CBS News: 2011 may become most expensive weather year ever
CBS.com
2011 may become most expensive weather year ever
(CBS News)
Hurricane Irene will likely put even more of a financial burden on this nation.
In a year of weather extremes - historic snowfalls in the heartland and Northeast, catastrophic twisters in Tornado Alley, the worst flooding in the Midwest in 20 years, and triple-digit heat across the nation - the Northeast in now in the path of a potentially disastrous hurricane.
Irene has just battered Puerto Rico and the Hahamas on her way to the Eastern seaboard.
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By the end of June, severe weather had cost the U.S. $32 billion. With hurricane season kicking into high gear, this threatens to be the most expensive year on record for weather-related damage.
"A Category 3 in the North is easily the equivalent of a Category 4 in the South," Dr. Nicholas Coch, a professor at Queens College in New York City and an expert on northern hurricanes, told CBS' "The Early Show."
He cautions that one of the most dangerous places to be if a hurricane strikes is New York City.
"If a Category 2 hurricane hit New York City, it would depend on the time and the tide and various other things, but it would be weeks or months before the city got back to normal," Coch said.
That's because the city sits at the center of a dangerous right angle that exists where New Jersey meets Long Island.
If a hurricane hits, the storm will propel water right back into the city - and in that concrete jungle water has no place to go.
"About every 75 years the Northeast gets a major hurricane,' Coch said. "It doesn't take a major hurricane to do major damage."