Rockaway and the Roar of Hurricane Erin

📷 All photos taken by me at Rockaway Beach during Hurricane Erin’s offshore swell.

📍 Arverne, NY

On Rockaway Beach in late August, the ocean looked unfamiliar. Hurricane Erin, still far offshore, had re-shaped the horizon. Swells rolled in at heights rarely seen here—nine feet at Rockaway, sixteen farther down the coast—drawing surfers who treated it like a holiday and clusters of onlookers who gathered on the boardwalk and the sand, phones raised, murmuring at the size of the sets. The beach became a theater, with the Atlantic as both performer and threat.

Erin was no ordinary storm. At its peak, it sprawled more than 650 miles across, one of the largest Atlantic hurricanes on record, and in a single day it vaulted from a tropical storm to a Category 5 with 160-mile-an-hour winds. Had the track bent just slightly toward the coast, Rockaway would have been staring down something far worse than photogenic surf.

Scientists call storms like this a warning. Warmer waters make rapid intensification more likely—now five times more frequent than four decades ago. Erin gave New York an extraordinary spectacle, and a reprieve. The spectacle may repeat itself; the reprieve may not.