The Hurricane That Almost Drowned New York — Sandy 2012

Hurricane Sandy didn't just flood New York's streets. On the night of October 29, 2012, its record storm surge poured straight down into the subway and filled the tunnels beneath the city, and the worst of it had been predicted a full year in advance. This is the reconstruction of the night the water came for New York's subway: seven tunnels flooded under the East River, roughly 600 million gallons of seawater inside the busiest transit system in the country, and a warning that nobody acted on until it was almost too late. A Columbia scientist, Klaus Jacob, had modeled exactly which tunnels would drown, and how fast, before Sandy ever formed. We walk through the surge at the Battery, the substation flash that darkened everything below 39th Street, the South Ferry station filling to its ceiling, and the single last-minute decision that kept the disaster from being far worse. New disaster documentaries every week.