Surprised nobody has started a thread yet... We are down to the 6th for the first major of the season: Florence Currently there are 4 tropical storms or hurricanes in the North Atlantic: @superdave - hope you are not a flood zone
A weather blogger my wife follows (an occupational hazard of her former job) has taken to talking about the predicted rainfall in feet, as in "Florence is going to drop 3 feet of rain in some places". The figure that's being bandied about is 10 Trillion gallons of rain. That's a lot of water, and as 5pm, the storm had slowed down to 5 MPH, which means it's going to just hover over the land when it hits. That was supposed to be one of the good things about a hurricane: it would move on, eventually. It's going to be a pretty hellish landscape for some...
A lot of the stories I've been hearing is that Florence is expected to bring a 9 foot storm surge north of the eye, and then stall and cause flooding in an already saturated area. I just heard a story of a person who did not leave her house because they did not want to get stuck in flooding trying to get back to their house.
And here's a nice opinion piece https://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/editorials/article218318010.html
There will be lots and lots of stories of people who do NOT evacuate. We seem to like the myth of the doughty "pioneer" braving the elements and tending to their homestead. Except that a lot of those intrepid pioneers died. I have a cousin-in-law who is staying put in Wrightsville Beach, which is about as close to the epicenter of Florence as you can get. They have several feral cats they tend and just this spring they bought a flock of chickens. They don't want to leave the cats. You know those doughty pioneers, they would have thought my cousin and his wife were fecking idiots for staying on their land to protect their cats.... And it get's worse. My cousin's wife has Krohn's disease, and if that's not bad enough, she has ulcerous colitis (?) She's too frail to walk in much more than a foot of surf. She could very easily get washed away by a waist-high flood. And yet, those cats.... I've been speculating why evacuating people in the face of a hurricane is such a problem. I think it has to do with the slooooow time frame of a hurricane's arrival. We've been looking at Florence for well over a week now, so everyone has heard the dire warnings. And yet, two days ago, we thought it was going to be Virginia Beach that what going to get the brunt of the storm. Lots of people in the Tidewater were evacuated and they're going to feel really silly if they left home for a week and return to find that only 5 - 8" were dumped. And that's the problem: I don't think that many people have the ego to drop everything and leave, for no ultimate reason, more than once in their lives. It's embarrassing. And of course, they have pets.
Not to worry about help and relief. FEMA and the Coast Guard and standing by. They may be a bit short of funds to do much though. The WH and DHS have decided to relieve them of $39 million to use towards kidnapping kids.
Uncertainty is a big factor. For example, Irma was supposedly coming straight to Miami as a cat-4, but it stayed a little longer than expected over Cuba and veered west, hitting the keys and then Ft. Myers. A lot of people I know fled to the gulf coast, only to get worse weather than in Miami. IIRC NOAA has been asking for more satellites and funding, but I guess billionaires didn’t see the need for it.
Something I was wondering about. . . A bit further inland, Florence might drop 30 inches of rain on many of the state’s 2,300 hog farms and lagoons that hold waste for millions of pigs. Those lagoons are generally designed to withstand about 25 inches of rain or less, and we already know what can happen when a storm hits. During Hurricane Matthew in 2016, waters saturated the low-lying floodplains of eastern N.C. and flooded more than a dozen lagoons, killing more than 2,800 hogs and almost 2 million chickens and turkeys. The same thing happened at hog farms after Hurricane Floyd in 1999, prompting the state to launch a program to relocate or close some of the swine farms. But those efforts largely stalled by 2016, and the farms continue to pose an environmental threat to nearby waterways.
Florence is affecting the Hurricanes. https://www.nhl.com/hurricanes/news/hurricanes-adjust-start-of-training-camp/c-300080020
Zoom! Big winds, tremendous. Doncha just love the 150 people living in a town in swampland who decided to stay home. Now calling for help. OK. Some I'm sure had good reasons. But 150?
Specieist! Fox is counting pigs at the pork processing plants in the state. They need electricity too. #Porcinelivesmatter #FoxNews.
People in Raleigh are acting incredibly strangely. It's been raining for a few hours...pretty hard, but nothing extraordinary. It's been windy, but not THAT windy. And the office is a friggin' ghost town. We're 100 miles from the coast. I honestly cannot fathom what people are thinking. Of course, I'm by far in the minority so I'm probably wrong, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what people are afraid of.
Almost reminds me of the media build up over several days about the massive wind storm heading for Seattle. Buddy sent me this the day after.