Storm in a tea cup: The weather thread

[MsD]

Adam Ant has cancelled three out of the four Florida dates, but is going ahead tonight. A lot of general nervousness in the area, and friends who have fancy hotels booked are bailing and driving north after the show.

As HP says, the islands ... how terrible for them. Yes, they're hardened to it, but don't have the resources and robust infrastructure for real resilience.

[Satchmo Distel]

St Petersburg will "only" get tropical storm effects, probable max winds 75mph, according to current tracks. Miami and Fort Lauderdale are likely to be in worse shape, as with Matthew 12 months ago, but their buildings are pretty sturdy, having been redesigned after the huge disaster of the 1920s.

MsD, can you post a link to, or list of, Adam's revised dates when confirmed, in case he comes close to my area? Who are backing him and who are the support act(s)?

[ursus arctos]

Report on the damage in the Leeward Islands, the full extent of which remains unknown

[San Bernardhinault]

It's terrifying stuff. Particularly as - apart from St Martin - most of the worst affected islands are also the smallest, with the least infrascture: Barbuda, Anguilla, St Barts and the BVI. And I've not seen any reports from Sint Eustatius or Saba yet.

[MsD]

St Petersburg will "only" get tropical storm effects, probable max winds 75mph, according to current tracks. Miami and Fort Lauderdale are likely to be in worse shape, as with Matthew 12 months ago, but their buildings are pretty sturdy, having been redesigned after the huge disaster of the 1920s.

MsD, can you post a link to, or list of, Adam's revised dates when confirmed, in case he comes close to my area? Who are backing him and who are the support act(s)?

I will do, I will put them in the music forum.

[Satchmo Distel]

Thanks, MsD.

The worst reports I have seen from the Caribbean concern Barbuda and the Dutch and French sections of St Martin [the Dutch one is correctly termed Sint Maarten]. To me it looks like they will be rebuilding from scratch, like a Year Zero. I assume that France and the Netherlands will bear the costs of rebuilding as they are still, as I understand it, imperial colonies.

Info on likely impacts in Florida is subject to interpretation. It seems that the southern east coast will get it worse than my area in SWFL, as shown by the fact that Miami Beach is already under compulsory evacuation, which I have not seen applied here yet. If/when SWFL is under an evacuation order, coastal areas would be first in line I would think, because they have farthest to flee and the roads are fucked - just a single exit lane over a bridge in many cases. Fortunately my wife and I installed huge fuck off shutters costing over $10,000 back in 2011, so we are probably as safe behind those as anywhere else. We also have four cats, whom we will not abandon or evacuate (infact I think my wife spent the ten grand to protect the cats).

The other issue is where exactly do you evacuate to? The cone is headed straight up the land mass of Florida and Georgia and is 400 miles wide.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

St Martin's airport has been so badly damaged that planes can no longer land. And the Dutch navy have reported that the harbour, similarly, has been so badly hit that they can't get ships into dock either. Oh and power's out. It's not entirely clear how the islanders are going to get through the next few days, let alone begin to rebuild. This is a tiny island with no facilities to do anything from scratch - all building materials with the possible exception of wood are imported. If they begin to runout of food and there's no access to airport or harbour can they airdrop it ?

[Satchmo Distel]

I dunno, maybe some kind of military effort is needed, like the Army Corps of Engineers in the US, who would be dropped from the air initially. Treat it like supplying a war zone.

[ad hoc]

It's going to be really tough but on the plus side these islands are not that isolated. There are places nearby that can come in with supplies fairly quickly. Rebuilding will take a while but they should be able to get fresh water and food there pretty quickly.

[Bruno]

This article on Slate.com yesterday (republished from Grist) says

Quite simply, meteorologists never expected a storm like Irma. The storm appears to have exceeded (or is about to exceed) the maximum theoretical strength for a hurricane in its environment—an estimate based on current water temperature and other conditions.

Why would their estimates be off? Anyway, they've batted around calling it a Category 6. This seems worrying:

The state has transformed since the most recent Category 5 hurricane, Andrew, hit in 1992. Miami alone has added 600,000 new residents in that time, and the state’s storm-buffering wetlands have degraded amid a push for urbanization. In the past 25 years, 1 in 10 new homes in America were built in Florida, during a slow spell for hurricane landfalls. That lucky streak now appears to be coming to an end.

[Wouter D]

Some images from Sint Maarten:

[hobbes]

In rather less upsetting news, Necker knackers Tory

[Bruno]

NPR interviewed the president of the Antigua & Barbuda Red Cross yesterday, who said the prime minister was understating the damage. He said that by all appearances the country's infrastructure was 100% destroyed, that it's worse than what the pictures show.

[Hot Pepsi]

Apparently the Red Cross is just out of their depth.
http://www.slate.com/articles/busine...a_new_way.html

A few years back, I saw a Charlie Rose interview with Sean Penn who, regardless of what you think of celebrities doing this kind of thing, really does give a shit and has spent a lot of time in Haiti. He was really honest about what he saw there and it wasn't good. His contention was that NGOs had a tendency to "represent" projects to keep the donations flowing from back home, but were often failing to follow through. On the other hand, he was impressed with work being done by the US Marines. And he's not a "support the troops" kind of guy. The tendency on the US left - Democracy Now! et al. - is to clutch one's pearls and claim that US military in places like that is imperialism and that the only people we can trust to help the Hatians are the Venezuelans because they only care about people and have no political motives of their own, but that doesn't seem to jive with the observations of people who have been there.

