NARRATOR: Sally is perhaps the most unwelcome guest among the current Atlantic storm.
Hurricane Paulette is over Bermuda, and Renee,
Teddy and now Vicky, are spinning over open waters.
Primal, destructive, growing more and more dangerous every year.
CHUCK: A hurricane represents a massive force of mother nature.
You sure need to respect them.
NARRATOR: Sally became a hurricane this morning packing 90 mile an hour wind.
Off the coast of Florida, an unexpected pile of rocks and a ship's bell,
what do they reveal about how monster storms shape America's past?
GREG: It's a hurricane victim.
And hurricanes are some of the most violent forces that happen on planet Earth.
JOHN: Had this hurricane not happened, America might have looked very, very different.
NARRATOR: And how does a sunken mass of subway cars
give hope to resisting future hurricanes?
ART: Epic things had happened on the seabed.
Subway cars were rotated, shifted, moved or completely obliterated.
DELLA: Dealing with hurricanes is very emotionally taxing
but it's part of the price of living on this area of the Gulf Coast.
NARRATOR: Every year hurricanes batter
America's eastern and southern coastlines.
They've been a menace for centuries.
They destroy, disrupt and some even change the course of history.
DELLA: There's a lot of, of shipwrecks in our bay
but we always hoped to find the earliest ones.
The Pensacola Shipwreck Survey was the brainchild of Dr Roger Smith.
And Roger was a legendary archaeologist especially here in the Florida.
He knew that Pensacola Bay had such high potential
because very early in the 16th century
there were Spanish um explorers uh poking around uh this area,
looking for bays and harbours.
Myself and, and Jim Spireck and Chuck Hewson,
we always hoped that we would find some of the evidence
of these early Spanish explorers.
Sometimes we would dive on these sites that the fishermen
or the shrimpers would show us and it was junk.
Car bodies or piles of tyres or one time we found a pizza oven!
But there was always that, that hope that the next dive
was going to turn up something amazing.
So, we kept on at it.
I never dreamed, you know that we would be finding something
so important historically and archaeologically.
In the fall of 1992, we had been surveying
at this particular place and had found some targets
and the first dive um I believe was a, a piece of shrimp boat gear.
The second dive I think was a car body, a Volkswagen Beetle or something.
And so, the third dive it was mine and Chuck's turn
and so we geared up and jumped in the water
and Jim was on the boat for safety.
The water's very dark there, you could not see even 12 feet.
I was on my knees holding the anchor at the, at the bottom of the buoy line.
Chuck swam out and did a circle, didn't find anything and out another few feet.
By that time was out of my range of vision.
A few minutes later he comes swimming back up the line
and he looks at me and goes like this.
So his eyes were real big, I knew he had found something interesting,
so I followed him back down the line to this big pile of rocks.
Here in Pensacola we don't have naturally occurring rocks like that.
The top layer was oyster, oyster shell.
Generations and generations of oysters had lived
and died on this, this pile of rocks.
And he started moving this top layer of rocks,
the rock went deeper and deeper and deeper
of these varying sizes of these kind of roundish river cobbles.
Now we got excited.
Because these kinds of rocks were used as ballast
in these old vessels to keep them stable as they were sailing across the ocean.
Once we finally got down to the very bottom layer of rock underneath that
was this Beautiful carved wood.
And that's when we knew for sure, we had a shipwreck.
I remember getting on the phone with Roger
and saying "Roger you need to come and see this."
We had no idea the age of it but it looked like it
was a historic shipwreck so we shifted our focus
from survey of Pensacola Bay to focusing on this site
that had the potential to be something very old and very important.
One of the local businesses in Pensacola donated
a small wooden barge to us that we could anchor up on site
and leave there and use as our excavation platform.
But it was leaky and occasionally it would sink.
So not a whole lot of work was going to happen till we could move the barge.
SOT: So Jim, what's the plan for today?
DELLA: We had found wooden structure
and it wasn't just an isolated like little piece or a splinter of wood,
this was major internal structural framing.
