Dammit to hell, Hurricane Irma is a thing.

[LeftCoastLurker]

@bashfulpixie keep us updated on how things are going!  Sending you good thoughts and lots of luck!

[Soulhuntress]

4 hours ago, LeftCoastLurker said:

The situation so many people are in is horrible. One thing I can hope that will happen after this blows over and their lives return to some semblance of normal (which I know could be years from now), and if their finances allow, they prepare NOW for what might happen in the future. Using examples from the article above, you could:

<SNIP>

If you live in an area prone to natural disaster, plan ahead.

THIS!  All of us can have an event and lose power.  We have ice packs and coolers ready for the next long time power failure.   And read company policy on emergencies now.  And don't listen to Limbaugh.  But you knew that already.  Stay safe FJers and check in when you can,

[GrumpyGran]

@bashfulpixie and @AuntK, if either of you are looking to head out and think you can make it, there are probably lots of hotel rooms here in Myrtle Beach now. It looks like the storm is only going to bring us about 5 inches of rain and some stiff wind. Tons of hotels here and summer is over so there is probably lots of availability.

As I read that story of the person stuck in Florida something occurred to me. Our military has many large transport planes, capable of carrying tons of supplies and possibly two hundred people. Why are we not flying them down to Miami, Ft Lauderdale, Orlando, Tampa loaded with water and other supplies, then loading them up with people to evacuate them? Take them to military bases well north of the danger zones and set them up in shelters on the base or nearby. Our country should do that for its citizens. Why wasn't Amtrak taking trains full of supplies down continuously and then running trains back north full of people? I think they could have at least doubled their routes. And I think Florida is going to have to put some serious thought into dealing with this kind of thing in the future.

[Cartmann99]

15 hours ago, RosyDaisy said:

My husband and FIL just left to pick up his aunt and uncle are from FL. Uncle got sick on the way, and Aunt can't drive. They're in Atlanta now. Please, God let them make it here safely. I have our guest bedroom ready for them.

@RosyDaisy, did they make back to your house yet? 

[Cartmann99]

 I really hope their building is as strong as they say it is. 

Here we go:

[RosyDaisy]

They're here. It was a long trip, but everybody is safe.

[AuntK]

@GrumpyGran Thanks for the invite, but I'll be ok. I'm in Tallahassee, not on the coast, in fact, I'm  almost in Georgia. We are going to have some pretty helacious winds, and I have a lot of trees, and some have snapped and come down in other hurricanes, but have always missed the house, and other structures, so I'm hoping. . . Gas is a problem anyway, most stations are out, then when the tanker trucks arrive, the lines are ridiculous. And we are on the evacuation route as South Floridians head farther north, so everyone seems to be looking for gas.

 My niece, her hubby and their 8 year old daughter, (who is my heart), have evacuated here from Tampa. We have lots of food and are eating like pigs before we lose power, which is a given.  Today we will move all patio furniture inside, (God knows where), and try to eliminate anything else in the yard that could become a flying missile. It's not even raining yet! Looks like it's gonna be a beautiful day! 

This is a great bunch of people on here! Thanks for your concern.  Got my wine & my big girl panties on so I'll be ok!

Hang in there FLORIDA!

[GrumpyGran]

57 minutes ago, AuntK said:

 Got my wine & my big girl panties on so I'll be ok!

Then you are ready! Seriously make sure you all know where the safe place in the house is, tornadoes are also a possibility. 

[AlwaysExcited]

I have lost track of all FJ members affected by this, but I'm sending all of you my thoughts and prayers from other side of the world. Stay safe!

[Cartmann99]

That "strengthen more" bit is concerning. Irma is frightening enough right now. 

[FakePigtails]

23 hours ago, GrumpyGran said:

 

As I read that story of the person stuck in Florida something occurred to me. Our military has many large transport planes, capable of carrying tons of supplies and possibly two hundred people. Why are we not flying them down to Miami, Ft Lauderdale, Orlando, Tampa loaded with water and other supplies, then loading them up with people to evacuate them?  Why wasn't Amtrak taking trains full of supplies down continuously and then running trains back north full of people? I think they could have at least doubled their routes. And I think Florida is going to have to put some serious thought into dealing with this kind of thing in the future.

Emergency planning is a joke in this country. Look at Houston - they knew evacuating such a huge city was dangerous so where were the local public shelters on higher ground, which there was plenty of in the city? Instead the discussion is just "evacuations were too dangerous" and "no one could have foreseen so much rain!" (um, isn't it the job of emergency planners to account for record-setting conditions?). Florida does seem to have a lot of local shelters and a system of flood zones but clearly there's not enough.

