2012 is a year I will never forget. Just for some background, while I currently live in DC, I spent the majority of my childhood up until the age of 15, in central New Jersey, between Princeton and New Brunswick. While I did not live on the coast, hurricanes were always a part of our daily lives, every fall we would wait and see if school would be closed for three random days in September or October. I even remember 2011 when Hurricane Irene made landfall, it was a lot of rain, wind, and trees falling over, but nothing much more than that, at least where I lived. That is not to say Irene caused significant damage, it did, and it ended up being responsible for the deaths of two people. However, Irene is always the precursor, the precursor to one of the most seminal events in the lives of everyone who lived through it; Superstorm Sandy. If you don’t know what Superstorm Sandy is, it is one of the largest Atlantic storms on record. It was just about 900 miles across, which is astronomical for hurricanes(for reference, Katrina was only 400 miles across). It caused $50 billion in damage across the mid-Atlantic region and is the second costliest Atlantic storm in the US of all time. Storm surge from this storm was anywhere from two to possibly more than fifteen feet. The highest confirmed was 13.3 feet at Sandy Hook, but technically the instrument stopped working at that point, indicating that the storm surge was probably higher than that, making it the highest storm surge ever recorded in New Jersey. Now my personal experience with it, like most hurricanes, I was expecting maybe a day off or two from school, needing to sleep in the living room near the fireplace when the power went out, things like that. Little did I know that instead of maybe two days out of school it would instead be two weeks because the school did not have power, now at least a week of that is because of Sandy, but a truck did hit a power pole during the cleanup and recovery causing power not to be restored until a week after that, we missed so much school that they shortened our spring break, which for a private school never happens. At home though, we were without power for about a week, we had a gas generator with three plugs, one for the fridge, one for my mom, because she still needed to work, and one to share between me, my brother, my dad, and my cousin, who at the time was a student at rutgers university, but rode out the storm with us. We were also lucky for two reasons, our water is connected to a city system meaning we did have running water throughout the entire event, an I think we also had a working stove because it was gas and not electric. But there were people who were without even these services. It was about three days of wind, rain, and craziness until on the fourth day, it stopped. It was a clear blue sky, and we could go outside; it was a little creepy. We found out why, within 12 hours, the storm was back, what had happened was that the eye had passed directly over our house. The eye of a hurricane is legitimately not stormy, it's the eye walls that are always the worst. It was then another couple days of shelter in place as the storm continued unabated. And then it moved on, but that is not the end of the story, because what it left in addition to the flooding and destruction was something unexpected for a storm like a hurricane: snow.

The reason why we got snow is the same reason why we don’t call it Hurricane Sandy, it was never actually a hurricane when it made landfall, instead it is described as a post-tropical cyclone. What had happened is that at some point while the storm was still off shore, it had combined with a Nor’easter, a storm is caused when a low pressure system moving up the east coast comes into contact with cold, dry air coming down from Canada, these storms do tend to leave a lot of snow, especially in New England and the Mid Atlantic. It was this combined storm that had hit New Jersey. And by the way, something like that combination has only happened one other time on record in the Atlantic to my knowledge. Superstorm Sandy was indeed an experience, one that I will not soon forget.

Work Cited

Chen, K., Li, X., Weaver, M. M., Christiansen, S. A., Horton, A. L., & Mann, M. E. (2025). The intensification of the strongest nor’easters. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(29), e2510029122. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2510029122

Statistics Show Hurricane Sandy’s Extraordinary Intensity | Climate Central. (n.d.). Retrieved September 16, 2025, from https://www.climatecentral.org/news/statistics-show-just-how-intense-hurricane-sandy-was-15196