Sep 2, 2010 13:57 GMT  ·  By

Researchers reveal that hurricane Earl would cause extensive damage and victims in New York City, if it were to hit the city.

They began worrying about such questions when weather services announced that the large tropical storm will move up the US East Coast before going further into the Atlantic and dissipating,.

This means that Earl would pass within a small distance of New York, or perhaps even over it. Though that is improbable, experts decided to take a closer look at the city's defenses.

The goal was to determine how well prepared the area is for evacuation in case of a major natural disaster. Such caution makes sense when considering the fact that 8 million people live there.

While only a handful of large storms struck the area in the past decades, geological data show that such events took place frequently in prehistory.

The National Hurricane Center (NHC) shows that Earl is currently taking on an arched path, which will allow it to swing by New York. It will affect the city with rain and wind, but experts don't expect the massive storm to actually hit the people here directly.

When peering over the evacuation plans for the area, the harsh realities became immediately obvious – there is no way to evacuate all the people in time.

Authorities generally have only a few hours to evacuate the people before a storm hits, and moving this many men, women and children to safety is impossible in such a short time frame.

As such, rescue and prevention efforts are oriented around getting all people out of low-lying areas, that may be inundated in case the weather kicks up storm surges.

It's only a matter of time before a major storm strikes. Various near-misses have been recorded over the past 60 years, with some weather events actually hitting the New York Metropolitan area.

As such, a large hurricane hitting Manhattan directly is something to be expected. Authorities need to draw up battle plans that would ensure they are not overwhelmed by the situation when it does occur.

“A major hurricane could push more than 30 feet of storm surge into some parts of New York City,” say officials at the Office of Emergency Management, quoted by LiveScience.

Making matters worse is climate change, which promotes anomalous weather patterns, storm behaviors, and also abnormally-high sea levels.

“With sea level at these higher levels, flooding by major storms would inundate many low-lying neighborhoods and shut down the entire metropolitan transportation system with much greater frequency,” explains Columbia University expert Vivien Gornitz.