I'm watching MSNBC and there's a couple staying put in a mandatory evacuation area with 3 young grandchildren. Last night there was footage from the keys of a restaurant open with people not evacuating (with the segment focused on it being the choice of people there) - including children - and I've read a few different news articles profiling people staying in evacuation areas despite stating an ability to leave despite having children with them. Either there's a failure of these areas to have local shelters and transportation and/or there's a failure to have legal consequences for those who refuse to get children out of mandatory evacuation areas (another extension of the USA's refusal to treat children as having their own rights). Last night, there was finally a hotline posted by the Florida government for anyone stuck due to fuel, disabilities, or any other reason who wanted to leave. Too little too late  It breaks my heart to think of what those kids might go through because their families and/or government has failed them.

Unfortunately, like the issue of health care, no one seems to care enough to change it because this is all people know and no one wants to pay up in taxes to invest in governmental help anyway. And, of course, "freedom".

[Cartmann99]

Irma's slowed down and is only moving 6 mph right now:

 

[AuntK]

Slowing down, not good!  Moving toward the west, also not good, at least for me, puts me on the right side of the hurricane which is the more dangerous side. Now we probably won't see the bitch until tomorrow! 

I hate this!

[Carm_88]

@AuntK Please stay safe! 

[RosyDaisy]

The pictures Aunt and Uncle are seeing on their social media right now are scary. Thoughts and prayers to all in Irma's path. We could have tropical storm force winds here in north Alabama late tomorrow. Tornadoes aren't expected though.

[GreyhoundFan]

The WaPo has a running updates thread here. One of the updates has me shaking my head:

Spoiler

Please don’t shoot at the hurricane, officers say

... < tweet >

In Pasco County, north of Tampa, sheriff’s officers warned citizens not to shoot guns into the air, after a Facebook post suggested shooting Irma out of the sky went viral. “Let’s show Irma that we shoot first,” the post from a 22-year-old man said.

About 27,000 people joined the “Shoot at Hurricane Irma” Facebook group.

“There we no actual shots fired. We don’t know if the individual was joking, or making a serious threat,” said Pasco County Sheriff’s spokesman Doug Tobin. “We’re just responding to citizens in general, making sure no one shoots weapons in the air. The bullet trajectory could come down and hurt individuals.”

Ryon Edwards, of Daytona Beach Shores, added an update Sunday morning to his wildly popular Facebook post, saying he’s “learned that about 50% of the world could not understand sarcasm to save their lives.”

What was it that "Forrest Gump" said? "Stupid is as stupid does." Yeah, that applies here. Despite Edwards' update, I don't think he was being sarcastic in his original post, I think he was backpedaling from his original post.

[GrumpyGran]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

The WaPo has a running updates thread here. One of the updates has me shaking my head:

  Hide contents

Please don’t shoot at the hurricane, officers say

... < tweet >

In Pasco County, north of Tampa, sheriff’s officers warned citizens not to shoot guns into the air, after a Facebook post suggested shooting Irma out of the sky went viral. “Let’s show Irma that we shoot first,” the post from a 22-year-old man said.

About 27,000 people joined the “Shoot at Hurricane Irma” Facebook group.

“There we no actual shots fired. We don’t know if the individual was joking, or making a serious threat,” said Pasco County Sheriff’s spokesman Doug Tobin. “We’re just responding to citizens in general, making sure no one shoots weapons in the air. The bullet trajectory could come down and hurt individuals.”

Ryon Edwards, of Daytona Beach Shores, added an update Sunday morning to his wildly popular Facebook post, saying he’s “learned that about 50% of the world could not understand sarcasm to save their lives.”

What was it that "Forrest Gump" said? "Stupid is as stupid does." Yeah, that applies here. Despite Edwards' update, I don't think he was being sarcastic in his original post, I think he was backpedaling from his original post.

 for you, Mr. Edwards. Yes, there are quite a few people with guns who don't understand much of anything except that guns make them feel more powerful. And faced with a situation that they cannot control, they will do the one thing that makes them feel more in control. You're either a trouble-making jerk or unbelievably out of touch.

[Cartmann99]

Nice story about people who helped some beached manatees:

http://www.tampabay.com/news/weather/hurricanes/manatees-stuck-when-water-drained-from-bay-are-rescued/2336995

[GreyhoundFan]

From the WaPo: "The Health 202: Mosquitoes, carbon monoxide and chemicals are big post-Irma health concerns'

Spoiler

Long after the waters have receded, Americans will be grappling with the effects of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, which broke records and ruined lives as they wreaked havoc on the United States and the Caribbean.

