our hands. >> reporter: hurricane center director rick knabb says next time there won't be a dilemma. why requires looking at what happened. forecasters knew sandy was morphing, becoming a superstorm. while it had hurricane force winds and pushed that wall of water called storm surge towards the coastline, by the time it made landfall, it wouldn't be a hurricane, technically. >> of all the disasters we dea , wi with, hurricanes are the ones that we map and spend a lot of time trying to figure out who's at risk and get the messaging out there for them to evacuate with time to leave. >> reporter: but the message may have been missed. there wasn't a hurricane warning because, again, technically, sandy wasn't one. to avoid what it felt would be confusion and misrepresenting the storm, the national weather service decided to go with high wind and flood warnings. >> there is no doubt that the phrase hurricane warning is more attention getting. >> reporter: it's impossible to say whether system lives would have been saved if the