Elliot Abrams

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Sandy Weakens but Causes Additional Trouble

October 30, 2012; 9:51 AM

Tuesday 11:15 a.m.

This video shows how the weather should behave in the aftermath of Sandy:

Stories, accounts, memories and nightmares associated with Sandy will be told for a long time. It has been an epic storm. The utter devastation in the New York City area looks like it came out of a movie, except the set is real, as is the suffering.

The storm will continue to weaken slowly during the next few days as it drifts to the northeast along with the upper-air storm that "captured" it. It was in some ways a repeat of the October 1991 Perfect Storm, except Sandy came ashore; the Perfect Storm did not.

I just got off the phone with one of our key radio group in West Virginia (Metro Radio News), and we were talking about the heavy snow in their mountains. In parts of Tucker, Pocahontas and Randolf counties, higher elevations have been buried by 3 feet of heavy, wet snow. They had interviewed a couple from D.C. who had decided to "drive west to get out of the way of Sandy" and wound up stuck in the West Virginia snowstorm.

At Chicago, the National Weather Service office said their "south buoy" in Lake Michigan had recorded a tie for second place for the highest wave ever recorded there... just over 20 feet.

With the disaster declarations, President Obama has again joined with his predecessors dating back to the 1920s in federal disaster assistance. The first widespread deployment of such assistance began at the insistence of Herbert Hoover (in advising President Coolidge) in the wake of the great Mississippi River Flood of 1927. Hoover's work and leadership during that flood was said to help his bid for the presidency the following year.

As of 11 a.m., Sandy was centered southwest of the middle of Pennsylvania, as shown on this pressure map.

The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of AccuWeather, Inc. or AccuWeather.com

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About This Blog

Elliot Abrams
Elliot Abrams from AccuWeather.com offers this Northeast Weather Blog for the U.S. with regular updates on NE weather from a leading forecaster and meteorologist.