We had no idea really the true age of it at that point.
And so that's when we decided, well let's move over a little way.
And we happened to come down right where that heel
of the mast is attached very securely into the hull of the ship.
Finding this wooden structure was huge for us
and that mast step was just classic 16th century.
NARRATOR: The 1500s is when European exploration in North America really kicked off
before the Pilgrims or the English settlements at Jamestown.
This ship dates to that era. But where did it come from?
And who was on-board?
DELLA: We started using the induction dredge which is like
an underwater vacuum cleaner to go down in layers
and very carefully recover whatever artefacts we found.
We began to see really amazingly preserved artefacts.
Things like pieces of rope, hemp line even leather shoe soles.
JOHN: I had a phone call where I was invited to come to Florida
to serve as the conservator for this ship and to take care of the artefacts.
We were trying to find as many clues as we could
to help identify the origin of the vessel.
Each day, you know, something different would show up in remarkable condition.
We found some real plain unglazed pottery,
it was just coarse earthenware we actually call them olive jars.
Well when we found olive jars it was one of the
first big clues that we're working with a Spanish shipwreck
because these big jars we know
the Spanish carried olives in them.
NARRATOR: Spain establishes its first permanent settlement
in Florida at St. Augustine in 1565.
But the artefacts coming from the ship are pointing to an earlier date: the 1550s.
Could these be the remains of one of the earliest
European colonizers on the American mainland?
DELLA: On one side of the ship, as we were excavating,
we ran out of hull structure.
There was nothing else there and the framing
and the ship's timbers were, were shattered.
JOHN: We found hundreds and hundreds of the small
spikes that were used to attach
the planking to the hull frame and so they were scattered on the wreck site
and almost all of them are bent.
Many of them are even broken.
It was obvious that the ship pounded up and down
and eventually it split open and broke apart like that.
DELLA: Whatever had caused this ship to wreck
was a violent, catastrophic occurrence.
NARRATOR: Like a hurricane!
DELLA: There was only one colonizing expedition from the 1550s that we could think of
that had wrecked on the Gulf Coast.
So all of these clues that we began to put together began to make us think,
maybe this is Luna.
NARRATOR: According to historical records, a Spanish explorer,
Don Tristan de Luna Arellano, founds a settlement somewhere
on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico in 1559.
It lasted just two years before vanishing without a trace.
JOHN: The records for the Spanish colonial effort in the New World are vast
and voluminous and well preserved in general.
I was always interested in archaeology and the thrill of exploration and discovery,
but the documents provide so much more rich detail and made it much more personal.
The Luna expedition was the most well financed
and certainly the most ambitious attempt
to establish a Spanish foothold in Florida.
DELLA: The search for the Luna land site has been ongoing
at Pensacola for years and years.
We always joked that we might find a plank
that said 'Luna was here' carved into it.
JOHN: Luna, arrived in 1559 with a fleet and they unloaded 1500 people,
500 soldiers and a thousand additional colonists.
He had no way to know that a hurricane was coming.
The wreck showed clear evidence of being driven ashore
and that actually corresponds quite well
with a letter that was written by Tristan de Luna
to the King of Spain in which he describes
that a storm hit about five weeks in.
The hurricane arrived at night and then for the next 24 hours
the winds came from all directions
and he said that the ships were broken free from their anchors,
driven ashore and broken open and destroyed.
But if this was a ship from the Luna expedition, it raises a whole new question.
We know that Luna lost seven ships in that storm.
Where were the rest of them?
We got a very large grant from the State of Florida
to continue the survey to try to find the other ships
and confirm we'd located Luna's fleet.
So, we purchased a really state of the art magnetometer.
GREG: I started here right after Hurricane Ivan,
that was my first hurricane at the University of West Florida.
Before that I'd been doing remote sensing surveys
and that's some of the expertise that I brought to the program.
Magnetometers can sense ferrous metals which is typically iron
in a ship-wreck and that's how we find these wrecks.
