How badly will he handle this one?

From the NY Post:

Hurricane Sandy will morph into a “Frankenstorm” that will likely dump 5 inches or more of rain — and possibly snow — on the city and cause $1 billion in damage on its path up the coast, forecasters said yesterday.

Chances the Category 2 storm would shear off to the northeast into the Atlantic fell sharply as meteorologists said it was much likelier to turn northwest, into land.

That translates to a 90 percent chance the New Jersey-to-New England coast will get steady gale-force winds, heavy rain and flooding.

The hurricane last night was responsible for at least 22 deaths across the Caribbean.

Worsening the situation is that Sandy is expected to collide with an early winter storm — arctic air from the north — and create a crisis like the “Perfect Storm” of 1991, when Hurricane Grace turned into a nor’easter and killed 13 people from Oct. 26 to Halloween.

Add to that the effect of a full moon Monday and you get even higher high tides to aggravate a storm surge.

Forecasters said they couldn’t recall anything like it.

From the NY Observer:

Mayor Bloomberg and the MTA are preparing for the maelstrom that could descend upon the city should the Frankenstorm indeed become the perfect one and dump unholy mayhem on the New York in the coming days.

At a conference of transportation planners hosted by the mayor’s streets czar Janette Sadik-Khan, Mayor Bloomberg joked that the assembled wonks, who had traveled from across the country and the world to debate bike lanes and traffic signalization, that they had better beat a fast retreat.

“You want to be out of here before this big storm, which everybody is panicking about, hits us,” Mayor Bloomberg said while delivering the closing keynote speech to end the three-day conference. He said it could hit “Sunday, Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday depending on which broadcast you are tuned into, and we’ve got to decide whether to pull all the subway trains out of low-lying areas, pull the buses out. Of course you can’t evacuate people and you can’t have schools open if you can’t have buses. Or if the storm doesn’t hit, god forbid, and you’ve wasted all this money.”

Meteorologist Jim Cantore has the latest from New York City, including a statement from the NYC mayor on Hurricane Sandy's storm surge that may be inconsistent with the message from many weather experts.