New York City’s Sandy Disaster: A Meteorological 9/11?
by Michael Daly Oct 30, 2012 2:00 AM EDT

The mysterious whistling sound¹ on high turned eerie when the source proved to be the hurricane’s winds gusting through the exposed steel of the nearly complete Freedom Tower at ground zero.

And with that noise came a conscious thought that had until then been a jangling edginess² whose own source was not immediately clear. The thought was this: could it possibly be that 10/29 proves to be in any sense the meteorological equivalent of 9/11? Would disaster strike us again?

The anxiety increased as the storm drew closer and the city approached the hour that Mayor Michael Bloomberg warned would be the worst.

An added feeling of being trapped came as the closures were extended from the subway to the bridges and tunnels, and people were advised to stay inside. Where we had once stood spellbound by the sight of the burning towers, we now listened to the unholy roar of the wind. Windows and doors rattled, and sirens wailed in the gathering night.

Only this time the sirens were not converging toward one place. They were going in all directions, and to hear them was to imagine dire emergencies³ of every kind, everywhere. If 9/11 was about what we saw, then 10/29 was about what we heard. And even when we cannot fully believe what our eyes behold, they are far better than our ears at gauging the true magnitude of a threat.

Hearing can tell us that something is getting closer and that it is awesomely big and getting bigger, but it
cannot tell us exactly how frightened we should be.

Is that wind just noise, or could it tear off the roof, or maybe send something crashing through the window, or drive the water of the harbor up over the floodwalls? Was that last gust⁴ as loud as it could get? What was that loud bang⁵? That crash? Is that why yet another siren has begun to wail? Are those two other sirens going there also? No, wait, they’re going the other way. Something else must have happened. But what? All that was certain was that New York’s firefighters and cops and paramedics would do everything they could to help whoever needed them.

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