JOHN: It seemed logical if the first ship was in this area
let's continue to look around that ship with this new magnetometer.
GREG: That's where we got lucky.
With a magnetometer you can never really know
what you have until you put divers in the water.
It's actually diving on these remote sensing anomalies
that we find to find out what they are.
And when we began finding the olive jar fragments,
the lead sheathing on the hulls
that's when the light bulbs began going off.
JOHN: We found enough little pieces of olive jar
that we were convinced on day two that it was
a Luna ship associated with the first one.
One ship in the bay might be explained away as something random,
but two ships near each other,
that was an astoundingly important discovery.
It confirmed in my mind that we absolutely positively did have the Luna fleet here.
It meant that not only did we have a number more wrecks
to find but that we also had
that settlement site and it had to be close.
NARRATOR: For nearly ten years the team searches
for the location of Tristan de Luna's lost settlement.
And finds nothing!
JOHN: We had no archaeological evidence whatsoever
to pin down where the settlement was.
In the fall of 2015, a former student reported
that he had found some Spanish artefacts
in a newly cleared house lot and wanted us to take a look,
thought they might be 16th century.
My first reaction was okay great, you know we have a lot
of people reporting a lot of things
but something in the back of my mind I think you know,
tickled my interest because of the fact
that it was on a particular lot in a particular neighborhood
right where we thought Luna might be located.
It turns out that it was identical to the kinds
of olive jar that had already been found on the shipwrecks.
NARRATOR: The team investigating the 16th Century Spanish
shipwrecks hopes the pottery shards found on shore
will finally lead them to the lost settlement of Tristan de Luna.
JOHN: We called on current students and former students,
everybody in the faculty and the staff,
anybody who we could get out there.
Then 5 days of intense fieldwork we found
literally hundreds of pieces of olive jar.
DELLA: I got really excited personally, thinking maybe this is it.
One of the very first major expeditions to settle what is now the United States.
JOHN: Once the neighbors started to realize
the importance of the site they began to call themselves
'America's First Neighborhood'.
We did basically a year's worth of full-fledged shovel testing
and dug more than 900 shovel tests across more than 50 acres.
All the evidence indicates that this settlement was the largest ever attempted
in 16th Century Florida.
We are essentially digging up a very short-lived city.
NARRATOR: The scale of the settlement confirms
the Spanish crown equipped the expedition
with everything needed to survive in the New World.
But a major hurricane is a force few Europeans had ever experienced.
When it arrived, the colony is helpless.
JOHN: I've lived in Florida uh since 2001
and I've been through quite a few hurricanes so I've seen enough to know
that this storm must have been absolutely devastating.
We do know from the documents that the hurricane caught them
in the midst of construction and as a result
they had not actually started to use the warehouse for storing food.
And so, the hurricane wiped out not just the fleet
but the food that they had stored on it.
And it took 24 hours for the storm to pass completely through.
Luna doubtless saw that his fleet was devastated
and there was nothing lefty but hulks of broken ships
and masts and lots and lots of supplies, barrels and boxes, crates.
The Luna expedition could have changed the course of history in this continent.
But overnight the settlers were transformed from
part of the most ambitious and well financed
colonial expeditions that Spain ever mounted to North America
into starving refugees.
Some of the settlers decided to throw in the towel and go home.
Some, including Luna, struggled on for nearly two years.
But ultimately the site was abandoned.
Had this hurricane not happened America might have looked
very, very different today.
It's entirely possible even likely that because
the Spanish would have had a really solid foothold
in southeastern North America a full generation
before the English settlers arrived at Jamestown.
North America might simply have been Spanish North America.
NARRATOR: Instead, the British and French come to dominate most of the continent.
The Spanish settlements in Florida, like St. Augustine,
eventually fall under British control.
St Augustine remains the oldest continuously inhabited city
in the United States and a victim of countless hurricanes
since its founding.
CHUCK: You've had ships coming and going
to St Augustine for over 450 years now.
At the same time, it's always had a treacherous inlet.
