[lonestar]

I'm talking about the houses on the Jersey shore...big old houses.

There are "regular" houses on Gaveston Island (Galveston has a seawall that doesn't work in a hurricane) but the beach communities are mostly houses on stilts and the new regulations are even higher stilts.

[muawiyah]

There are parts of the Jersey shore that are infrequently hit ~this time was a bit abnormal. Remember, most of our hurricanes in this area come up from the South, so they go inland at Cape Hattaras, or they simply move off East and hit New England or Canada.

This one started due South at Jamaica and went straight North which took it just East of Cape Hattaras but close enough to the shoreline to be steered by a divot in the jet stream right into Jersey and New York.

Last storm I recall running into Delaware Bay managed to cut a channel in the barrier island where Ocean City MD is located. The next big storm up to hit MD filled in that channel on the way in and opened up the old one that'd been filled in. Stuff happens.

We end up not having many fast moving high CAT storms because the Continental shelf around here is fairly broad ~ so the storms are running over shallow water. That's why they slow down and lose energy approaching New Orleans too. Appalachacola, though, gets 'em full force.

[muawiyah]

http://maps.csc.noaa.gov/hurricanes/# lots of fun to play with. To show you how rare hurricane hits on NJ are they’ve had about 10 since records started and Indiana has had about 16. Jersey just about never gets hit by a storm that starts in the Gulf!