This October in History: Hurricane Sandy Hits PA

For a month that is typically dry and sunny in State College, the last few Octobers have brought some whammy storms to central Pennsylvania. In a series of blog entries, I'd like to remember a few of them. Today, I recount the story of Hurricane Sandy through my blogs.

Hurricane Sandy was a behemoth of a storm -- something that many said "couldn't happen." A major hurricane approached the Northeast and made landfall as an unnamed, but powerful, nor'easter, causing an immense storm surge in NYC and dropping feet of snow across the Appalachians. Hurricane Sandy generated more Internet hype than Hurricane Katrina (although the Gulf storm was remembered for longer), according to Google Trends.

The spectre of a major hurricane impacting New York City was first mentioned on this blog in 2006, when a press release by AccuWeather said: "The Northeast is staring down the barrel of a gun," said Joe Bastardi, AccuWeather.com's chief hurricane forecaster."

Six years later, the European (ECMWF) computer weather forecast model suggested on Oct. 22 that just such a thing might happen. I wrote on the morning of Oct. 22, 2012: "The AccuWeather meteorologists (and, indeed, the entire meteorological community on the Internet) are abuzz this morning with the possibility of a large hurricane moving into the mid-Atlantic states, resulting in heavy snow inland."

Our first forecast on Oct. 23 was cautious, laying out two scenarios. Although the European model was demonstrably more accurate than the U.S. model (the GFS), it's never a good idea to put all your forecast eggs in one model basket. (Earlier this year, the U.S. admitted that their new, higher-resolution version of the GFS would have also predicted Sandy's landfall).

Two days later, more models were calling for landfall, but I blogged that there was no historical precedent to this storm, going back to the year 1900. AccuWeather.com framed it a "Extraordinary Circumstances Needed" on Oct. 25, 2012. However, by the next day, it seemed unavoidable, many quotable moments were had, and we issued our first risk maps publicly, though we had been warning clients of the possiblity for a week.

The rest, as they say, is history. By the time the storm made landfall, we used words never-before used on AccuWeather.com, such as "Colossal" and "Catastrophe." A complete list of my blogs is shown below; view my blog "10 Awesome High-Res Hurricane Sandy Maps" for additional resources.

After the damage we saw from Hurricane Irene in 2011 and the flooding from Tropical Storm Lee the same season, we were preparing for the worst from Hurricane Sandy here in central Pennsylvania. Here in Centre County, at least, the storm passed without much fanfare. Expecting the worst, I warned my neighbors to put their cars in their garages and pick up loose yard items; I made sure I had emergency supplies, then we battened down.

This video shows what little wind we got:

At AccuWeather, we had a number of emergency discussions about the storm (the 8 a.m. Oct. 26 shown here). The night the storm came in, we ordered a dozen pizzas and switched to generator power. It was time to await the storm.

The low pressure was perhaps the most impressive part of the storm here. Harrisburg and Philadelphia set new pressure records (28.45" Hg & 28.16" Hg respectively). Here in State College (where records are not maintained) we dropped to an impressive 28.73" Hg -- one of the lowest pressure I've ever personally experienced, certainly since I moved to Pennsylvania in 1997 (and also the same pressure which set an all-time record at Columbia, South Carolina, during Hurricane Hugo in 1989!)

In eastern Pennsylvania, winds gusted to 81 mph in Allentown and 76 mph in Bensalem, downing some trees and powerlines, but here in central Pennsylvania, we only reached 60 mph; I was expecting more of a Hurricane Hugo situation, where we had thousands of trees downed 200 miles inland. Over a million people lost power from the storm, but most of those were in the northeastern part of the state. Wind gusts were between 45 and 53 mph in Lancaster, Harrisburg and York, which all received higher wind gusts during Hurricane Irene.

Here's a wrap-up from the NWS in State College, Pennsylvania (see also Philadelphia/Mt. Holly):

Rain was not terribly impressive either, with southernmost Pennsylvania averaging 4-6 inches. Ironically, the snow that fell as a result of the former hurricane might have been the most impressive, although it was limited to the higher peaks, with 13.6" falling at Laurel Summit, and as much as three feet falling in the southern Appalachians.

SIDE NOTE:A report came out just this week of the Red Cross's performance with Hurricane Sandy. It said, in part:

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