Hurricane Sandy

So, unless you have been living under a rock in the last few weeks you most likely have heard of Hurricane Sandy. Over the last week or so, Sandy has been speeding towards the U.S. coast and causing damage in the Caribbean. What has been in many news articles recently is how this storm is going to affect the up-and-coming presidential election between Romney and Obama. If the outcome of the election was hard enough to predict before the storm made landfall along the New Jersey coastline, it seems that it may have played quite the role in the outcome. First of all, let us consider several factors that are making Hurricane Sandy as bad as it is right now. First, the fact that Sandy avoided most of the southern coastline and moved up the eastern coast then suddenly cut it. Also, it collided with a cold front along the Appalachian Mountains which caused a significant amount of snowfall along the east coast and it's effects were reported to reach all the way into southern Canada. There is no debate that the storm was quite devastating to the east coast (estimates ranging around $60 billion and a loss of over 100 lives; http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/11/hurricane-sandy-the-aftermath/100397/). However, one could ask, how could it have been worse? It could have move inland at a much faster rate. There is no doubt that the coastline got the worst of the storm (winds up to 96 mph and 26 inches of snow; http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/770347_Hurricane-Sandy-was-nasty--but-it-could-have-been-worse-in-Lancaster-County.html), but the inland got off pretty easy. The outcome was terrible and any time there is any life lost is horrible, but we are truly blessed to have gotten off so easy, per se. We are lucky to live in a country with broad mass-communication where millions of people got the information in good time and had time to prepare or evacuate. We are also blessed to have organizations such as the Red Cross that has so many volunteers willing to help out those in need.