Outsmarting The Surge

Correction appended Nov. 13

After Hurricane Sandy hurled the Atlantic at the Northeast coast on Oct. 29 and 30, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo returned from touring a shell-shocked New York City to face reporters. The storm surge had inundated lower Manhattan, Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn and Queens. It had obliterated the New Jersey shore. Across more than a dozen states, from North Carolina to Maine and as far west as Michigan, it left more than 50 people dead and more than 8 million without power, and it likely caused more than $20 billion in damage. Sandy, a seemingly minor Category 1 hurricane, was a major catastrophe.

But for Cuomo, Sandy was the harbinger of something even worse. “We have a 100-year flood every two years now,” he said. “We need to make sure that if there is weather like this, we are more prepared and protected than we have been before.”

(MORE: Climate Change and Sandy: Why We Need to Prepare for a Warmer World)

We’ll need to be. Thanks to a combination of factors — more people and property in vulnerable coastal areas as well as climate change — we’re likely to experience disasters on the scale of Sandy more often in the future. That’s a future we’re not ready to handle, and judging from the near total absence of debate about global warming on the presidential campaign trail, it’s a future we’re not even thinking about. The good news is that there’s still time to prepare — if we heed the lessons of the storm.

Make sure you can see ahead.

When the infamous Long Island Express hurricane hit the Northeast in 1938, there was little warning and less preparation. As many as 800 people died, making it one of the deadlier storms in U.S. history. We’d never be so unprepared today, thanks to the more than two dozen U.S. weather and environmental satellites that peer down on the planet and help predict its weather.

But in September, NOAA’s GOES-East satellite — one of a pair of orbiting spacecraft that provide the backbone for advanced weather forecasting — suddenly winked out. Fortunately NOAA had a backup GOES satellite already parked in orbit, and forecasting capabilities were unaffected in the month leading up to Sandy’s formation. But that near miss was a scary reminder that the U.S. satellite fleet is in peril, threatened by budget cuts and government short-sightedness. “Gaps are opening in both our operational and research satellites,” says J. Marshall Shepherd, director of the atmospheric-sciences program at the University of Georgia and president-elect of the American Meteorological Society. For every $1 spent on space infrastructure, about $5 in disaster-damage costs are saved — proof that it makes economic sense to keep our eyes in the skies operating.

PHOTOS: Scenes of Sandy’s Wreckage and Recovery

Build a better grid.

It was the signature digital moment of Hurricane Sandy: people tweeting that they had lost power. Some of that loss was unavoidable. A storm the size of Sandy would stress even the most resilient electrical grid. But that’s not the grid we have in the U.S. We still depend on rickety 20th century technology to power a 21st century economy. Prolonged power outages are common even after storms far less powerful than Sandy; 3.2 million homes and businesses in the Northeast lost power, some for more than a week, after last Halloween’s freak snowstorm. Many homeowners in rural New Jersey and Connecticut — like those in developing nations like India — have installed backup generators for when, not if, the grid goes down. That’s smart, but weather-caused blackouts are more than an inconvenience. The Department of Energy estimates that sustained power interruptions (those lasting more than five minutes) cost the U.S. $26 billion annually.

Even budget-strapped utilities can prepare the grid for a major storm. Downed trees take out power lines, triggering cascading blackouts, so before Sandy, utility companies sensibly marshaled crews to trim wayward branches. That helped limit damage but could in no way contain it. Burying power lines makes even more sense, but it isn’t cheap, especially outside dense urban areas — one reason just 18% of U.S. distribution lines are underground. Better to integrate emerging smart-grid technology that would enable utilities to rapidly identify outages, isolate them before they spread and repair them. Modern life depends on the electrical grid. It should be more resilient than Twitter.

(MORE: Why New York City Could Get the Worst of Sandy’s Wrath)

We’re all in this together.

What really set Sandy apart was its immense size. It has been labeled a superstorm, with destructive winds and flooding extending more than 450 miles (725 km) from its center as it made landfall in Atlantic City, N.J. That meant the storm hit multiple states and tens of millions of people more or less simultaneously. Normally in a disaster, the hardest-hit states can borrow emergency personnel or utility crews from unscathed neighbors under mutual-aid agreements. Sandy’s size made that virtually impossible.

