I'm still boggled by the size of the storm, as well as its ferocity and horribly bad timing. It's just so huge!
By geographical span, from something I read just tonight, the largest North Atlantic tropical storm ever recorded.
And a potential rival to Katrina in dollar-amount property damage. But let's also remember this: Sandy has resulted in 50 deaths (at current count); Katrina resulted in something exceeding 2500 deaths, the exact number not determinable.
As another aside, people tend to get fixated on the Category-X number given to hurricanes. That is only part of the story involving these storms, and often not even the biggest part. The Category category is based solely on maximum sustained wind velocity. It doesn't take into account storm size, storm surge, rainfall, or any of the many local factors involving coastal geography, infrastructure, etc. Sandy struck the most densely populated portion of the U.S., much of which contains very expensive property. Therefore the property damage figures will be high, almost by definition. Katrina destroyed a lot of low-value property possessed by low-income people. The high-value property in New Orleans survived largely intact; I know, because I used to live there, and visited again back in 2009. The big stuff there survived pretty much intact. The poorer neighborhoods were devastated, and many rural areas in southeast Louisiana, where nobody even really knows how many people lived there, were just plain wiped out.
Which is not to be taken as any form of disrespect for the damage and problems now being faced by northeasterners from this colossal storm. Just to make a point that the two events aren't really directly comparable.
Other than both were caused by excessively hot seas in the tropics. But I'll let Senator Imhofe of Oklahoma apologize for that stuff.
caw