Science: Hypothetical Catastrophe

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New Yorkers do not worry much about the weather. When a tropical hurricane struck Long Island and New England last September, killing some 600 people, the world's biggest city emerged practically unscathed. Many New Yorkers, safe in their towering apartment buildings, canyon-like streets and skyscrapers, did not even know a hurricane was passing. Last week, however, Meteorologist Charles Franklin Brooks, of Harvard's Blue Hill Observatory, pointed out that if a future hurricane happened to hit Manhattan just wrong, not all the brick and asphalt in the city could prevent a terrible disaster.

Speaking at an American Association for the Advancement of Science convention in Milwaukee. Dr. Brooks recalled that, when a hurricane hit Manhattan in 1821, the tide in the Hudson River rose 13 feet in an hour. If another such storm should happen to strike during a high spring tide and with the Hudson in flood, seawater would surge over lower Manhattan, engulfing the Battery, part of the financial district; water would pour down the subway entrances and fill the tubes, trapping passengers like flies; and the automobile traffic tunnels under the Hudson would fill up from end to end with solid cylinders of water.