Whimbrel with satellite transmitter. photo by Barry TruittHurricane Irene punished more than the people of the Atlantic coast over the last few days. Brian Watts and Fletcher Smith of the Center for Conservation Biology, at the College of William and Mary, released a report on a whimbrel flying into Irene, while it was a Category 3 storm, and against all odds made it to it’s wintering area in South America. This bird was lucky, others with Brian’s satellite transmitters weren’t so lucky, the transmitters suddenly blinking out, the bird carrying it presumably lost. I have blogged here about red knots with geolocators forced to fly more than 1,000 km off-course to avoid tropical storms. With geolocators, however, we never really know if the birds are doomed or make it through the storm because we must recapture the bird to retrieve the information.
For a few nights, we felt like these birds. Irene threatened our home near the Delaware Bay as well. Fortunately, the storm drifted farther out to sea and weakened in strength by the time it reached the mouth of Delaware Bay, so we were spared its destructive influence. But we spent a few nights worrying about what it would do to us. While she was wreaking havoc on the coast of North Carolina, my wife Mandy and I were unable to sleep fretting over minute variations in the projected track — at midnight, it was to come right up the Cape May peninsula, at three AM it was farther out to sea missing most of the Atlantic Coast, at 6AM it was back to threatening Atlantic City.
These minor variations were major for us. Last April the Sustainable Jersey Committee in our small town of Greenwich helped the State of NJ and NOAA complete a modeling project that projected the influence of sea level rise and hurricane storm surge along the Cohansey River and a portion of the Delaware Bay. It modeled the high tide line at .5 , 1.0 and 1.5 m of sea level rise. The results were sobering 
NOAA projection of storm surge in Greenwich, NJ along the Cohansey River which flows into the Delaware Bay. This map is from a report by NOAA and NJ DEP – see link in blog
More sobering was the storm surge projection for Category 1 or 2 hurricanes in the Delaware Bay (Irene was first predicted to be Category 2 — see Map 5). Sea level rise and storm surge could reasonably be confused, but they are very different. Projected sea level rise is the decades-long, slow increase of the high tide line as the oceans rise from melting polar ice and other impacts of climate change. Storm surge is the rush of water pushed by an angry hurricane as it plows through the ocean or inland bays. The storm surge is what often kills people in hurricanes.
As the above map shows the storm surge of even a category two hurricane would inundate our small town of Greenwich (in the box). In those dark hours of the night before Irene arrived, we heard the surge was predicted to be 4 to 8 ft. We worried what would happen to our small town, to our home. We didn’t know what would happen to us, and this was the greatest lesson of the experience.
The fact is, nobody really knew because the actual path of a hurricane can change wildly as it approaches land. But for us on the Delaware Bay it was worse because we were basically left on their own. While the Weather Channel, the state web sites, the Governor of NJ and DE worked hard to respond to the emergencies the storm creates, all of the attention focused on the Atlantic Coast. As hard as I searched, I found no guidance on what we should do and what would happen to us and other people living along the Delaware Bay.
Fretting in the dead of night, uncertain of what would happen, was an all-to-common experience for the people facing Irene. The storm caused record damage and many people’s lives will be permanently upended. But it’s worth a second to use this experience to understand what shorebirds feel as they fly into the teeth of a storm. Unlike us, they don’t have the benefit of Doppler radar and meteorological predictions. Imagine flying in the dead of night over an angry sea, hundreds of miles from land, hoping against hope that you will reach your destination thousands of miles to the south. Hurricane force winds block your way, slowing your speed to almost nothing as you furiously pump your wings — reserves all but lost and there is no help, no hope. For some, it may be a silent death at sea, for others it means flying 1,000 km around the storm (with the hope you have enough energy to make it), or turning back.
In the end, it worked out for most of us. Typically, New Yorkers complained about the inconvenience, but for the rest of us — animal and human — one can only say “there but for the grace of God go I”
photo by L Niles