Many of those effects will be health-related. State and federal health authorities have warned residents to be on the lookout for mold in their homes, strange rashes on their bodies, stray jagged items in standing water that can lead to infected wounds, and depression and post-traumatic stress disorder as those affected try to stitch their lives back together.

Some of the dangers are obvious. For example, drowning is a top cause of hurricane-related fatalities. But there are some lesser-known health threats that Americans face.

Here are five of them:

1. Carbon monoxide poisoning. After hurricanes, people often struggle without power for days or even weeks. Many people set up generators to provide much-needed electricity while they clean up their homes. But these generators emit odorless, colorless carbon monoxide, which is toxic to breathe, and experts say the gas poses a poisoning risk when the devices are used improperly.

Carbon monoxide poisoning accounted for 13 percent of all hurricane-related deaths in Florida in 2005, the Florida Health Department said in a report two years ago about the health dangers associated with hurricanes. Nine deaths after Hurricane Sandy in 2012 were blamed on the gas, and five nonfatal carbon monoxide poisonings were detected after Hurricane Katrina.

The Florida agency found that a noticeable spike in reports of carbon monoxide exposure in 2004 and 2005 among Florida residents probably was related to the intense hurricane activity during those years.

The Florida Department of Public Health took to Twitter to warn people about the location of generators:

...

2. Chemicals. The winds and storm surge that sweep onto the land during and after a hurricane can unleash dangerous chemicals, as floodwaters inundate industrial sites, overflow sewage and wastewater treatment facilities, and drench agricultural sites.

Dangerous substances can also spew into the air as a result of fires and other malfunctions. In Texas, for example, Hurricane Harvey damaged oil refineries and sparked a fire at a chemical plant in Crosby. Such incidents led to the release of more than 1 million pounds of dangerous air pollutants into the atmosphere in the week after the storm, according to public regulatory filings aggregated by the Center for Biological Diversity.

My colleague Steve Mufson warned of the dangers facing the Turkey Point and St. Lucie nuclear plants in southern Florida — both of them opted to shut down before the storm hit.

But you don't have to live near a chemical plant to be in danger — some of the most dangerous chemicals can come from a person’s garage. Damaged cars can leak battery acid and crude oil. Fertilizer and pesticides can spill from their containers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

3. Mosquitoes. A lot of attention has fallen on the alligators, snakes and fire ants that were forced from their swampy abodes and into flooded back yards and living rooms during Hurricane Harvey. But the most fearsome creature to emerge from the storm may be the humble mosquito.

The annoying little critters are expected to proliferate as they breed in the waterlogged debris left over from the storm. There’s good news, at least at first, according to entomologists at Texas A&M: This first wave of “floodwater mosquitoes” will not carry any of the nasty diseases we associate with the bloodsuckers, including Zika and West Nile virus.

“Then as conditions dry up, we will cycle out of those weeks of floodwater mosquitoes, and then begin cycling into a period of time where the disease-transmitting mosquitoes will emerge and build up,” Sonja Swiger, a veterinary entomologist at Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service, said a statement. “So, the initial run of mosquitoes is not too much of a disease threat  -- although a huge nuisance to people. But it’s the next run we really need to be concerned about.”

Brazoria County, Texas, warned residents not to be alarmed by spray planes targeting mosquitos:

...

4. Chronic illnesses. The aftermath of a hurricane can spark a variety of health problems, from respiratory illnesses caused by mold outbreaks to infected wounds. But a potentially larger problem for some people is the lack of access to medications and treatment for chronic conditions such as diabetes, asthma and kidney disease.

During Hurricane Katrina, 94 dialysis facilities were shuttered because of flooding or power loss, affecting nearly 6,000 patients, according to a November 2015 study in the American Journal of Kidney Disease. Patients on dialysis need the treatment three or four times a week to keep their bodies functioning.

Dialysis clinics reported long lines for care in Houston after Hurricane Harvey. Among the first to be evacuated from U.S. territories battered by Hurricane Irma last week were those needing the life-sustaining treatment.

5. Mental health. It’s no surprise that natural disasters can traumatize people, so it perhaps follows that hurricanes can exacerbate mental illness.

A year after Hurricane Katrina, for example, residents reported an increase in suicidal thoughts and a worsening of post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, according to a 2015 paper published in the journal Nature.

Scary stuff indeed.

