Hurricane Sandy Caused Enough Overflow to Cover Central Park in 41 Feet of Sewage

Hey, remember Hurricane Sandy? If you're one of the thousands of people the massive franken-storm left homeless, you certainly do. Especially if the city of New York is about to kick you out of your temporary housing and onto the street.

You might also remember Sandy better if it happened to have sent a torrent of feces flowing down your street. That's because some of the most under-reported fallout from Sandy is the truly massive amount of sewage overflow the storm caused. Climate Central has parsed the stats and done the math—all told, Sandy spewed 11 billion gallons of sewage across the eastern seaboard.

That, as the organization points out, was enough to cake Central Park in an even 41 feet of shit. And a full third of that was raw, untreated sewage. Stuff that had just been flushed. As you can see from this nice infographic, the vast majority of the overflow hit New York and New Jersey:

"Six months after Sandy, data from the eight hardest hit states shows that 11 billion gallons of untreated and partially treated sewage flowed into rivers, bays, canals, and in some cases, city streets," Climate Central explains in the accompanying report. This was "largely as a result of record storm-surge flooding that swamped the region’s major sewage treatment facilities."

That's 50 times the amount of oil loosed over the course of the BP spill. That's a lot of sewage.

So, when you are considering the impact of major hurricanes—and of climate change, which many climatologists believe made Sandy as powerful as it was—don't just think of the breached levies, the power outages, the storm surge, the gale-force winds. Think of the shit.