Superstorm Sandy Anniversary: Remembering Hurricane Sandy Two Years Later

On this day two years ago, Superstorm Sandy made an unusual left turn and slammed head first into the population dense East Coast, changing history forever.

People often forget the beginning. Sandy was born on Oct. 22, 2012, in the Caribbean, only six hours after being named as Tropical Depression 18. In two days Sandy was a hurricane, weaving through the Caribbean, dealing a blow to Jamaica before scraping Haiti and making landfall on Cuba as a Category 3 hurricane.

Sandy's toll on the Caribbean read like a twisted box score: Jamaica: $100 million in damage, 1 dead; Cuba: more than 171,000 home damaged, more than 16,000 of them destroyed, 11 dead; Haiti: more than 27,000 homes damaged or destroyed, 54 dead; Bahamas: $300 million in damage, 2 dead; Dominican Republic: more than 20,000 people displaced, 3 dead.

Next, Sandy skirted up the southern East Coast, past Florida, North Carolina and Virginia. And even though it had weakened by this, the storm still managed to cause flooding, inundating low lying areas like North Carolina's Outer Banks.

But the worst for the U.S. would come when Sandy swerved west, dealing a left haymaker square on the jaw of the Mid-Atlantic, particularly New Jersey and New York.

Before Sandy made landfall on the U.S. it was massive. As the animation above shows, before Sandy even made landfall, tropical storm force winds extended outward in diameter some 943 miles from southwest to northeast, the biggest circulation of any tropical system on record.  

The sheer size of the storm played an important role in the devastation Sandy dealt to the East Coast. Among the many factor that influence storm surge, size matters, because as the National Hurricane Center notes, bigger storms impact a greater area of the ocean over a longer period of time than smaller storms, thereby enabling a large storm to push more ocean water ashore.

As a result, coastal areas in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut experienced massive storm surge. Kings Point, New York, took on 12.65 feet of storm surge alone. Total water levels at Battery Park, on the southern tip of Manhattan, rose to nearly 14 feet.

The same was true for New Jersey, where Sandy made landfall. In casino-rich Atlantic City, New Jersey, nearly 9 feet of water swept ashore, damaging a section of the boardwalk and washing away roads and portions of homes in the area.

Seaside Heights, New Jersey, along with its iconic boardwalk and amusement rides, also fell victim to Sandy's storm surge, slipping into the sea. An indelible image emerged from the scene: The skeleton of The Star Jet rollercoaster jutting out of the Atlantic Ocean, its tracks taking on waves.

Tens of millions of dollars in damage were dealt to New Jersey's boardwalks alone. And only recently, The Wall Street Journal reports, did all repairs conclude, returning Seaside Heights, Ocean Grove and Long Branch's stretches of boardwalk back to normal again.

Water cut through the barrier island of Mantoloking, New Jersey, (shown above) dramatically eroding the sand and cutting off homes from inland New Jersey. The same devastating scene played out along more than 100 miles of New Jersey coastline, particularly in Ocean and Monmouth counties. By the time Sandy had left New Jersey, some 346,000 homes were damaged or destroyed in the state, The New York Times reports.

These are just a couple of the thousands of storylines that unfolded in late October two years ago. Because of the size and scope of the Superstorm Sandy it's nearly impossible to tell them all.

But all told, Sandy claimed more than 186 lives; nearly half of all the people killed in the U.S. drowned in Sandy's intense storm-surge related flooding. And the storm was the second costliest hurricane in U.S. history, racking up an estimated $65 billion in total damage along the East Coast, from Maine to North Carolina.

Sandy can never be forgotten after altering the lives of so many people in such a dramatic fashion. And especially not now, just two years on.

For more of weather.com's extensive coverage of Superstorm Sandy, checkout some of the links below.

• PHOTOS: Superstorm Sandy Then and Now
• Before/After Sandy: Aerial Images of Sandy's Damage
• 5 Things We'll Never Get Back After Sandy