How Ocean City Survived a Hurricane's Direct Hit

Hurricane season is coming to a close, but emergency planners have been busy this fall -- studying the response to Hurricane Irene and giving thanks for some very lucky timing.

If Ocean City were the pin in a really long par-5, Atlantic Ocean hurricanes are like the shots of a bad golfer, most often slicing right and landing in the middle of the ocean, sometimes hooking left into woods of the southern Atlantic states and only on extremely rare occasions making a respectable run up the fairway.

So when hurricane forecasters took note of the long, strong and unswerving drive of Hurricane Irene in late August, the local emergency management community woke up in a hurry.

Three days away, Irene was a Category 3 storm with sustained winds topping 111 mph. Forecasts called for 15 inches of rain and a record storm surge. Irene was on a path that would take it directly over Ocean City on a summer weekend.

More than 100,000 people -- a mix of vacationers and residents -- occupied the island during that final week of August. Millions more were in the path of the storm along the New Jersey coastline. Emergency management systems were about to be tested.

The call for a mandatory evacuation was issued on Thursday, Aug. 25, and public safety employees, emergency planners and volunteers went to work executing the first evacuation since Hurricane Gloria in 1985.

A little more than a month later, Ocean City's Community Emergency Response Team (CERT), a group of volunteers trained to assist in large-scale emergencies, met with emergency management officials and retired National Weather Service meteorologist Jim Eberwine to assess the evacuation.

The meeting had two overriding themes: 1) Irene provided a chance to prove that a massive evacuation could succeed, and 2) Ocean City was very lucky that the storm wasn't worse.

In a presentation to the CERT volunteers, Eberwine said a few small changes in the course of the storm could have led to catastrophic results. While Irene passed dangerously close to Ocean City on Aug. 28, just to the east on its way to making landfall about 20 miles to the north, center of the hurricane passed a few hours before high tide (8:05 a.m. at the Ninth Street Bridge). By high tide, the winds had shifted out of the northwest, pushing water from the back bays out to sea.

Had Irene moved just slightly faster or slower up the coast, Ocean City could have seen much more substantial flooding, Eberwine said.

At the same time Ocean City benefited from good timing, the storm was slowly falling apart. While technically still a Category 1 storm (74 to 95 mph winds), Ocean City never saw hurricane-force winds. The strongest winds were at higher altitudes -- the highest recorded gusts of wind on instruments at 59th Street were in the 50 to 59 mph range.

"We didn't take a Category 1 on the chin by any means," Ocean City's Emergency Management Director Frank Donato told the CERT volunteers. But he said the storm provided a perfect test run.

"We have to cherish this experience," Donato said.

With that, the group set to work analyzing the details of a massive logistical operation -- the tasks of notifying, transporting and sheltering refugees.

One other piece of "luck" was an earthquake felt in southern New Jersey the same week that Hurricane Irene arrived. Donato said dispatchers watched the 911 switchboard lighting up with a heavy volume of non-emergency calls.

The experience allowed the city to publicize a city telephone number to answer hurricane and evacuation questions, leaving the 911 system free for emergency calls. It was a small detail that probably would not have been anticipated without a real-life scenario.

And that's what Hurricane Irene did for Ocean City's emergency planners -- gave them a chance to poke some holes in plans that for so long went untested. But overall, they identified few major gaps.

"You did a fabulous job for us," Donato told a room full of CERT volunteers.

And Ocean City may now be a little more prepared for another major storm when the New Jersey coastline may be a little less lucky.