There's a lot of job security if you're an underwater archaeologist
in St Augustine because there have been so many shipwrecks over the years.
We know there's a lot out there but finding them is what's tricky.
We have an operation that can actually go out, finding shipwrecks at least until
hurricane season cuts our dive season short.
SAM: It was at the end of the field season
so we were all pretty tired and we had this book
of the various targets that we had and we said "let's go to this one,
it's got a magnetic signature that looks interesting".
CHUCK: We are blessed with really poor diving conditions here in St Augustine,
it's pretty black down there.
We do our best to pinpoint the exact location and then we will probe.
I cleared off an area and then I began to feel with my fingers.
I could feel lumpy, bumpy rock-like things.
I immediately knew they weren't any kind of natural
stone but what we call concretions.
So iron objects that were encrusted with rust.
I felt a wooden plank.
At this point my heart is bump bump bump bump bump beating.
Down there alone in the dark I really knew
there's really nothing else that could be.
It just had to be a shipwreck!
SAM: We got Chuck back on the boat and he's like 'we have ourselves a wreck.'
CHUCK: The game is afoot now, we have something!
SAM: I'm like 'that's really good news!'
It was actually the perfect way to end a field season.
CHUCK: There is an old joke in archaeology, it's almost a truism,
that you make your big discovery on the last day.
SAM: We were done for the summer.
NARRATOR: September brings the peak of Florida's Hurricane Season
making it impossible to excavate.
But for archaeologists, unsettled weather can be both a curse and a blessing.
CHUCK: After a period of storm activity,
we had an opportunity to go out and take a look at the site,
so what we would call a monitoring dive.
SAM: It was a beautiful morning, I was on the first dive team
and it's absolutely beautiful conditions,
crystal clear and I look forward
and it's just like this blue gloom but a really rich beautiful blue.
And so we're going along and I'm looking at this blue gloom
and then I see this something looming out of the blue gloom
and I'm like, that's a cannon.
And then I look again and right next to the cannon is a bell and I can't believe it.
It's just not computing, I mean that's a canon
and that's a bell and I'm like 'brrrrr look at this!!'
So we swam around and it was like a whole different wreck, you know?
CHUCK: They came up after a relatively short amount of time
and Sam pulled his regulator out of his mask
and he said, 'there's 10 feet of visibility'.
Well that instantly got everyone's attention on the boat.
We had not yet seen any of the shipwreck.
We had been there without able, you know, just doing archaeology by Braille.
And then the next sentence he says, 'oh and there's five cannon
and the ship's bell just sitting there on the surface'.
So that, you know, our first reaction is like, 'are you joking?'
SAM: And I'm like 'nah, man I'm just kidding.'
CHUCK: And I could see in his eyes, I'm like 'you're not joking.' He's like
'no I'm not joking there's cannons and a bell right down here.'
SAM: Yeah, I think that's probably the best dive I've ever done.
CHUCK: A ship's bell, that's the holy grail for a diving archaeologist.
That could give the name of the ship and the year it was launched.
SAM: So we had this event, we invited all sorts of people,
nice nibbles and, and drinks.
And our conservator was starting to clean off the bell
and the idea was we're gonna have this wonderful event
where we reveal the name of the wreck.
And she cleaned the bell and there was no name at all, it was a completely blank bell.
CHUCK: The ship's secrets weren't just going to fall into our laps.
We needed to get more information.
Archaeology is just like a crime scene investigation.
We are trying to reconstruct a scenario, an event, from the past.
In our case it's a really cold case, it goes back hundreds of years.
SAM: One of the things that was obvious from the beginning,
the arrangement of the material and the guns in particular
on the seabed was not what I would call normal.
CHUCK: Cannons, if they're in place as weapons,
you might expect to find cannons kind of evenly placed
pointing away from the shipwreck.
The bell is usually at the belfry, that's at a certain part of the ship.
Maybe cookware, things like that, where the galley
or the kitchen of the ship would be.
