One of the many advantages of having gone to Columbia half a century ago is that I receive its excellent alumni magazine. From the latest issue of Columbia Magazine: Sandy’s Wake. Excerpt:
The storm made landfall. The Hudson rose and rose. Klaus Jacob went to bed.
“I knew what was going to happen,” he says with a shrug in his voice.
Of course he did.
On the evening of October 29, Superstorm Sandy, a weather event so gigantic and freakish that the word “hurricane” was insufficient, whipped the New York area, which lay to the right of that gargantuan white spiral in the satellite picture, the windier side. The Atlantic, plowed by winds, piled up high and rushed toward the coastline.
At around 9:00 p.m., New York harbor was a churning, brimming tub. Waves heaved and crashed. One wave measured thirty-two feet.
At 9:24, a storm surge of 13.88 feet, breaking the record of 10.2 feet set by Hurricane Donna in 1960, breached the seawalls of Lower Manhattan, flooding subway tunnels and knocking out power.
Twelve miles north of the city, up the wooded banks of the Hudson River, on a swollen tributary in Piermont, New York, behind a stand of marsh grass, in an old Dutch settlement, inside a white clapboard house, Jacob, a seismologist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, climbed the steep wooden staircase.