[GreyhoundFan]

More from the WaPo: "The Daily 202: Hurricane Irma would have killed vastly more people in the past"

Spoiler

THE BIG IDEA: Five deaths related to Hurricane Irma have now been confirmed in Florida. Two of the victims died in a car crash southeast of Tampa on Sunday: A sheriff’s deputy had been stationed in an evacuation shelter overnight and was driving home at about 6 a.m. to pick up more supplies. A corrections officer was on his way to work.

Any loss of life is a tragedy, and the death toll is certain to go up, but it’s remarkable the extent to which the human cost of a storm as destructive and powerful as this one — which will cause untold billions in property damage — can be mitigated.

Forecasting has improved dramatically over the past century, as has the quality of construction. We have a much better idea of who should leave when a massive storm is coming, and they have more time to get out. Government officials of both parties are also more willing to order mandatory evacuations. Finally, better roads and equipment make it easier to extract people in harm’s way.

For context, at least 6,000 died when a Category 4 hurricane unexpectedly made landfall in Galveston, Tex., on Sept. 8, 1900. Some estimates put the number of deaths closer to 10,000. With no evacuation from the port town, people were sitting ducks. It remains the deadliest storm in U.S. history.

There are several other storms that may have been less powerful than Irma yet caused vastly more deaths. A storm surge from a 1928 hurricane killed more than 1,800 people around Lake Okeechobee, Fla. Separate hurricanes in 1893 each killed more than 1,000 people.

-- Erik Larson wrote a gripping account of the Galveston hurricane in a 1999 book called “Isaac’s Storm.” The protagonist is Texas’s chief weatherman Isaac Monroe Cline, who led the Galveston observation office of the United States Weather Bureau when the storm hit and lost his wife to the storm surge. For a full decade leading up to the devastation, Cline insisted publicly that the idea Galveston could ever be “seriously damaged” by a hurricane was “simply an absurd delusion.”

“It would be impossible for any cyclone to create a storm wave which would materially injure the city,” Cline wrote in a piece for the Galveston News. That op-ed helped dissuade city fathers from investing in a sea wall that could have saved thousands of lives when the storm came.

Cline was once on his way to Mexico for a work trip when his steamship encountered a low-intensity hurricane. Rather than counting his blessings, the meteorologist concluded (insanely) that hurricanes were more survivable than conventional wisdom depicted.

He believed he was an especially gifted, even brilliant, scientist. But, Larson writes, “he did not know there was such a thing as the jet stream, or that easterly waves marched from the coast of West Africa every summer, or that a massive flow within the Atlantic Ocean ferried heat around the globe. Nor had he heard of a phenomenon called El Nino.”

Cuba had pioneered hurricane detection, and its meteorologists at the time held a more sophisticated understanding of how these storms worked than the Americans. But the forecasters from the United States, which maintained a heavy military presence on the island in the wake of the Spanish-American War, foolishly dismissed them all as backward and laughed at their methods. Trying to centralize control of forecasting, the Weather Bureau persuaded the War Department to ban telegraph operators on Cuba from transmitting forecasts unless they were from the U.S. government. That meant that key information was not passed to the U.S. mainland as the hurricane barreled toward Galveston.

Experts knew a storm was coming, but they had no idea how intense it was or what course it was on. Ironically, because of missing measurements and analysts wrongly interpreting what limited data they had, the government believed that it was a tropical storm and that it was heading for Tampa — not Texas. An advisory was sent out saying as much just hours before the hurricane hit Galveston. “The bureau had few hard facts about the storm, yet what is remarkable about its cables that day is the complete absence of doubt or qualification,” Larson writes.

Serious people mistook signs back then that would be obvious today to anyone who paid even a little attention in their high school science classes. Swells were coming in very slowly at Galveston, at intervals between one to five minutes. This should have been a red flag, obviously, but it somehow reassured people who were on the beach that the storm wasn’t going to be too bad.

Other mistakes were made that wouldn’t be repeated today. Concerned about fire, for instance, the city required that all roofs be shingled with slate, not wood. That made the hurricane much deadlier when the slate started flying around.

-- In its April edition, Popular Science chronicled how much the federal government’s satellites and technology for interpreting data have improved even in the past few decades: “Although predicting where tumultuous weather might go is challenging, NOAA’s errors in storm tracking have been cut in half in the last 12 to 15 years … And beginning five years ago, the agency could give imperiled residents 12 more hours of notice that a hurricane was expected to hit (we now get 36 hours of advanced noticed — up from 24 hours). … In a 2007 study published in Natural Hazards Review, scientists demonstrated that improved storm forecasting prevented up to 90 percent of deaths that would have occurred should satellite-less, error-prone technology still have been used to predict hurricanes. The researchers found that between 1970 and 2004, an average of around 20 people died from hurricanes each year. But if forecasts were as faulty as they were in the 1950s, they estimated that 200 people would have died each year, simply because significantly more people had settled into the path of destructive cyclones. ‘The bottom line is that the number of deaths have been going down, but the coastal population has been going up,’ says Hugh Willoughby, the study's lead author and a hurricane researcher at Florida International University.”

