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This topic comprises 4 pages: 1 2 3 4
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Author
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Topic: Hurricane Frances
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William Hooper
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1879
From: Mobile, AL USA
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 09-10-2004 03:25 AM
Only in that it was "recognition humor" for the folks in the gulf coast states. Come down to the gulf coast & you'll hear it adapted for other states in every state you visit. I've been in every gulf coast state except Texas when some hurricane has been approaching, & when the hurricane is mentioned at meetings, convenience store counters, gas station, ANYTHING, folks always say "Get away, (name of hurricane)! Go on over to Texas!" Or Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, or Florida, depending on where you are at the time. The humor is that 1) silliness because nobody can control where the hurricane goes, 2) very black gallows humor of passing around a gun like Russian Roulette with your friends.
The difference between approaching hurricanes for the gulf coast states & the Atlantic coast states is that for the Atlantic states, there is a chance the hurricane can just head north & avoid the coast. However, when a hurricane enters the Gulf of Mexico, it's just a matter of which location on the coast is going to get it. Somebody is doomed.
It's like Lifeboat!
Someone is going to die! Who will it be?
Although at the time, levity was a little more appropriate because Ivan wasn't a category four then.
When a gulf coast hurricane is coming, there's this sort of "Uh-oh, where's the WORST place for it to go, & what's left?" ordination of landfall horrors.
1. New Orleans: Nobody EVER wants another hurricane to go there. NOLA is below sea level, as almost everyone knows, & so a lot of water would be Really Bad, even with all the extreme flood control engineering. But what a lot of people don't know is that the Mississippi pretty much wraps around one side of New Orleans, & on the other side is Lake Ponchartrain. New Orleans will just fill up like a bowl. Betsy (the last hurricane to hit New Orleans) wasn't as bad as it could have been, things are more conducive to disaster now, & everybody just hopes luck will hold out. Evacuation when Georges approached scratched the surface of some of the problems of emptying New Orleans - it's not the richest city on the earth, & public transportation for lots of residents was a big problem along the routes away from the hurricane.
2. Florida: Everybody is terrified by the thought of a hurricane hitting New Orleans, but there's a belief that the people in Florida are Just Crazy. As Charley showed, there'd been no realistic operational consideration of evacuating the peninsula. They got a whole lot of schooling with Frances, though, & were lucky it came after the short subject of Charley. Nobody wants a hurricane to go to the Florida peninsula.
That leaves areas more easily evacuated inland: The Texas coast, Louisiana coast, Mississippi coast, Alabama coast, & the Florida panhandle.
3. The Louisiana coast: The Louisiana coast is undergoing massive erosion & subsidence - it's sinking, & losing an area the size of Manhattan every year. It's due to a number of things: the levees, channels being cut by offshore oil companies, etc. It's having major economic impact on the seafood & petroleum industries. The hurricane does not need to go hit the fragile, crumbling LA coast.
4. The Texas gulf coast: There's a lot of difference & a long way between Galveston & Brownsville, but the coastline is very complex with many inland bays & other features, & built up in many areas. Hurricanes striking the TX coast have one less-horrible aspect: hurricanes lose strength over land, & the "dirty side" is to the east. So when one hits the TX coast, the duration is usually shorter & less severe traveling inland. However, the coastal "profile" makes it a TERRIBLE place in many places. Also, there's this thing where a lot more people seem to die in Texas hurricanes.
5. The Mississippi coast: Love the MS folks, but MS has got those barrier islands which tend to knock the strength of hurricanes down when they come straight up the gulf. DIDN'T MAKE A WHOLE LOT OF DIFFERENCE WITH CAMILLE, THOUGH.
http://www.maritimemuseum.org/camille/index.htm
Picture of other hurricanes are always terrible pictures of destruction, but for those of us who stuck our heads out after Camille, there's still been no comparison. The eeriest thing, & it took a while to figure it out, was the frequent absence of debris. Everything just gone, like it was bulldozed AND hauled off.
Ivan could be as powerful as Camille, & possibly larger.
But Mississippi can evacuate inland, there's not much on the coast now (since Camille) except casinos as far as up to category 3 would be considered. Knock 'em down, nobody really cares. Category 3 and above, the back bay, etc. causes problems.
6. The Alabama coast: Well, uh, Mobile's right there. Frederic was bad, but all the other hurricanes (Georges, Danny, maybe missing a couple) were not above category 3 winds, & were mostly rain. Mobile knows roof & storm drains like Einstein
http://www.usouthal.edu/geography/fearn/480page/99Taylor/Taylor.htm
Most hurricanes, if they're just going to be mostly the rain which causes most of the damage with these things, can come on here & Mobile will just have several more rainy days, like when Danny moved into the bay & rained for DAYS. All the weather people are amazed by Danny, but the locals didn't see what the big deal was.
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/1997danny.html
The Alabama gulf coast away from Mobile is pretty much, after Frederic, just a wall of condos now. Knock 'em all down, the people can get out & often have to.
http://www.southalabama.edu/meteorology/hurricanedanny.html
You can see what just the winds of Danny did to the condos. One of the MAJOR enablers of destruction during hurricanes is that the federal government CONTINUES to provide cheap insurance for hurricane & flood prone areas, stuff is knocked down again & again, the property owners act like it's their RIGHT to continually build in these areas & soak the taxpayers. The most recent 'development' of this is a huge overbuilding of condominiums on Dauphin Island, which is actually just a sand bar.
