an encyclopedia of a world that didn't happen
The Dry October
In late October 2012, a ridge of high pressure over the North Atlantic held firm two days longer than it did in the known record, pushing the storm that would have become Hurricane Sandy on a track that passed east of Nova Scotia and out to sea rather than curving inland over New Jersey. The mid-Atlantic and Northeast United States experienced only rain and gusting wind from the system's outer bands. The absence of the flood, the fires, and the eleven-figure damage bill it would otherwise have caused altered the subsequent decade of American coastal policy, utility regulation, and climate politics.
Diverged 2012 · “Hurricane Sandy tracks north of the continental United States, sparing the eastern seaboard.”
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Where this world left ours
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TodayNew York and New Jersey are not popularly understood as hurricane-vulnerable coastlines; municipal resilience planning instead centers on winter nor'easters and heat, and federal coastal-barrier funding went disproportionately to Louisiana and Florida instead. The absence of a named catastrophic Northeast storm in the record is frequently cited, by both climate advocates and skeptics, in arguments over whether the region is "due" for one, a debate still unresolved in the 2020s.
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