Reply #2: What if we have a hurricane that bounces up the length of the East Coast? [View All]

[hedgehog]

We've all heard a lot about storm surge, but hurricanes tracking north can cause major flooding in multiple states even if they degenerate into a tropical depression. I was amazed to read earlier this year about a hurricane Hazel in 1954 which actually caused major flooding and 81 deaths in Toronto, Canada! People living in the mountains in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York tend to be living at the bottom of narrow valleys. When the water rises, it rises fast and there is no where to go. Kim Stanley Robinson's book Forty Signs of Rain describes a scenario in which a hurricane sits off the Maryland coast and D.C. floods as it is caught between torrential rain up stream and storm surge on the Chesapeake.