-- There has also been a paradigm shift in how public officials prepare for storms. Politicians have become more likely over time to err on the side of caution when it comes to ordering evacuations. Back in 1900, the Weather Bureau (which became the National Weather Service in 1970) banned the use of the word “tornado” in dispatches to avoid panicking people. The government-run network also “took special pains to avoid using the word hurricane, except when absolutely necessary or when stipulating that a particular storm was not a hurricane,” Larson writes. “The Weather Bureau’s reluctance to use words like hurricane and cyclone inadvertently reinforced the bravado of sea captains.”

-- While many still die from big hurricanes — Katrina took about 1,200 lives in 2005 — the causes of death are different than in the past: “Many deaths that follow a big storm in the U.S. come in the days and weeks afterward — especially if there are power outages,” NBC News reported last year. “Carbon monoxide poisoning often leads the list, as people turn to grills and gas stoves. ‘About 70 people die every year and many more are injured from carbon monoxide poisoning caused by portable generators,’ the Consumer Product Safety Commission warns. ‘Carbon monoxide (CO) from a generator used indoors can kill you and your family in minutes.’  … In 2008, Hurricane Ike hit the Texas coast near Galveston, killing 74 people in Texas and Louisiana. The largest percentage were people who died from carbon monoxide poisoning after the storm had passed and left 2.3 million people without power — 13 people died this way, state health officials reported. Eight people drowned and 12 died of heart attacks, strokes and other heart-related causes.”

-- Hubris is the most interesting theme in Larson’s book. “The nation in 1900 was swollen with pride and technological confidence,” he writes. “There was talk even of controlling the weather — of subduing hail with cannon blasts and igniting forest fires to bring rain. In this new age, nature itself seemed no great obstacle.”

Even though they’re vastly more accurate, today’s forecasts include nuance and acknowledge uncertainty. For most of last week, it remained unclear whether Irma would make landfall on the east or west coast of Florida, for example, and the government’s forecasts said as much.

David Von Drehle marvels in his column for today’s paper that Irma reminds us of all we still don’t know about the natural world: “As 21st-century heirs to the Enlightenment, we know an awful lot. We know how to edit a gene. We know how to convert millions of simultaneous messages — conversations, texts, memes, movies — into packets of ones and zeros and speed them from tower to tower to another person’s hand. We know how to convert the energy of sunlight into a ride in the car. Yet we still don’t know everything. In the case of Irma, meteorologists and their computers could read the air currents across a hemisphere and forecast the storm’s eventual collision with an air mass that would push it sharply to the north. What they could not predict five days in advance, the hole in their knowledge, was the precise spot above Earth where the collision would occur...

“One could choose to marvel at the overall accuracy of the forecast or grumble about its imperfection. The difference is largely a matter of temperament,” David concludes. “Across the Caribbean, throughout Florida, in sodden Houston and shaken Mexico and elsewhere in this world of death and woe, nature is reminding us of all we have yet to learn — and all that is beyond our paltry control.”

...

I realize the article is focused on US lives, but it makes an interesting point about how much worse it could be.

[GreyhoundFan]

"‘People are roaming like zombies.’ Virgin Islands stagger after storm passes."

Spoiler

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The storm-stricken Caribbean took on the feel of a sprawling disaster zone Sunday, with Cuban first responders using inflatable rafts to navigate flooded streets as panicked families sent up social-media pleas in search of loved ones on hard-hit islands farther east.

On St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands, “people there are roaming like zombies,” said Stacey Alvarado, a bar owner who managed to leave for the mainland. Her husband, who is still there, told her Sunday that residents and tourists are in shock. “They don’t know what to do. The island was wiped out. It’s like the walking dead down there.” Other islanders sent social media messages pleading for help, decrying looting and a series of armed burglaries.

“We need help,” wrote St. John blogger Jenn Manes. “We need the United States government to step up. We need military. We need security.”

In Cuba, where the government said it had evacuated 1 million residents, Hurricane Irma’s driving winds and pelting rains sent roofs flying, knocked over trees, wrecked building and caused large-scale flooding along the northern coast. Officials in Havana warned of flooding that would last through Monday. In the city of Santa Clara, the Associated Press reported that 39 buildings had collapsed.

