As a kid growing up on Long Island's South Shore in a largely glass house surrounded by tall trees, I always envied people who lived in Manhattan. I saw the city as a fortress against foul weather, the kind of place where a guy could enjoy a hurricane rather than worry about it.

I felt this way, that is, until I came across a little-known interim technical data report by the Army Corps of Engineers released in 1995, in which the corps concluded that even a modest hurricane, on just the right track, could drive an immense storm surge into lower Manhattan, submerge Kennedy Airport and drown a few subway trains. The greater message of the report, one I have heard often from tropical meteorologists over the last couple of years, is that despite satellites, hurricane-hunting aircraft and the Weather Channel, hurricanes remain potential killers with a persistent power to deliver the unexpected.

It is tempting to dismiss the corps' report as alarmist, especially after the fearsome Floyd left New York City relatively unscathed. But the corps is a pretty sober outfit. The authors discovered Manhattan's peculiar vulnerability to storm surge only after they had begun a routine evacuation study for the metropolitan region, the kind done for most other cities and states on the nation's hurricane coasts.

They deployed a sophisticated computer model -- Slosh, which stands for Sea, Lake and Overland Surge from Hurricanes -- used by coastal emergency planners throughout the country. The model, proven time and again to be accurate, takes into account the contours of a region's shoreline, undersea landscape and water depths to calculate how a storm surge would likely behave.