He told attendees of Advisen's Property Insights Conference last year. There was likely an even mix of audience members laughing at him as there were with him.

This year, Advisen invited Coch back to the conference.

He didn't gloat. He didn't need to.

Everyone now knows Coch has been right all along—that he is indeed no Chicken Little—thanks to Superstorm Sandy, which in October 2012 did much to fulfill his prophecy that New York would someday be home to the world's longest aquarium—its subway system.

The affirmation of Coch's theories based on decades of study doesn't mean the “Master of Disaster” has packed it in. The professor doesn't stop to say “I told you so” because, according to him, there is no time to. 

Sandy was not “the big one” that will happen in our lifetime, he tells NU. But Sandy did prove we are “pitifully prepared for when the big one hits.” 

The storm category has no bearing. If Sandy—not even classified a hurricane—made landfall 100 miles north of where it did, “Manhattan could have been wiped out,” the lifelong New Yorker says. “And it could have happened. That storm could have turned [inland] anywhere.”

Coch says the storm surge was just one deadly aspect of Sandy. The professor says meteorologists would better serve residents by predicting the height of wind-driven waves on top of surge.

Some residents in Sandy's path might have thought they were safe after listening to storm surge predictions. “That's why they died on Staten Island,” he says.

Debris and the force of wind in between the city's tall buildings were major destructive factors during the superstorm, and will be amplified when a stronger one strikes. Wind pressure is intensified when it's squeezed, he explains.

Yet what's most striking are Coch's thoughts about inland flooding. The phrase wasn't uttered post-Sandy, but Coch says it played a major role in flooding from the “freak” storm.

Manhattan was built upon a series of rivers shown in early maps, he notes. The water is still there somewhere, he says, and topography of the upper East Coast increases the chances of freshwater flooding from rivers and off mountains. 

“You can't understand Sandy without freshwater flooding,” Coch adds.

But what really makes New York so dangerous is the right angles formed by Long Island. The ocean water will need a place to go, and it can only move west, into the city, with its low-lying infrastructure, utilities, hospitals and airports. Coch says the city will eventually need flood walls.

He says rebuilding at higher elevations on the coast is an exercise in futility unless we build way up. Homes rebuilt on 8-foot stilts may last a generation but their time will also come, considering the erratic changes in weather and rising sea levels.

The only way you can deny climate change, he adds, is if you can't read a thermometer.

“We shouldn't elevate; we should abandon,” he stresses. “The shoreline is retreating. We should too. Homeowners are never going to win the fight against Mother Nature. Houses are going to go into the sea like they're on a conveyor belt—eaten by the God of the Sea.”

He relates one story from a student who began telling him her parents couldn't afford a beachfront home on Fire Island, N.Y. (a barrier island off Long Island) in the 1960s.

“I stopped her before she could finish because I know how the story ends,” Coch says. “I told her, 'Your parents have a beachfront house now, don't they.' She said, 'yes.'”

Much of what is being done to stop coastal storm damage, he adds, are “futile attempts to defeat the inevitable” that are wasting taxpayer money. He thinks of more immediate potential remedies to save people, such as raising low-lying roads and improving mass transit and electrical systems.