The widespread destruction underscores just how important a strong federal response is to a natural disaster. The Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) — which didn’t exactly distinguish itself in the response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 — declared a disaster in eight states and the District of Columbia before Sandy made landfall, allowing them to request assistance before the worst of the storm hit. FEMA isn’t perfect: a government audit released this year found problems in how the agency trains workers. But we need it. That’s why the prospect of FEMA’s losing nearly $900 million of its $14.3 billion budget if Congress fails to avert the looming fiscal cliff is worrisome.

PHOTOS: In the Eye of the Storm: Capturing Sandy’s Wrath

Stop ignoring the climate connection.

Climate scientists are divided on exactly what role global warming plays in making hurricanes like Sandy bigger and stronger. Researchers know that tropical storms derive their energy from warm waters. That’s one reason hurricanes are much more common in the hot tropics. The Atlantic Ocean is about 2°F (1°C) warmer on average than it was a century ago, in part because of man-made climate change. Warmer waters generally mean stronger storms, and indeed, scientists have agreed that climate change seems likely to lead to stronger and wetter storms, though possibly fewer of them.

Then again, Sandy was more than a hurricane. It was a hybrid storm, a tropical cyclone that, as it moved north, drew energy from the sharp differences in temperature and air pressure coming from an atmospheric blocking pattern in the North Atlantic. A tropical cyclone like Sandy usually veers off harmlessly into the Atlantic at this time of year, but that Arctic air pattern forced the storm to take a hard left directly into the heavily populated Northeast.

(MORE: Frankenstorm: Why Hurricane Sandy Will Be Historic)

That, say most climate scientists, was largely bad luck, though the record Arctic sea-ice melt this summer may have contributed to that northern blocking pattern. But the truth is, there’s no way of knowing for sure how much responsibility climate change bears for Sandy, at least not until researchers have had more time to study the storm.

Here’s one thing scientists do know, however: climate change has caused sea levels to rise, which made the storm surges and coastal flooding caused by Sandy all the more devastating. Overall sea levels have risen by 8 in. (20 cm), and the rate has been accelerating recently. That puts coastal cities like Washington and Miami at growing risk for major floods every time a storm strikes. New York City, which saw its subway system flooded and parts of its electricity grid submerged, has more than 580 miles (930 km) of coastline — all of it increasingly encroached by a rising sea. A 2012 paper in Nature projected that climate change could lead to floods that should occur only once a century happening every three to 20 years. It’s a visceral reminder that climate change is real and that it generally raises the risks of a range of natural disasters, from heat waves to droughts to storms. The science is clear: cutting carbon emissions over the long term is key to reducing the risk from extreme weather.

Prepare for the worst.

At the same time, climate change is being compounded by the human factor. As of 2003, 153 million Americans lived in coastal counties — an increase of 33 million since 1980 — and 3.7 million lived within a few feet of high tide. So when a storm like Sandy strikes — in this case during a full moon, with astronomical high tides — more people and property are in harm’s way. Besides cutting carbon emissions, we’ll need to adapt to the effects of climate change by building infrastructure that can withstand the devastating coastal storm surges that will become only more common as sea levels rise because of warming. Protection won’t be cheap. A 2004 study projected that installing sea barriers to block storm surges in New York City would cost nearly $10 billion. But that may be the price of admission to live in a hot and crowded world.

Hurricanes have always been a part of life on this planet, and they will continue to be. But we can control our preparation for and response to events like Sandy — for better or for worse. We can make sure that natural disasters don’t morph into man-made catastrophes like Katrina, but it requires farsighted leadership and investments made before the storm clouds roll in. “What is clear is that the storms that we’ve experienced in the last year or so, around this country and around the world, are much more severe than before,” New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the day after Sandy pulverized his city. “We’ll have to address those issues.” And that’s Sandy’s final lesson: if we don’t pay now, we’ll certainly pay later.

FOR MORE IMAGES OF SANDY FROM TIME PHOTOGRAPHERS, GO TO time.com/lightbox

The original version of this article misstated that the GOES-East satellite is run by NASA. It is actually run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)