We had definitely a different scenario.
SAM: It was clear that something was going on.
One of the objects that I noticed was this long strange
cylindrical object and it was all lead, completely and utterly lead.
CHUCK: I had an attached length of plumbing or piping to it.
This was a deck pump.
When you operated the pump handle you were pumping up nice,
clean seawater to swab the decks, to fight a fire so a deck pump
was a way to get seawater on board the vessel for a variety of purposes.
SAM: We brought this up and we had it in the lab and one of the team, very keen eyes,
noticed that there were hack marks on the lead.
CHUCK: We had more than one segment of plumbing that had been cut clean through.
And then we realized what had happened.
SAM: Someone had taken an axe and hacked it, hacked it out of the ship.
CHUCK: This is an expensive piece of equipment.
Why would you purposely disable it?
The answer that makes sense to us is that this was a frenzied attempt,
a desperate attempt to remove this pump from the hull of the ship
where it would have been mounted.
It seems pretty clear to us that that is an attempt to lighten the ship.
And that makes sense if a ship has run aground
and you have to try to save the ship by jettisoning all the heavy cargo.
These artefacts are telling the story of the desperate attempt by the captain,
the crew and the passengers to try to save the ship.
If you can just get the ship to float up off the sandbar,
then you can get it ashore and you've saved the vessel.
We had found that bell, the cannons, the deck pump,
but we only ever found that one wooden plank.
There was no hull, no remains of the ship structure itself.
Was it possible that the ship had gotten away?
NARRATOR: Hoping to solve the mystery of the ship's fate,
the investigation takes a closer look
at the metal artefacts found off the coast of St. Augustine.
CHUCK: When you have an iron object that is immersed
in sea water for centuries it undergoes a number of chemical changes.
That rust turns into an encrustation, it turns into a coating.
It's thick and lumpy and bumpy and shells get stuck to it
and often you'll have more than one
artefact near each other and they all just rust together
into what may just be an amorphous blob.
SAM: Once we started examining the concretions,
X-raying the concretions and finding
the smaller objects within the concretions,
that is when the full story of what actually happened came out.
What X-rays can do if you really amp up the power,
it can actually see through the calcium carbonate.
CHUCK: We found a lot of small items, a lot of personal items, a lot of cookware,
a lot of plates, a lot of spoons, shoe buckles,
coins, so we really are getting a picture
that a lot of the things that people were bringing
with them ended up on the sea floor.
SAM: When we found the Queen Anne's pistol,
expensive small items that you absolutely would not throw overboard
under any circumstance, that told us the story
that they were so stuck on the bar they never got off.
CHUCK: It seems pretty conclusive that this ship
could not be saved and we have the burial ground of this vessel
and all of the items that were on board.
SAM: What archaeologists really want to do is what we want to tell the story,
where was it from? When did it wreck? Why did it wreck?
So our story evolved from very small clues.
CHUCK: There was a lot of stuff.
We found a base of a wine glass that we knew dated to some time in the 1700s.
We found a pewter spoon, the same thing.
Everything we found it seemed to push the date
to the second half and even the later 1700s.
So as we narrow that time range down, there was one event in particular,
that looked promising.
NARRATOR: In December 1782, the American Revolution is entering its final phase.
The 13 colonies are a dangerous place for those still loyal to the crown.
So in dozens of ships they flee to Florida, which remains loyal to King George III.
They hope to find refuge in St Augustine but not all of them reach safety.
CHUCK: This could be a candidate, one of these ships.
Everything seemed to be pointing into this direction.
We had debates about what artefacts we might actually find,
that would really be definitive. And then it happened.
We found the artefact.
It was a single button.
A small pewter button, it had lettering on it that we could see after cleaning,
the letters RP with a crown above and that told us immediately
that we had Loyalists on board.
Because that RP button stands for Royal Provincials,
that's a unit in the British Army
it's made up of Americans who were loyal to King George.
It is poignant.
To read some of the letters, to read some of the accounts
that were written back and forth
about this particular event that's a really important part of the process.
