she sets up, such as the fate of the
couple in Ditmas Park and their dog who waited by its fallen caretakers, for example
-- should be read by all who want to understand the storms of the past to help
deal with or keep out of the way of the superstorms of the future.
As Miles herself writes in her afterward (sic): “Sandy was
the worst-case scenario that was never supposed to happen. New York may have
fared better than Haiti, but the storm show just how vulnerable we all are…But
sometimes, that’s just not enough. Sometimes, Nature breaks all the rules. And
it always plays to win.”
Hopefully, that's a lesson Miles can help us learn before the next superstorm hits.