The imperialism bus left the station years ago anyway, and I suspect the military is the only group that has the gear and the command and control to handle shit like this. Indeed, wouldn't it be great if we could transform the military, or at least a big part of it, into a humanitarian organization - applying all of that West Point/Annapolis discipline and know how to something productive?

[Bruno]

Yeah. I was sorry to wonder if the guy had an agenda in overstating the damage. An academic distinction in light of the evidence though.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Apparently the Red Cross is just out of their depth.
http://www.slate.com/articles/busine...a_new_way.html

A few years back, I saw a Charlie Rose interview with Sean Penn who, regardless of what you think of celebrities doing this kind of thing, really does give a shit and has spent a lot of time in Haiti. He was really honest about what he saw there and it wasn't good. His contention was that NGOs had a tendency to "represent" projects to keep the donations flowing from back home, but were often failing to follow through. On the other hand, he was impressed with work being done by the US Marines. And he's not a "support the troops" kind of guy. The tendency on the US left - Democracy Now! et al. - is to clutch one's pearls and claim that US military in places like that is imperialism and that the only people we can trust to help the Hatians are the Venezuelans because they only care about people and have no political motives of their own, but that doesn't seem to jive with the observations of people who have been there.

The imperialism bus left the station years ago anyway, and I suspect the military is the only group that has the gear and the command and control to handle shit like this. Indeed, wouldn't it be great if we could transform the military, or at least a big part of it, into a humanitarian organization - applying all of that West Point/Annapolis discipline and know how to something productive?

To a considerable extent that's pretty much how Canadian Forces worked — prior to Afghanistan.

[Satchmo Distel]

Sean Penn was very good on an episode that Anthony Bourdain did in Haiti.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Hurricane Katia is likely to hit Mexico apparently. Which is all they need right now. A meteorologist from Quintana Roo this morning made the point that "Hurricane Season" used to last about three to four weeks, now it's getting to be three to four months.

[Satchmo Distel]

Fucking track of Irma is shifting farther west. I'm currently in the track of the eye, which is 150 miles wide and unavoidable. I was never planning to evacuate because we have four cats and good shutters (although much of the roof blowing off can't be ruled out), but even if we had made a run for it during the last 48 hours, there is nowhere to go to avoid this track because:

a) it's too wide.

b) gas is in such sporadic supply that fuel would be a huge gamble (we were lucky to get some at 8pm yesterday)

c) gridlock on bottlenecks, of which there are many.

My wife, btw, has been allowed to postpone her flight 8 days at no charge. Thanks to Delta for that small mercy.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Looks as though Jose, now a Cat 4, is going to move through more or less the same areas as Irma - on this live map it looks slightly less far from Barbuda than Irma is from Florida

https://earth.nullschool.net/#curren...-57.409,16.760

[Lang Spoon]

Aw Christ almighty.

[Bruno]

Hang in there Satchmo! and post here til the power goes out

[San Bernardhinault]

The theory was that Jose wouldn't be as bad - it was meant to be on a more northerly track, but that seems to have changed. It was also not meant to be able to develop that amount of power. Irma had disrupted the atmosphere sufficiently that it would be hard for Jose to maintain structure; and hurricanes actually cool the ocean as they travel over them, meaning that there shouldn't have been the amount of warm water needed to generate a major hurricane. So it seems to actually come as a big surprise that Jose has made it to Cat 4. It shouldn't have done.

It looks unlikely to be a problem for most people, but unfortunately it looks likely to skirt Barbuda, Anguilla and St Martin again, which really, really sucks.

Also - good luck, Satchmo. It seems odd to want the hurricane to track east over the more major population center, but from what I've seen Miami seems much better able to cope than the west coast of Florida.

[Satchmo Distel]

Floods will be the big story. The Everglades is projected to be under 9 feet of storm surge water, as is Marco, whilst anywhere west of the I75 from Naples to Tampa is looking at 1-4 foot. I am thankfully 20 miles east of that so as long as I avoid major wind damage, I will be OK.

Regarding power, the height of the storm is Sunday morning so I expect to wake up with no power but hopefully have it until bedtime tomorrow.

I don't anticipate I will be able to do any teaching next week so I have been preparing three sets of lesson plans based on how many hours of class time I lose from the courses. I'm not sure if universities have the flexibility to extend semesters in these instances, but I don't want to have to dump entire chapters of material, or condense four exams into three (because it penalizes students, reducing their chances of recovering from a bad start or mistake).

[Cal Alamein]

I know I'm reaching, but may the storm fizzle off to the middle of the Atlantic and prove the forecasters wrong.

Don't fret too much on lessons, can't see your school worrying about attendance next week. Take care of yourself and crossed fingers Florida gets a lot of wind and some rain, but not too much damage.