Elizabeth Lichtenstein Johnston was a Georgia Loyalist.
She had evacuated and had ended up in St Augustine
and so she was an eyewitness to these shipwrecks.
16 vessels, small vessels she says, have been lost on or about the bar.
So that means they have run aground on the sandbar.
These ships were carrying people but they're also their hopes
and dreams for making a new life in this
really difficult time in their lives and they're just strewn on the sandbar.
We don't know for sure what caused these ships to wreck,
but we know there was a hurricane
just two months before this fleet came to grief.
We don't know exactly what its impact was on Florida
but a hurricane represents a massive force of mother nature.
SAM: Every time a hurricane came through the channel
would change, the sands would shift.
CHUCK: That shifting sandbar meant these ships
had no idea where the safe channel was.
SAM: So, it is possible that hurricanes effectively caused these wrecks.
CHUCK: In a very real sense it is because
of hurricanes that this inlet was so dangerous.
These storms throughout history have changed history.
And what a hurricane does below the water
can be as dramatic as what it does on shore.
NARRATOR: Millions of people on or near the American coast
live under the threat of hurricanes.
But of all the dangers these monster storms bring,
the greatest comes from Storm Surges.
The huge volume of ocean water pushed ashore by storm.
The surges can cause devastating even deadly flooding.
OBAMA: Obviously all of us across the country are concerned
about the potential impact of Hurricane Sandy.
COMMUNICATOR: We are expecting a very large storm
with impacts over a very large area.
ART: When we saw that Sandy was coming our way, we dropped everything.
I remember calling up the director of marine operations
and saying "I need to get on that boat".
I'm a coastal geologist and my primary mission is to try and anticipate
how and where Storm Surge will hit populated areas.
People think the sky is where to look for clues
to the damage a hurricane is going to do,
but for me, the answers are underwater.
ART: We really need to understand what's going on in the water and at the seabed,
if we're going to try to understand how storm surge plays out.
MAN: Yeah looks good.
ART: When they tell you to evacuate, you need to evacuate.
While everyone else was preparing to leave, we were heading 16 miles offshore
towards the approaching storm.
We needed to seize that moment, to try to capture
a picture of the seabed right before the storm
and see how that storm would evolve and change.
That would give us an incredible picture of how the seafloor,
the ocean and the sky interact,
something that has very rarely, if ever, been done.
And the best place to do it was Redbird Reef.
NARRATOR: This is no ordinary patch on the sea floor.
It's the strangest of artificial reefs.
ART: There are hundreds upon hundreds of New York City subway cars
on the sea floor.
Two and a half meters, we're closing in on it.
For me the Redbird Reef site has become
a great natural laboratory for us to better understand
hurricanes and their impacts on the coastline.
CARTER: I need a little bit more, I'm getting tugged.
ART: That's it right there, yep, coming right up on the corner.
It really makes for an amazing seascape.
Rows upon rows of subway cars in different orientations and arrangements.
I often chuckle to my archaeologist friends and say,
'how would you interpret this hundreds of years from now?
What kind of bizarre sort of battle took place here?'
CARTER: We've been studying Redbird Reef for over a decade now.
ART: The missing element was we need a storm.
What Sandy meant for us is it gave us
for the first time an opportunity to see how a single storm event
could change the seabed.
Let's see how she's looking here good!
I wanted four days out at that site.
We could squeeze one day to get everything done.
That meant we needed to map the site, we needed to deploy our instruments,
and then we needed to get the heck out of there before Sandy came through.
COMMUNICATOR: We're looking at tropical storm force winds
along the coast, beginning tonight.
ART: One of the last things we did was deploy
an instrument frame to the sea floor,
that was going to sit out there during the storm
and measure the waves and currents.
As we were leaving, I had this thought,
'will we ever see that instrument package again?'
CARTER: The waves that were created from this storm
covered over an area of 1.4 million square miles
so this was a massive storm for the Atlantic basin.