As streets turned into rivers, authorities took to inflatable rafts to access coastal neighborhoods. Some Cubans had even sought shelter in caves. The brutal storm struck Cuba along a coast studded with resorts that are among the pillars of the island’s economy. Authorities warned of heavy damage from the storm, which has killed at least 25 people across the Caribbean.

“The hardest-hit provinces are Camaguey, Villa Clara, Sancti Spiritus and to some extent Matanzas, the resort area of Varadero, which was directly in the path of the hurricane and where all the tourists were evacuated,” Richard Paterson, the CARE organization’s representative in Cuba, said by phone from Havana.

“Power has been turned off throughout the city, in fact, throughout the country,” he said. “The electricity infrastructure received extensive serious damage.”

European governments came under fire as critics accused them of being slow to respond to crises in their Caribbean territories, where massive damage left thousands homeless as looting broke out in the streets.

On Sunday, the French government announced that President Emmanuel Macron would travel to St. Martin, an island split between France and the Netherlands, on Tuesday. The French have already deployed more than 1,000 personnel to the Caribbean region in an aid-and-relief effort.

The evacuation of U.S. citizens from the Dutch side resumed Sunday, according to State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert, after being suspended in anticipation of Hurricane Jose, which later veered off to the north. Priority is being given to those needing urgent medical care, she said.

Residents in the devastated British Virgin Islands used Facebook in frantic calls for help.

One user, Lanein Blanchette, echoed many others still looking for word from relatives and friends whom they had not heard from since Irma began belting the region last week.

“There is absolutely no news about East End on any of these pages,” she wrote. “I’ve posted over ten times asking for assistance as to whether anyone has seen my uncle Kingston ‘Iman’ Eddy and not one person has replied. I am lost for words at this point. I honestly don’t know what else to do.”

At the same time, dramatic tales of escape began to emerge.

Lauren Boquette, a 48-year-old restaurant manager on St. John, said his family had barricaded themselves in the bathroom of their home. When they emerged, he said, they saw a scene of total destruction.

“It was beyond rough times, it was end-of-the-world times. Everything normal to us has been destroyed,” he said.

Authorities in the devastated island nation of Antigua and Barbuda faced a historic effort ahead to rebuild. The island of Barbuda suffered damage to almost 100 percent of its structures.

“In Barbuda, where they evacuated everybody, now they have to figure out where to start, how to construct basic need services, how to figure out what to do with families that lost their homes,” said Jan Gelfland of the International Federation of the Red Cross.

I've never been to Barbuda, but the idea that almost every structure was damaged is hard to imagine. It's so very awful.

[GreyhoundFan]

This is an interesting analysis from the Capital Weather Gang: "Why Hurricane Irma wasn’t far worse, and how close it came to catastrophe"

Spoiler

Hurricane Irma has wrought havoc all over Florida and is no slouch of a storm. But, while extremely costly, it may not rank among the state’s worst-ever hurricane disasters, as had been feared.

Leading up to its back-to-back landfalls in the Florida Keys and on Marco Island, several twists of fortune eased the pain the storm inflicted on the state. And only slight deviations would have made the storm’s outcome much more severe.

The first stroke of good luck for Florida occurred when the center of a Category 5 Irma scraped along Cuba’s north coast. This, of course, turned into Cuba’s misfortune. But Irma’s interaction with land weakened the storm from a potentially catastrophic Category 5 to a Category 3.

...

While Irma recovered some of its strength and made landfall in the Keys as a low-end Category 4, it was not the same behemoth it was before its Cuban encounter.

Key West then caught the next lucky break. While the storm’s vicious eyewall battered the island and winds gusted over 90 mph, the most intense right-front quadrant of the eyewall, where wind and storm surge are maximized, passed just to its east.

...

The Florida Keys’ far less developed zone from Sugarloaf Key to Marathon caught the brunt of the eyewall’s wind and surge:

...

When Irma approached the Florida peninsula, there was no “good” course for it to follow. Devastation was guaranteed from a storm so big and so strong (attested to by the 6 million-plus power outages), but the track it ultimately pursued was better than some alternatives.

The dangerous right-front quadrant with the worst winds and biggest surge targeted the stretch from Everglades City to Marco Island, a less populated zone than many others.

...

If the right-front quadrant had instead targeted Miami, for example, the storm surge disaster would have been unimaginably bad — akin to the worst-case scenario we wrote about before the storm.

“The storm surge flooding in Miami [on Sunday] is a mere fraction of what would have happened if the core of #Irma had been farther east,” tweeted Rick Knabb, a hurricane expert at the Weather Channel and former director of the National Hurricane Center.

