Woods Hole Currents - Digging into Hurricanes

Can you imagine NYC being hit with a Catergory 3 hurricane? Needless to say things would be bad, REALLY bad!

Check this link from out from whoi.edu

http://www.whoi.edu/home/about/currents_v9no3_hurricanes.html

It may have happened and may happen again!

"3 SEPTEMBER 1821 - Perhaps the most destructive hurricane in the history of New York City raised a ten-foot surge of water in just one hour onto the Battery in lower Manhattan—the highest surge ever recorded in New York Harbor. The storm had moved from North Carolina to New York in just ten hours, and hurricane winds were experienced as far west as Philadelphia. Though reliable meteorological records are scarce, eyewitness accounts and historic reconstructions suggest the storm made landfall near Jamaica Bay as a category 3 hurricane. It was the only time in recorded history that New York took a direct hit from an intense hurricane....

Recent research using theoretical models suggests that a modern category 4 hurricane would drown John F. Kennedy International Airport under 20 feet of water and would flood the Holland and Brooklyn-Battery tunnels and the subways."