In the meeting on Wednesday (9/14) I asked a question about evacuating Long Island.  While I used the obvious problems of the New Orleans evacuation during Katrina as an example of a poor evac. plan, no one the expert panel (reps from DHS, NYS Homeland Security, both country’s OEMs and large government contractors) had an answer to how 2.3 million people would get off of LI in the event of a catastrophic terrorist attack involving CBRN weapons.

Essentially, by not answering the real question, or more specifically, by answering that "even" in the event of a Cat 4/5 hurricane, there wouldn’t be the kind of flooding that we saw in New Orleans, the panel was telling us that in the event of a CBRN attack and easterly winds, what we were to do was bend over and place our heads between our legs and "kiss it" goodbye! The 2.3 million people out here will be collateral damage, casualties of war…because as was proven back in the days leading up the closing of the Shoreham Nuclear facility, there is not way to evacuate Long Island (so ask yourself…what is the evacuation plan for your home town or region???). FWIW, everyone sitting near me, and those who knows me all later commented how ridiculously transparent the non-answer was, and how the panel has avoided answering the question.

But let’s examine the New Orleans parallel question for Long Island:

What if a massive hurricane hit LI?
Seaside areas safeguard themselves against possibility of a major storm, keeping in mind the aftermath of severe hurricane that hit LI in 1938
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-lihurr184431865sep18,0,3372329.story?coll=ny-top-headlines
Mushrooming population and increasing development on Long Island’s South Shore could make a hurricane the magnitude of the 1938 storm even costlier in lives and property today.

Though beach fortification projects have long been undertaken to protect such communities as West Hampton Dunes, Quogue and Westhampton Beach - and the mainland fronted by those seaside villages - they probably couldn’t withstand the storm surge brought on by another Category 3 hurricane, experts say.

"The damage would be similar to what we’ve seen in coastal Mississippi, in beachfront cities like Gulfport, Biloxi and Pass Christian" after Hurricane Katrina, said Mike Wyllie, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton. "A 15-foot wall of water could move inland and pretty much do extensive damage to everything in its way."

Though hurricanes of the intensity of Katrina are all but unheard of in the cooler Atlantic waters around Long Island, lesser storms still pose a significant threat, the experts say.

"In 1938, there wasn’t that much development along the South Shore of Long Island," Wyllie said. "The same storm today would be dramatically different. A Category 3 storm would do Category 4-type damage."

Floodwater could destroy communities as far north as Sunrise Highway along the South Shore, Wyllie said...

…"The barrier island system on the South Shore is our levee system," said Aram Terchunian, the West Hampton Dunes commissioner of wildlife protection. "Either we take care of it, or we’re going to be pulling bodies out of the bays."

[BTW, what they're talking about is not a levee system, but a barrier island system that is subject to the natural and yearly changes of erosion and sometimes build-up of sand.  Mother Nature controls that, even if Man and the Army Corps of Engineers intercedes.]

If you wish to see something very scary (at least to anyone living on the south shore of Long Island) check out this website and play around with the animated maps that show the encroachment of the ocean onto the land area…

http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/38hurricane/storm_surge_maps.html

And yup!  a Cat. 3 would flood way north of where I live.

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