NOVA - Official Website Inside the Megastorm. Inside the Megastorm. PBS Airdate: November 1. NARRATOR: Anatomy of a catastrophe.. BROAD CHANNEL FIRE DEPARTMENT TRUCK LOUDSPEAKER: The mayor of the city of NY has ordered a mandatory evacuation. NARRATOR: …superstorm Sandy slams the northeast..

Man's voice: …huge storm surge. Oh, my gosh. MARTY INGRAM (Breezy Point Volunteer Fire Department): And the water never stopped coming. ARIEL FAHY (Breezy Point Resident): It came down and it just washed everything away. NARRATOR: …dozens dead, tens of thousands homeless, entire communities obliterated. ARIEL FAHY: The entire sky was just lit up. GUY FERRARO (Union Beach, New Jersey Resident): …like a bomb went off.

NARRATOR: Are lethal storms becoming more frequent, more destructive, even more deadly? ALEXANDER "SANDY" MACDONALD (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Earth System Research Laboratory): It really was a combination of the worst that nature delivers in storms. NARRATOR: Stormchasers take you inside the eye of Hurricane Sandy, for a blow- by- blow account of an epic natural disaster. JEFF WEBER (University Corporation for Atmospheric Research): So it came in right at high tide, during a full moon, record storm surge, with incredible winds. NARRATOR: How vulnerable are the most populated cities? JOHN MIKSAD (Consolidated Edison Company of New York): So there are parts of Manhattan that were being impacted 2.

NARRATOR: Can we engineer our way to safety, if Sandy is a sign of things to come? Inside the Megastorm, a special presentation, right now, on NOVA.

In the warm waters of the Caribbean, a tropical storm is forming, one that is about to write its way into the history books. It's the 1. 8th storm of the Atlantic season. The National Weather Service assigns a name from near the bottom of this year's predetermined list, an innocent- sounding label for what will soon become, against all odds, a devastating megastorm: Sandy. It's October 2. 2, 2. MATT LAUER (Today/Film Clip): Let's start then with the latest from Al and this tropical storm Sandy. Al, good morning.

AL ROKER (Today/Film Clip): That's right. All eyes right now in the Caribbean, Matt. Sandy is 1. 20 miles, 1.

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Kingston, Jamaica, 7. NARRATOR: Tropical storms are a fact of life in the Caribbean, but only about half strengthen into hurricanes. JEFF WEBER: Hurricanes are systems that are born in the tropics, and they need to have 2.

Celsius, approximately 8. Fahrenheit, water to get the systems going. They actually act as a heat engine. They take the warm water, and it rises up as water vapor.

And as that water vapor condenses, it releases latent heat into the atmosphere, and that's where the wind energy is coming from. NARRATOR: Only one in 2. Atlantic hurricanes ever strikes the east coast.

Odds are that Sandy will do what virtually all of these hurricanes do, head into the Gulf of Mexico, like Katrina, or blow into the cold Atlantic and fade harmlessly away. Masterchef Us Junior Season 4 Episode 7 on this page. But then, a startling prediction from 4,0. A day even before Sandy has been named, the supercomputers at a European weather center predict that she will not follow the normal course. TIM HEWSON (European Centre for Medium- Range Weather Forecasts): Conventional wisdom said that Sandy would move towards the north, 'cause it was in the Caribbean, and then towards the northeast, and then it would die and not affect land.

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But there were suggestions that that the hurricane might not behave in a normal way and might actually end up over the northeast of the U. S. NARRATOR: Worse than that, the model goes on to predict that once Sandy reaches the northeast, it will make a sudden, improbable left turn, sending it straight into the heart of the Jersey shore and New York City. SANDY MACDONALD: When the European Centre model came out, eight days before, I think the reaction was, "This is a really dangerous possibility, but it's so far in advance, we're going to just have to watch this."NARRATOR: Now, late in October, with the hurricane season drawing to a close, New Yorkers are preparing Halloween parties, not thinking about a storm. But that's about to change, because the storm with the innocent name is about to ring their doorbell, dressed as a monster. A thousand miles to the south, Sandy is becoming a storm to be reckoned with. Since her birth, as a tropical depression, she has steadily gathered energy, fed by the warm tropical waters. On October 2. 5th, she is officially upgraded to a Category 2 hurricane, with sustained wind speeds of more than 1.

She has already brought devastating winds and fierce rains to Haiti and Jamaica, and now heads north to Cuba and beyond. At this point, computer models at N. O. A. A., the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, are still showing several possible paths. ADAM SOBEL (Columbia University): The American model, like all these models, was run in an ensemble mode, where the models run many times each day. And as late as Wednesday or Thursday, the 2.

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American model had some tracks coming in and making landfall, but other tracks going out to sea. And by about Thursday or Friday, the American model started to agree more with the European models. And we became quite confident that Sandy would make the left turn and come into the mid- Atlantic region. NARRATOR: Now, all the models are converging, forecasting that Sandy will swing sharply around from its northeast track and crash into New York and New Jersey and much of the east coast. Parts of the coastlines of New York and New Jersey are only a few feet above sea level. Strong winds could push the ocean right onto the land, causing extensive flooding.

ADAM SOBEL: And it was quite clear that there was a possibility of a very high storm surge, and that it could be a catastrophic event. NARRATOR: The city's emergency services, police, fire and hospitals, begin to prepare for the worst. SALVATORE CASSANO (New York City Fire Commissioner): We started on the Thursday before the storm hit. People were checking their equipment, checking their pumps, making sure our boats were in order, all the prep you would do for a storm. NARRATOR: But despite all the warnings, there remain plenty of doubters.

MICHAEL CLARKE (Staten Island Resident): We thought they were just amping it more than what it was, to cover themselves, basically. LINDA CLARKE (Staten Island Resident): We said, "Oh, yeah, here comes another storm."NARRATOR: Sandy heads north out of the Caribbean, leaving more than 7.

It is a massive system, sending tropical- storm- force winds across an area nearly 6. Now, the first of many unusual meteorological conditions begin to affect the storm's path. JEFF WEBER: There's a high- pressure system that kind of lives over Bermuda.

It's called the "Bermuda high." And, generally speaking, Atlantic systems will kind of come along the bottom side of that high and then kind of curve around it and move its way back out into the eastern Atlantic. NARRATOR: But this time, there's no Bermudan high to steer Sandy away from land, so the storm heads to the northeast, parallel to the eastern seaboard. Though most of the ocean gets colder, Sandy feeds off a ribbon of warm water that keeps it alive: the Gulf Stream, a circulating current that pumps warm water from the Gulf of Mexico up and across the Atlantic. And right now, the surface waters are even warmer than usual. RADLEY HORTON (Center for Climate Systems Research): Parts of the North Atlantic were five degrees warmer than normal.