[Graphic: See the storm surge and its impact]

Finally, when Irma’s journey inland over the Florida peninsula near Naples and the eyewall’s trajectory over land helped seal the deal in terms of reduced impact. If the storm center had stayed over the warm Gulf of Mexico on its way up the coast, it would have maintained its power longer, and its right-front quadrant could have battered more population centers, including the very vulnerable Tampa.

Ultimately, Key West, Miami and Tampa — all perilously exposed to hurricanes due to their geography, population and infrastructure — just missed a much more damaging experience from Irma.

Before the storm, many trusted forecasters warned that Irma could be one of the most infamous storms in history. Did they go too far in sounding the alarm about this storm? Given all of these near misses and the fact that only the most subtle changes in the storm’s evolution would have caused much more horrifying scenes, the answer is probably no.

For better or worse, in predicting this storm, forecasters had to emphasize the worst-case scenarios. When decisions had to be made about evacuations late last week, for example, a direct landfall in South Florida seemed plausible.

Then, forecasts couldn’t pin down whether the eye of Irma would scrape across Cuba’s north coast or narrowly remain over open water, which made the difference between 130 mph winds and 160 mph winds or stronger.

Lastly, when the storm track shifted to Florida’s west side, knowing exactly where the storm would come ashore — which had massive implications — couldn’t be pinned down.

President Trump, before a winter storm that underperformed expectations in March, said something often true but inconvenient about storm forecasting: “Let’s hope it’s not going to be as bad as some people are predicting. Usually it isn’t.”

Until forecasts are good enough that we can pinpoint the enormously consequential shifts and wobbles, forecasters will continue to err on the side of caution. And, in many, maybe most cases, the outcome won’t be as severe as feared. But given what’s at stake if a worst-case scenario materializes and potential victims need to be ready, forecasters have a serious obligation to communicate the possibility.

The tweets, videos, and graphics are interesting.

[Cartmann99]

It's going to be a long road back for these folks:

 

[Cartmann99]

Some good news:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Florida struggles with top job in Irma’s wake: Restoring power to millions"

Spoiler

MIAMI — The remnants of once-fearsome Hurricane Irma rolled through the southeast on Tuesday, still carrying flood risks and leaving a staggering recovery effort in its wake that includes simply trying to turn the lights back on across huge swaths of Florida.

The unprecedented outages — knocking out power to more than half of Florida’s homes and businesses — also unleashed a cascade effect across the region. Millions of people who fled Irma may struggle to return home for weeks as crews try to deal with downed lines, debris and a storm-swamped electrical grid. Electrical power is needed, too, to keep water and sanitation systems operating.

For those with a generator, fuel supplies depend on the success of a logistical network trying to keep gas flowing to all points of battered and sweltering Florida.

“Power pretty much drives everything,” Christopher Krebs, assistant secretary for Infrastructure Protection at the Department of Homeland Security, said at a news briefing Tuesday.

Krebs said Tuesday morning that as many as 15 million people in Florida lacked power, an astonishing figure that represented three-quarters of the state’s entire population.

This number will evolve, though, as crews are able to navigate debris and try to restore power. State emergency officials said that some 5.6 million power company customers lacked power on Tuesday morning, representing about 54 percent of all customers statewide, a figure that had dropped since Monday. Since each account can represent more than one person, the overall figures remained at remarkable levels.

Perhaps most alarming to those in Florida who awoke without air conditioning or working refrigerators is the reality that in some cases, power may not return for days or weeks.

“This is going to take some time to restore, and in some circumstances, it will be a situation about rebuilding,” Krebs said.

Krebs’s figure was higher than those offered Monday by utility companies supplying power to a large number of Floridians.

Eric Silagy, president and chief executive of Florida Power and Light, the state’s largest utility and which powers half of the state, said Monday as many as 9 million people were affected by his company’s outages alone. Shawna Berger, a spokeswoman for Duke Energy, said 1.2 million of its 1.8 million customers were without power Monday in the state. Berger said if you multiply that number by 2.5 — per the latest census data, she said — it shows that 3 million people were affected at the peak blackouts.

“We’ve never had that many outages,” Silagy said. “I don’t think any utility in the country has.”

Gov. Rick Scott (R) warned the many residents still stuck in the dark that “it’s going to take us a long time to get the power back up.”

Florida was not alone. Blackouts hit wide areas in Georgia and South Carolina — with more blows possible as the remains of Irma continue moving north.

Georgia power officials said Tuesday that about 800,000 people in the state lacked power. Some air service was scheduled to resume to Miami and other Florida airports, but hundreds of flights remained canceled in Atlanta, a key hub in the country’s air travel system.

