Hurricane Sandy in photos

A look at the superstorm’s impact 10 years later

• By Anthony R. Wood, Monica Herndon, and Tom Gralish
• Published Oct 28, 2022

Killing 147 people, disrupting life from Florida to Maine to the Midwest, terrorizing New York City, ripping apart Long Beach Island, and unplugging the lights for over a million utility customers in the Philadelphia region, Sandy was a storm of such ferocity that it defied a meteorological label.

Ultimately, it would alter the Jersey Shore in unexpected ways, add to a National Flood Insurance Program debt that will never be repaid, inspire changes in the power-delivery system, and stoke anew the debate over the role of global warming.

Sandy had impacts as far west as Wisconsin and generated a 3-foot blizzard in the North Carolina mountains.

This was a “hurricane?” Yes, and other things.

Born from an atmospheric “wave” off the African coast on Oct. 11, 2012, it grew into a tropical storm deep in the Caribbean and was knighted a hurricane almost two weeks later before hitting Jamaica with 95 mph winds and slamming into Cuba with 115 mph winds. It followed a serpentine track off the Atlantic Coast before making a hard left toward New Jersey on Oct. 29.

By the time it made landfall near Brigantine, it technically was no longer a tropical system, according to the National Hurricane Center, which had stopped issuing warnings. That became a controversial decision as some public officials said it was source of confusion.

Interacting with an upper-level system to the west, Sandy became a monstrously large hybrid hurricane-nor’easter, at one point covering 1.8 million square miles.

Officially, the hurricane center decreed, when Sandy met New Jersey it was a “post-tropical storm.” Fox Weather’s Bryan Norcross, who at the time was a hurricane specialist at the Weather Channel, recalled declaring, “We’re not going to put ‘post-tropical storm’ on the air.”

He thought a better name for it might be “Superstorm Sandy.”

The name lasted, along with Sandy’s legacy. Shore houses are higher than ever, and so are the prices. Sandy was an impetus for raising the heights of power substations and replacing some wooden utility poles with metal ones that can withstand 120 mph winds, said Atlantic Electric spokesman Frank Tedesco.

On Sandy’s 10th anniversary, New Jersey has filed suit seeking damages from fossil fuel companies that it contends have made the world warmer and more dangerous.

One thing is certain: Land-use change was a major player in Sandy’s destruction. In 1962, the year of the Shore’s most-devastating nor’easter, an inflation adjusted $1.7 billion worth of property was situated on Long Beach Island. By 2012, that total had increased to $21.7 billion, an 1,173% increase.