NOAA’s GOES-13 satellite captured this visible image of Hurricane Sandy battering the U.S. East Coast Monday morning. Sandy’s center was about 310 miles south-southeast of New York City. Tropical Storm force winds are about 1,000 miles in diameter. Courtesy NASA GOES Project
When the MSU women’s golf team left for the Landfall Tradition tournament in Wilmington, N.C., on Wednesday, the weather was beautiful — the sun was shining and conditions were ideal for golfing.
But Friday night, conditions took a turn for the worse and head coach Stacy Slobodnik-Stoll woke up to a text message Sunday morning saying because of 3 inches of rain and high winds from Hurricane Sandy, the greens were unplayable, and the remaining rounds of the tournament were canceled.
“We took the team out to the beach (Sunday) morning after breakfast; the ocean had come all the way up to the stairs to the access to the beach,” Slobodnik-Stoll said. “There were easily some 8 foot-to-10 foot waves. We were watching them crash … Everyone was joking we survived Hurricane Sandy.”
Although the brunt of Hurricane Sandy’s effects will be felt in coastal cities, the massive storm will have a radius as far out as the Midwest with a wind advisory in effect and sporadic power outages predicted for the East Lansing area Monday evening through Tuesday night.
National Weather Service meteorologist Mark Sekelsky said the Category 1 storm is comparable to the notorious “Perfect Storm” of 1991 when homes, sea walls and boats completely were destroyed, according to a report done by the National Climatic Data Center.
Because Hurricane Sandy is the result of a traditional hurricane and cold front merging, it is considered unique and is predicted to cause extreme winds, rain and even feet of snow for some regions Sekelsky said.
This, combined with its massive size — spanning from Boston to Chicago — Sekelsky said, is a recipe for destruction.
“In terms of a Category 1, the storm will produce more damage than a typical Category 1 because it’s so spread out,” Sekelsky said. “It’s very large in terms of area … It’s rather unusual for Michigan to feel the impacts of an East Coast tropical cyclone, just gives you an idea of how big this storm is.”
Many families, such as international relations and Russian sophomore Kory Miller’s family in Pittstown, N.J., are boarding up their homes and preparing for what could be a dangerous storm.
Currently, gas stations in many East Coast cities are packed and grocery stores are selling out of survival items, such as bottled water and flashlights, in preparation for Sandy, MSU alumni living on the East Coast said.
“There’s not a ton I can do but stock up on a lot of water and nonperishable food; we’re hoping for the best,” MSU alumnus Kaitlin Aprill, who is a seventh-grade teacher in Washington, D.C., said. “People I’ve talked to are anxious, not nervous or scared for their safety, but people want to know what’s going to happen.”
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