It's just incomprehensible to think about the billions and billions of dollars
of damage that was wrought by this storm.
Once Sandy had passed we went back out to the site to recover our instrumentation.
We just didn't know what to expect when we got there and whether or not we'd have any
equipment left to recover.
ART: We start hauling up the lines and as part of the rope was coming up,
I saw this tangle of metal wrapped in the line and my heart sank.
CARTER: I turned and looked at Art
and he just this exasperated sigh of 'oh my goodness there's nothing left.'
It turns out that that was a piece of one of the subway cars
possibly a door frame or a window frame.
ART: The storm had torn it free and tangled it up amongst our line as the waves
and the currents were sloshing back and forth.
So, we kept hauling up, pulling up and then suddenly,
through the water I see the frame of our instrument package
and when it burst through the surface, it was just a real moment of elation
and my final thought was, I hope we hit record!
As we start looking back through the records,
we're our eyes are just going bug-eyed.
Right there at the Redbird Reef site we measured
two and a half story-high waves with a period of 16 seconds.
Every 16 seconds another one of these monster,
mammoth waves is coming through generating three knot currents
at the sea floor, in 100 feet of water.
CARTER: The currents that were being generated by that storm was staggering to us.
ART: We knew in that moment that our gambit had paid off.
But to truly gauge the power of those currents,
we needed to measure the storm's impact right at the seabed.
That meant we needed to map the site to see how much damage was done.
One of the most valuable assets that we have in our research arsenal
is our small un-personned submarine, and it's fully autonomous meaning
we have to plan its missions and we hit
go and she dives below the surface off on its own
to navigate through this mysterious subsea world.
We're painting a three-dimensional picture
very high resolution and precision,
so we can get every little bump and divot of the seabed.
ART: We started going through, piece by piece in every portion
of the Redbird Reef site and looking at the changes before and after Sandy.
Yeah look at the scour around some of these subway cars.
We could see whole areas where the surface sand was pulled and eroded away.
It became very obvious to us that epic things had happened on this, the seabed,
because there were suddenly areas where subway cars
were missing or they had been flipped on their sides or broken apart.
There were subway cars that were just rotated,
shifted, moved or completely obliterated.
CARTER: We're talking about subway cars that weigh on the order of 75,000 pounds,
just eviscerated by the currents that were occurring down there
which really shows you the power
and the amount of energy that's being imparted on the sea floor.
ART: The largest and perhaps most impressive structure in the artificial
reef system is the former ex-USS Arthur Radford.
It was a Navy destroyer and it's the largest artificial reef object
north of Florida anywhere on the east coast, more than 500 feet long.
But when we went out and then surveyed over the Radford that's when it just clearly
showed that this storm took things to a whole 'nother level.
It's in deeper water depths and it's a much larger structure.
We knew from before the storm that the Radford was in three parts.
When we got out there and mapped it after Sandy
it was just jaw-dropping to realize that the entire center section
was picked up and rotated more than 30 degrees.
We're talking about an enormous Navy destroyer that's moved
more than 200 feet in 120 feet of water.
It really shocked me, it really surprised me to see
how much change there was to the seabed.
I'd never seen it over that sort of scale and magnitude.
We now know how much of an effect a storm has on the sea floor.
But that interaction goes both ways.
Water movement is affected by the shape of the sea floor
as the storm moves towards land
and those initial conditions are what determine how storm surge behaves,
and ultimately, where and how it hits. That's crucial information.
You know in hindsight, we could have lost everything.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of equipment.
But if we didn't risk that loss, we wouldn't have the gold mine of information
about how the sea floor changes during a storm.
We have the technology now to monitor these changes as each storm passes.
We can feed that into our storm surge models,
and predict where and how the next storm surge is going to occur.
There are gonna be more storms, and there are going to be more intense storms.
And we need every bit of information we can to help combat storm surge losses.
Here for the first time in the history of hurricanes,
we might finally have a weapon that helps
us fight the worst of what those hurricanes are throwing at us.
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