We are in, right, now the right eye wall, no doubt about that there you see the surf, he said breathlessly. That tells a story right there.
Stumbling and apparently buffeted by ferocious gusts, he took shelter next to a building. This is our protection from the wind, he explained. Its been truly remarkable to watch the power of the ocean here.
The surf may have told a story but so too did the sight behind the reporter of people chatting and ambling along the sea front and just goofing around. There was a man in a t-shirt, a woman waving her arms and then walking backwards. Then someone on a bicycle glided past.
#1
Irene's wind and storm surge were spread out enough and diminished enough that their damage was fairly modest. The rain however, is a different story. The ground was already saturated and the lakes and rivers filled, unlike the typical situation for this time of year; adding 5-6" of rain has overwhelmed a lot of the watersheds in hilly areas. Lots of old towns that haven't had significant flooding in their 200 year existence are being devastated. They're small and spread out, so the total numbers won't be huge, but they make 'great' photo shoots.
#4
Although I would have ordered the evacuations, it would be interesting to see some follow-up on how many people, if any, lost their lives because of the evacuations -- ICU patients, the frail elderly, and others. It can be a hellish choice.
Posted by: Matt ||
08/29/2011 11:13 Comments ||
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#5
Yeah, especially for those of us on the West Coast, the media coverage was tiresome to say the least. But then, the TV is just about worthless anyway.
#6
Matt,
Very good point. If you are responsible for a frail person you have to choose between the certain stress of an evacuation with its statistical health risk, or the statistical storm risk of staying put with a relatively certain health outcome. Evacuate a frail person enough times and odds are the stress will take him. Stay put enough times and odds are the event will take him. In an ideal world you just use your best judgement and hope you are right. In the real world you get sued or jailed if you are wrong and don't evacuate but are mostly ok if you are wrong and evacuate and the person dies.
#7
Glenmore, I think there's a bias in favor of evacuations because (1) it avoids a disaster scenario like that nightmare we saw down in Chalmette (six years ago today) and (2) it looks like strong leadership. But it's really substituting one set of risks for another. If you order 100 elderly nursing home residents to be evacuated, it's a near certainty that the evacuation will kill some of them. I've just never seen any meaningful comparison of the two sets of risk. Obviously if it's a Cat 5 everyone needs to be somewhere else, but if it's a Cat 1, the tradeoff is a lot less clear. And that doesn't include road accidents or the risk of getting caught in your car.
Posted by: Matt ||
08/29/2011 12:32 Comments ||
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#8
Fortune telling be hard. Make your choice & take what's coming to you.
#9
like that nightmare we saw down in Chalmette (six years ago today)
Exactly what I was thinking of. And it was followed a few weeks later with that bus of nursing home patients burning up while evacuating Rita - as I recall there were different liability issues with the bus (failure to comply with some safety rules about oxygen, maybe, and lack of driver training or licensing) but it still provided a very real demonstration of the fact that there are risks to staying and risks to going, and that we do a poor job of analyzing them.
Tell that to the towns in New England that are completely under water. By comparison, my power and tree-limb loss are modest.
Posted by: Barbara ||
08/29/2011 13:13 Comments ||
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#12
Barbara, that reference was to the wind and surge damage. Later in the comment I referred to the rain flood damage, which is devastating to the communities affected, but these are relatively small. I've been in some of them and many were charming little places (at least they were 40 years ago) and the destruction is tragic. However, their losses would be 'lost in the noise' had there been just a few feet more storm surge in the New York embayment.
#13
As a Meteorologist in another life, I for one cannot understand why the NHC kept inferring the storm was going to wipe out New York. In reality it turned into a Summer Nor'easter.
Two things a Hurricane must have to maintain it's strength or grow are open ocean (excluding small islands) and warm water 360 degrees. Other variables have to do with atmospheric conditions and upper level wind patterns.
This storm was very large but started to lose steam a soon as the NW side start to bump up against the Carolinas. By the time it reached North Carolina the eye had lost it's definition and it was down to a strong Cat 1. By now the storm was starved of half of it's moisture source and was tracking over relatively cooler water.
Radar pics along MD, NJ and NY coast showed the SE quadrant of the storm was drying up. Having said that this storm was very large and pushed a lot of moister ahead of it. It's one thing to drop 6-10 inches of rain on the sandy soil of the coastline, but it's another to put that in the rocky and loamy soil of the hills inland. If you add the gradient of the land as it rises from the coast it rings out the clouds.
Finally the reporter that claimed he saw the eye-wall in NY, wouldn't know one if it winked at him. He probable saw sky between storm bands.
Net-net as the center of this storm ran along the coast it was like ripping a board with a crosscut saw.
#15
Finally got the power back on tonight. Out almost 36 hours. It was a lot wilder than I thought it was gonna be. Got a burst about 10:30 AM yesterday that took down 3 100 footers a street over which took out the wires, a transformer and snapped three poles in half. Considering what it looked like yesterday, I'm pleasantly surprised that they got it back as fast as they. Probably helped that today was beautiful.
Don't expect this to be splashed over the front pages, but malaria, the second biggest killer of children worldwide, is in dramatic decline across much of East Africa, and it appears climatic changes are the cause.
Of course, everything caused by climate change has to bad. So there are weasily speculations as to why climate change isn't the cause at the link (BBC).
Saving the lives of many thousands of children, and improving the lives of many thousands more, should be a cause for celebration.
But what are the lives of poor black Africans worth when compared to salving white middle class guilt at their affluent wasteful lifestyles.
#1
One potential climate change cause is a reduction in rainfall (or at least in predictable rainfall) - which would reduce mosquitos, which would reduce malaria, but would also reduce crops and increase starvation. Climated change of that type has been occurring across north Africa for millenia - the north coast was a breadbasket of the Romans, but modern Libya certainly isn't. Must've been due to the CO2 emissions of the Roman chariot propulsion systems.
#3
Far be it from me not to accuse the BBC of weaseldom, but while climate change is one possible factor, another is the massive amount of mosquito control work being done to get malaria under control. A big part of this involves DDT (oh noes!). Paging Rachel Carson to the white courtesy phone.
#4
GNot sure Greeans would consider this as a positive effect. When I told one of them about the one hundred colored people dead due to the ban on DDT he told me he didn't care.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
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Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
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Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