7. The Florida panhandle: They can evacuate inland, but they're still worse than the MS or AL coast. North Florida is actually more like South Georgia, & it's not very economically resilient. Florida makes a big deal over having no state income tax, but outside of areas where there's not a lot of tourism, you really notice the absence of managed drainage, streetlights, sidewalks, road maintenance, etc. There's a lot of destruction & sustained personal horror with hurricanes that make landfall on the Florida panhandle.
I said go to Florida, mainly at the time as the traditional joke, but if I had to pick, it would still be there.
1. The models have a slim chance it could break east, & the dirty side could be over the Atlantic.
2. The FL EMA's are all mobilized & working VERY well now, & preparation & recovery for #3 is going to be best handled by those folks.
3. The population is already non-complacent, mobile, & able to adapt to preparation & recovery.
4. A lot is already tore up & not repaired, as opposed to places that could get tore up newly.
5. This is very crass, but realistic: an election is coming up. MS, AL, LA & TX are already considered going to the incumbents, but FL is still a battleground state for its electoral vote. For preparation & recovery, the Federal gov't is going to be all over FL like an 18 year old virgin on a honeymoon.
More reasons why not to let the hurricane go to FL
1. If it skirts the gulf coast, the dirty side will grind up the FL coast all the way up, while the hurricane builds or retains its strength over the gulf.
2. The Tampa Theatre is on the Florida gulf coast. Shoo, hurricane, shoo!
2. If it goes over lake Okeechobee, there's going to be a cataclysm on the order of the last time a hurricane went over it.
When it gets into the gulf, someone's going to get it!
No denial or evasion, who do you pick?
The nhc's historical data site is down due to traffic load being distributed for current info, but it's fun to look at the tracks for all storms 1900 - present overlaid. Kinda chaotic on the east coast, a funnel in the gulf.
For Mark Lensenmayer, who likes looking at the individual models used for forecasts, relayed by the SFWMB for the 09/09/2004 5pm forecast:
Note that it defers to nhc public product, because it's data the nhc uses for its public product. It's interesting, but not *extremely* useful, each track has its own margin of error, & the distribution is close enough to get a mean of the probabilities & indicat a range, which is what the nhc public product does. Faster, less susceptible to misinterpretation:
That's 11pm - oh no, expected a little more easterly now! The range of probabilites for the track has become wider over a longer period of forecast, too, indicating that it's expected to slow down. That's not good, either.
Edit:
Dayum, Jeremy, you don't want a category 4 hurricane going up your nose. The folks in Florida already got their stuff in the car & are ready to go, what's already been demolished can't be made worse, & all the emergency services (including just getting water & power restored) are fast-tracked.
It can't be that boring in Corpus Christi! Whatever happened to riding around & shooting at stop signs?
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Bruce McGee
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1776
From: Asheville, NC USA... Nowhere in Particular.
Registered: Aug 1999
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posted 09-10-2004 06:55 AM
Most restaurants are closed here due to the ongoing water disruptions. There are water pick-up stations around town. Schools are closed again today. Many businesses will remain closed here today too.
We have been told by the water authority that 2 of the main spillways in the North Fork Lake, half of our water supply, are damaged due to flooding. They have been working 24 hours a day to repair this. They have to replace all the pipe foundations, and reset everything, then re-install the 2 huge pipes. We've never had anything like this happen in my lifetime, so this is a pretty big deal.
We saw the damage on TV yesterday morning on "Good Morning America." Biltmore Village got alot of damage from high water.
The French Broad river is still above flood stage, but is coming down fast. This is a rude wake-up call to all the people that own property here in flood plains. People being interviewed on TV are saying that they have never seen anything like this here. Well, I have, in 1962, and 1977. There's been alot of money spent on tourism in these flood-prone areas in the last 20 years. Much of that money is now gone with the current.
Thanks, Jason, for your comments.
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William Hooper
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1879
From: Mobile, AL USA
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 09-13-2004 05:04 AM
quote:
Well.... we'll just have to wait and see. Retired from Kodak and living on the gulf coast of Florida for 5 months now and this is what we fell into!
"Florida, folks! Sunshine, sunshine! Perpetual sunshine all the year around! Let's get the auction started before we get a tornado."
-- Groucho Marx, selling Florida real estate in The Cocoanuts
They didn't show you this?
Hurricanes since 1990
Like William Parr mentioned, if a gulf hurricane doesn't hit the Florida peninsula, it might as well not exist for most of the media. Since the forecast track has moved westward, Yahoo news is posting an AP story that it looks like now Florida will be spared, & the Florida gulf coast may only be "brushed" by the hurricane. No mention that the hurricane is actually still going to make landfall somewhere; it's a hurricane headed straight for the Florida panhandle. Destin, Appalachicola, & Pensacola apparently aren't on their maps of Florida. The panhandle has had 4 hurricanes in the last 6 years.
Hurricanes 1965 to present: 
The maps show only hurricanes, but include the tracks as they downgrade to Tropical Storms as they pass inland. Tropical storms which come ashore are not shown.
quote:
MUSN 216N 826W 33 X X X 33 PANAMA CITY FL X X 2 11 13
MUHA 230N 824W 4 3 1 1 9 PENSACOLA FL X X 2 12 14
MUAN 219N 850W 56 X X X 56 MOBILE AL X X 2 12 14
MMCZ 205N 869W 21 X X X 21 GULFPORT MS X X 3 11 14
MMMD 210N 897W 1 2 X 1 4 BURAS LA X X 7 9 16
MARATHON FL X X 1 3 4 NEW ORLEANS LA X X 4 10 14
MIAMI FL X X X 3 3 NEW IBERIA LA X X 2 10 12
Woo hoo! You can get even odds pretty much from Panama City to New Orleans this morning!
Go to Florida, Ivan!
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