A storm that arrived at the worst possible hour

Sandy came ashore in New Jersey within a couple of hours of high water, on the night of a full moon, and put the sea over Lower Manhattan.

The surge at the Battery reached about 4.3 metres above the low-water mark, the highest in the record, and the full moon accounts for something like a foot of that. A storm this size arriving at low water on a neap tide would have been a bad night; arriving here, it flooded seven subway tunnels.