Hurricane Sandy: Life After Hurricane Katrina

Did you know Hurricane Sandy is known as “The Superstorm”? Sandy was one of the most destructive hurricanes in the 2012 Atlantic Season. On October 19, 2012, the meteorologists named the storm Hurricane Sandy. Sandy developed in the Caribbean Sea on October 22, 2012.Sandy was deadly, moved very quickly, but there are ways to survive hurricanes.

Recently and historically hurricanes have caused catastrophic amounts of damage to individuals, property, and society as a whole. Given this immense amount of destruction caused by hurricanes, a president’s response to these storms is not only extraordinarily significant but necessary for society to recover from the damage. Not only does the president need to provide aid and support to the victims affected directly by these hurricanes, but also unite America in these times of crisis. A president’s ability to deal with these dire situations is crucial to their success and a representation of their leadership skills. Hurricane Maria and Hurricane Sandy were both similar storms that resulted in contrasting results. Two deadly storms with two very different responses: one from Obama and the other from Trump. President Obama’s response to Hurricane Sandy was swift and respectful, while Trump’s to Maria was sluggish and demeaning to the people of Puerto Rico, demonstrating the contrast between Obama’s heart and intellect and Trump’s idiocy and heartlessness.

Hurricane Sandy was a tropical cyclone that devastated portions of the Caribbean, Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States in late October 2012. The eighteenth named storm and tenth hurricane of the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season, Sandy was the largest Atlantic hurricane on record, as measured by diameter, with winds spanning 1,100 miles. Sandy is estimated in early calculations to have caused damage of at least $20 billion. Preliminary estimates of losses that include business interruption surpass $50 billion, which, if confirmed, would make it the second-costliest Atlantic hurricane in history, behind only Hurricane Katrina.

Hurricane Sandy started off as a small storm, but quickly grew to be a large and powerful hurricane that caused major destruction to the Caribbean islands and East Coast of the United Sates of America. On October 19, 2012, a tropical depression formed in the Caribbean Sea by Venezuela. In a matter of five days, the tropical depression gained speed and became known as Hurricane Sandy. Hurricane Sandy caused high wind speeds, rain, and even snow in all East Coast states, especially New Jersey. On October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy made landfall in Atlantic City, New Jersey with peak wind speeds measuring just over 220 miles per hour. At this point, people who thought that they would wait the storm out realized what a

Hurricane Katrina was the storm of the century. Hurricane Sandy earned the nickname Super storm Sandy. If anyone had any doubts as to what Mother Nature is capable of, these storms are perfect examples of the fury she can dish out here on planet Earth. The sheer amount of energy those storms had is almost incomprehensible. Katrina had sustained winds of 174 mph and wave heights of over 40 feet in some places. (Knabb) Sandy had winds of 115 mph and dumped over 10 inches of rain (Blake). By all measures, they were both extremely powerful weather systems capable of taking lives.

In April 2012, the United States of America experienced Sandy, known as one of the deadliest and costliest hurricanes in the American history. It is estimated that the hurricane caused damage of about $75 million. Besides numerous causalities along its path, the deadly hurricane left many cities without electricity, communication system, infrastructure and even shelter in many cases. Within the United States, New Jersey and New, both major socio-economic hubs and highly populated regions, remained the worst hit area of the storm.

Hurricane Sandy destroyed homes by separating families and tearing down their homes. After Hurricane Sandy happened when families came back home from wherever they went when the hurricane occurred some of them maybe most of them came home to almost nothing. Half of the towns and almost half of buildings was ruined with water damage and had to be rebuilt (Dunbar).

Hurricane Katrina is the most expensive natural disaster in American history (Kates et al., 2006). This is supported by the statistics from August 2006, where the death total surpassed 1836 and the cost of the destruction was projected to be near $108 billion (Kates et al., 2006). On August 29, it made landfall in Louisiana as a category 3 Hurricane and its aftermath was devastating

All the states that are on the coast had to redo 80% of the roads. Over two million households in the state of New Jersey lost power in the storm, 346,000 homes were damaged or destroyed, but 8,100,000 homes lost power. The outages affected people in seven-teen states, as far west as Michigan. Four weeks after the storm 25,000,000,000 dollars was the estimated dollar value of the lost business activity , according to financial analysis firm IHS Global Insight. Estimates as of 2015 assessed damage to have been about 75,000,000,000 dollars ("Hurricane Sandy Fast Facts").

