ONLY a TEST! – HURRICANE SANDY Used As Emergency Exercize in 1997
Eerie Similarities of a Hurricane “SANDY” Test Exercize in New York in October, 1997
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Westchester County Communications Officer Sandy Fried, an Amateur Radio operator and ODES staff member, had recently attended a training seminar at the National Hurricane Center in Miami. Part of the training was a simulation using data from the Hurricane of 1938 that caused major losses on Long Island and in Westchester. The texts of the simulated bulletins, forecasts, discussions and strike probabilities along with the hurricane’s track were sent home with the seminar attendees. We named the simulated hurricane after Sandy, who incidentally was nine years old during the real Hurricane of 1938.
These texts were used as the drill stimulus. They were time-shifted to simulate land-fall around 6pm on Saturday, October 4th. Working backward from this time, we used these texts to generate and automatically update a World Wide Web status page (http://www.weca.org/SET) and send email to the Westchester ARES/RACES email reflector and fax to the County Emergency Operations center at the times that the National Weather Service would normally have sent them.
Figure 4: Web Page at 5 a.m. October 3, 1997
Figure 5: Simulated Hurricane Sandy Track at 2 p.m. October 4, 1997
Figure 6: Simulated Hurricane Sandy Bulletin at 5 a.m. October 4, 1997
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