It was an unpleasant Halloween surprise up and down the East Coast last Monday as massive Hurricane Sandy became the most powerful storm to affect New York in the city’s 390-year history. Sandy made landfall near Atlantic City, New Jersey, and pushed a nine-foot storm surge into New York Harbor, flooding large parts of the city. Sandy was truly a record-breaking storm, with the largest wind area ever recorded in an Atlantic tropical cyclone; at landfall, the storm was bringing 40-mile-per-hour sustained winds to an area of coastline stretching from Wilmington, North Carolina to southern Maine, a diameter of almost 1000 miles and causing power outages as far apart as South Carolina and Ontario, Canada. This historic storm left 160 dead as it traveled from the central Caribbean to the Jersey shore, and caused untold billions of dollars in damage.