Hurricane Sandy tore into the northeastern United States in October 2012, and this NOVA special reconstructs the storm hour by hour using footage of flooded subways, wrecked boardwalks, and stranded coastal neighborhoods. Stony Brook University oceanography professor Malcolm Bowman, a storm surge specialist, appears throughout, walking through the data he supplied to the production and explaining how a hurricane merging with a winter storm system produced the surge that overwhelmed New York and New Jersey's defenses. The film uses that footage to ask a harder question: are storms like Sandy becoming more frequent, and if so, why. Scientists lay out the case for warming oceans and rising seas feeding bigger surges, while engineers and planners weigh what coastal protection should look like afterward, from sea walls to storm surge barriers modeled on systems already built in London and Rotterdam. The special closes on the unresolved argument between hardening the coastline and retreating from it, with Sandy's damage as the baseline everyone is now measuring against.