Hurricane Sandy, a massive post-tropical cyclone spanning over 1,000 miles, struck the New Jersey coast, sending a record storm surge into New York Harbor that flooded subway tunnels, knocked out power to millions, and set Lower Manhattan streets underwater. The storm caused roughly $70 billion in damage across the United States, becoming one of the costliest hurricanes in American history and prompting major rethinking of coastal flood defenses.
Sandy's sheer size made it unusual: at its peak the storm's tropical-storm-force winds stretched across 1,000 miles, engulfing the entire mid-Atlantic seaboard even before landfall. Meteorologists watched with alarm as it merged with a cold front moving in from the west, transforming into a hybrid 'superstorm' that drove a wall of water into New York Harbor at high tide under a full moon, maximizing the surge.
The East River and Hudson breached their banks simultaneously, pouring saltwater into subway stations, tunnels, and the electrical vaults of Lower Manhattan. Con Edison workers watched a transformer explode at 14th Street, plunging much of downtown into darkness for days. Hospitals evacuated patients down darkened stairwells by flashlight, and the New York Stock Exchange closed for two consecutive days due to weather for the first time since 1888.
Breezy Point in Queens burned to the ground even as floodwaters rose around it, an inferno amid a flood. Sandy killed at least 233 people across the Caribbean, the United States, and Canada, and its aftermath reshaped disaster policy, spurring billions in resiliency spending and new building codes for flood-prone coastal cities.