Hurricane Sandy and a Blast from the Past.

"Long Island and New England had been lashed by rain for four straight days. The air was unnaturally warm & muggy. Ears felt queer because atmospheric pressure was decreasing. In Vermont people noticed the smell of the seashore in the air"......The storm happened quickly. People on the southshore of Long Island saw what one of them described as a 'thick and high bank of fog rolling in fast from the ocean...When it came closer we saw that it wasn't fog. It was water. '....The storm surge stuck Long Island around 2:30 PM (near high tide) on September 21st 1938. So mighty was the power of that first storm wave that its impact registered on a seismograph in Sitka, Alaska, while the spray carried northward at well over a hundred miles an hour whitened windows in Montpelier, Vermont."*   

Back in 2006 I wrote a post about the New England Hurricane of 1938, dubbed later as the "Long Island Express".   I noted back then, "to grasp the energy of these storms remember that  a category 1 hurricane-one with winds blowing in excess of 75 m.p.h. is as powerful as 500 Nagasaki-type atomic bombs and contains more electricity than the entire United States uses in six months."  

Hurricane Sandy is a category 1 storm but her energy levels as she collides with a cold front coming out of the Midwest makes her an exceptionally powerful and dangerous storm.  All stock exchanges are closed today and tomorrow.  It is impossible to say at this juncture what kind of economic and personal damage Sandy will bring to the eastern seaboard.  Right now we are seeing rainfall projections of biblical proportions.  Flooding from both rain and from the storm surge will be extensive.  Sandy is also making landfall at astronomical high tide which will compound the misery.  Power in the direct path of the storm is expected to be lost from three to seven days.  

Sandy is an unmanageable portfolio event in the fact that she could not have been anticipated until the very end of last week and the investment community did not fully understand her implications until the weekend began.  Futures were down about 1% today, although as mentioned earlier stocks did not trade.  We will have to see how this sorts out in the next several days and of course our thoughts are with all of those in harms way.  Back when we know something more concrete.  Here  is a link to the original post I referred to at the beginning of this article.  For those interested if you actually go to the link, the hurricane barrier in Providence, RI is closed.   

*Paraphrased from The Glory & the Dream, William Manchester, Bantam Books, 1973. pp 183-186.