In article ,
says...

On Wed, 25 Aug 2010 01:01:29 -0400, Wayne.B
wrote:

On Tue, 24 Aug 2010 23:58:16 -0400, wrote:

On Tue, 24 Aug 2010 19:24:52 -0400, Wayne.B
wrote:

On Tue, 24 Aug 2010 18:11:51 -0400, wrote:

They have a similar scenario for New York City with Long
Island Sound acting the same way.
The History Channel even did a show on it.

The risk to NYC is much less because the vast majority of the land is
well above sea level, unlike New Orleans which is mostly below. About
once every ten years or so lower Manhattan near the Wall Street area
gets flooded by a combination of high tides and strong north easterly
winds but there is little long term impact. Probably the biggest
property risk to to the south shores of both Long Island and
Conecticut. They are highly developed with a lot of expensive real
estate.


That is not really true Wayne. Certainly the streets are above sea
level but there are several floors below sea level in most of the
buildings in Manhattan. Of course you also have the subway system and
all the utility tunnels that are not real tolerant of salt water and
link the city together
If water ever goes over the battery and gets into the subway in
quantities the pumps can't handle, the place is screwed. There are
lots of building with direct subway access, even if the water never
gets above the road in mid town it could still flood plenty of
buildings, wipe out underground utilities, flood the sewers and
contaminate the water supply.
These people are saying a 10-15 foot storm surge is not unreasonable
if a cat 3 hit in L.I. Sound. Basically a Katrina storm

Most of Manhattan has fairly good elevation except for the Wall Street
area. I worked on Wall Street for many years and saw a few floods
along the way. The subways are amazingly resilient once power is
restored and things get pumped out. Fresh water comes down from the
Catskill Mountains north of the city and is quite resistent to
contamination on Wall St.

The hurricane of 1938 was similar to the scenario you are describing.
It came into eastern LIS as a Cat 3 and did enormous damage throughout
Long Island and southern New England. The storm surge in NYC knocked
out power and subways, flooded a bunch of sub-basements, etc, but
things were running again in fairly short order. Not true further
east however; places like Block Island still have very few large trees
as a result of that storm, and many coastal towns have hurricane
barriers and gates as a result. There are pictures in the lobby of
Edgartown Yacht Club on Martha's Vineyard that show incredible
devastation to the town and harbor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Eng...ricane_of_1938

I am just going on what I have heard. They say New York is more
vulnerable than it was in 1938 and the hurricane could be more of a
direct hit.
You would certainly have a very low evacuation rate so there could be
10 million people trapped in the city.

Watch it, if you disagree with Plume, you'll be called names and
insulted! Remind you of anybody else here? That's right, I taught her
well.