The National Hurricane Center said Irma, now classified as a post-tropical cyclone, was expected to weaken throughout the day Tuesday as it moves through the Southeast United States en route to the Tennessee Valley.

In a sign of how the storm had lost steam as it moved inland, the hurricane center said its advisory Tuesday morning was the final dispatch it would release on Irma.

Still, Irma was not entirely done. The hurricane center said its rain bands would cause “localized intense rainfall” that could lead to flash flooding, even as the storm’s rainfall left behind flooding in Florida and potentially Georgia and Alabama.

In Jacksonville, the city tucked along Florida’s northeast coast that had seen historic flooding as the St. Johns River swelled, the sheriff’s office said Tuesday that mandatory evacuation orders had been lifted.

Rescuers had used boats, water scooters and even surfboards to get to residents surprised by the rising waters, said Kimberly Morgan, a spokeswoman for the Clay County emergency center. “You have to get creative in a situation like this,” she said.

The sheriff’s office said 356 people had been rescued from the flooding and added an admonishing note on Twitter, saying it hoped those people “will take evacuation orders more seriously in the future.”

Remarkably, the storm could have been much worse.

That was the grateful mantra on the lips of many who surveyed the damage in the mainland United States. Though there was significant property damage in the Florida Keys and in some parts of southwest Florida, officials said there were investigating just a small number of fatalities that came as the storm made landfall. It was unclear how many were directly related to the storm.

Damage to water supplies in the Keys remained a top concern, however. A Defense Department statement said an estimated 10,000 people who rode out the hurricane in the Keys could still face evacuation. But there were no immediate plans underway to move people from the island chain.

Authorities in Monroe County, which includes the Florida Keys, said they would begin allowing residents and business owners to return to some parts of the archipelago on Tuesday morning, including Key Largo, Tavernier and Islamorada.

In a message posted online, Monroe County officials said people heading back to the Keys should remember that “most areas are still without power and water,” cellphone reception is questionable and most gas stations remain shut.

Marilyn Miller awoke in St. Petersburg at 1:30 a.m. Monday to a pitch-black house. A native Floridian, Miller was expecting the outages and has even gotten used to them after enduring years of tropical storms.

What she didn’t expect, she said, was the possibility that the blackout could last for days.
As neighbor after neighbor on her block tried to call Duke Energy for help, they heard that just 80 homes in their neighborhood had lost power — out of more than 100,000 across Pinellas County.

It became clear, Miller said, that her neighborhood would not be the priority. So she started making readjustments to a time before technology.

“I need my cellphone. It wakes me up in the morning for work. I need my air conditioner at nighttime,” she said. “Can’t cook. Can’t see. Can’t do anything.”

Driving in many cities remained extremely hazardous — an exercise in vigilance due to downed trees and the ubiquitous palm fronds that lurked in wait like alligators on the street. In Miami, some residents expressed frustration about the evacuations, which in many cases ultimately weren’t necessary.

“Everyone got stirred up, and they were told to leave,” said Sara Edelman, 29, a biologist walking along 104th Street with her mother, Philis Edelman, 60, an officer worker. “And now there’s no one to clean the trees up.”

Dan Zumpano, 44, who lives nearby, said he believes authorities began evacuations “way too early” in an abundance of caution, driving people from places that ultimately weren’t seriously impacted by the storm into areas that were: “I thought it was the right thing to do, but I think they sent a lot of people right into the core of the hurricane.”

That was a familiar story: People who evacuated from Miami to Tampa. And then, in some cases, from Tampa to Orlando. The storm followed many of them the entire time. “Every day you saw the models changing,” Zumpano said.

But all along Miami’s streets, signs also remained of the hurricane’s fury and the tragic possibilities that might have been.

Sailboats on Miami’s Coconut Grove marina were flipped over. Million-dollar yachts were half submerged in the bay. Once-idyllic parks looked like desolate war zones. Large trees toppled over, roots dangling in the air.

Resident Paul Plante came to the marina to check on his home and boat, which he had docked indoors. His boat was fine, and he and his sister looked in disbelief at the submerged boats in the bay that weren’t so lucky.

“You have to take nine different roads to get here now, but everything was okay,” he said. “The storm surge could have been so much worse. We’re lucky.”

The Miami residents who are whining about evacuating are too much. All indicators pointed towards Miami taking a direct hit, so officials decided to tell them to evacuate early. What do these people think, you can simply "beam" six freaking million people out? There's only one major interstate that leads north, it can't handle six million people all at one time.