Hurricane Sandy made a devastating landfall along the coast of New Jersey (McCallum, Wicklein, Reiser, Busciolano, Morrison, Verdi, Painter & Frantz, 2012). However, the origin of the hurricane was quite removed from that location. The core instigation of Hurricane Sandy originated off of the west coast of Africa in the southwestern Caribbean Sea. It started off rather weak, a category one on the Saffir-Simpson’s scale. The storm became a stronger category three as it moved towards the island of Cuba, and then weakened to a category one again as it traveled north through the Bahamas. On the journey from the Bahamas to the

As the Assistant Administrator of National Preparedness with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (F.E.M.A.) when Super Storm Sandy made landfall on October 29, 2012, in New Jersey it brought with it storm surges of more than 11 feet, killing more than 100 people (including 43 in New York of which 34 occurred in Queens and Staten Island), destroying or damaging thousands of homes, and leaving more than 8 million people without power.

“Life is a hurricane, and we board up to save what we can and bow low to the earth to crouch in that small space above the dirt where the wind will not reach. We honor anniversaries of deaths by cleaning graves and sitting next to them before fires, sharing food with those who will not eat again. We raise children and tell them other things about who they can be and what they are worth: to us, everything. We love each other fiercely, while we live and after we die. We survive; we are savages” (Ward, 2013). Before Hurricane Katrina in August of 2005 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012, New Orleans and New Jersey both boasted a thriving tourism industry. Hurricane Katrina and Sandy devastated the cities they wreaked havoc on. Thousands

The state of New York was severely affected by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, particularly its suburbs, Long Island, and New York City. The devastation impacted New York City's Subway system, road tunnels, and many communities across the area. Furthermore, the New York Stock Exchange closed for two days, an entire hospital complex had to be evacuated as well as the surrounding neighborhood, and multiple fires destroyed over 100 homes in Queens. Thus, in the end, 53 people lost their lives due to Sandy. The economic impact accrued damage to thousands of homes and an estimate of 250,000 vehicles across New York. The city faced $19 billion in damage, with $32.8 billion required for restoration across the state of New York. (City of New York)

Hurricane Katrina not only tore the city apart and forever changed the lives of the people living in New Orleans, but truly hit home for the rest of America as well. Nothing of this brutal disaster had really hit the nation before August 23th, 2005, so the shock of it all struck the nation at an all time high. The after math of Katrina was catastrophic on the worst levels. Families were torn apart, homes and vehicles swept away or completely ruined by the massive amounts of water, and all that was planned to save lives was partly ironically what drown them. In a situation like this one would expect a hospital to be sophisticated and more equipped to keep it together, but it ultimately the opposite happened entirely. When the lives lost were

There is an estimate of $50 billion in damages according to David Abramson in Hurricane Sandy: Lessons Learned, Again (Abramson, 1). In the effort to restore some that was destroyed, government agencies were set out to help. “As of July 2013 FEMA and the Small Business Administration (SBA) had helped more then 270,000 individuals or households and 3,900 businesses to get back on their feet through $3.8 billion in SBA recovery loans and FEMA individual assistance.” (US Department of Housing and Urban Development) The repercussion of this storm could’ve been prevented with better preparation behaviors. In an article from The Nations Health, Natalie McGill talks about those living in public housing and shelters during the storm. She describes how residents in shelters went without main necessities such as electricity and food for weeks after the storm (McGill, 2014). In another article Nancy Solomon describes a family from Long Island whose bay house was completely destroyed by Sandy yet she was gratified to see that process was being made. (Solomon, 2016) So although not all affected by the storm feel abandoned by the efforts of the government it is a pressing issue for a majority that