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Irma's Coming!

Our daughter (and son-in-law) in South Florida called us again a few minutes ago. It is raining pretty hard and pretty steadily. The winds have picked up and already some trees have come down. Now the part I find hard to believe.

Around 5:30PM-6:00PM EDST they lost power. :(

About thirty minutes ago it was restored! :)

No guarantee it will stay on but we had figured they would be without power until Monday afternoon at the earliest. You have to give some credit to the people who work for the utility companies. They're the ones who have to leave their families alone while they go out and work long exhausting hours in the wind and rain, terrible conditions.
 
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GlennB said:
I'm just wondering how several million (I'm reading 6.3m) are being evacuated from the most endangered parts of Florida while such a thing was deemed impossible for the Houston area.

The strength, the length of the warning, the predictability of the storm's path, the local geography?
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The warning. Also, having seen what it already did probably spooked a lot of people.
 
The issue about evacuations is interesting. In most if not all counties in Florida they have set up shelters. Many of them are in publicly-owned buildings that are of recent construction meaning they were required to be built to standards which should make them fairly safe even in a hurricane. (Btw Donnie recently signed an exec order that will allow officials to waive these standards for new construction in the future. Too expensive.)

Many if not all local transit systems provided service to these shelters so people without a car or without access to a car could get to them.

The other issue is, unless you live in one of the areas, meaning you live in Florida, your local news station is not going to provide detailed reports on where and how to seek shelter if you need it. That's only going to be provided by local newscasts. A TV news report in, say Cleveland, is not going to waste airtime instructing people who need shelter in Tampa on a) where the public shelters are or b) how to get to them. Why would they?

This was posted on the Miami-Dade dot gov Twitter account:

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newyorkguy said:
The issue about evacuations is interesting. In most if not all counties in Florida they have set up shelters. Many of them are in publicly-owned buildings that are of recent construction meaning they were required to be built to standards which should make them fairly safe even in a hurricane. (Btw Donnie recently signed an exec order that will allow officials to waive these standards for new construction in the future. Too expensive.)

Many if not all local transit systems provided service to these shelters so people without a car or without access to a car could get to them.

The other issue is, unless you live in one of the areas, meaning you live in Florida, your local news station is not going to provide detailed reports on where and how to seek shelter if you need it. That's only going to be provided by local newscasts. A TV news report in, say Cleveland, is not going to waste airtime instructing people who need shelter in Tampa on a) where the public shelters are or b) how to get to them. Why would they?

This was posted on the Miami-Dade dot gov Twitter account:

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Makes one wonder what's wrong with Houston.

I suggested in another forum that Houston could have at least mapped out the higher ground people might have saved their cars in. A whole bunch of people
posted how stupid I was because people who lived there knew there was no higher ground. But some peoples' houses didn't flood. :confused:

So I posted an elevation map of where there was flood water and where there wasn't and another whole bunch of people reported my post and a mod deleted it with the comment, "give it a rest"! Seriously. :boggled:

Whatever. :rolleyes:

So, Houston, dangerous to evacuate. I get that. But just wait to see whose houses flood and send in the boats? Something's wrong with this picture.

And that's not even getting into the detailed report long before the flooding warning of the pending disaster that was completely ignored. Echoes of NOLA for sure.
 
KatieG said:
Most of that area was originally wetlands. So pretty close. What caused the worst of the flooding was releasing water at the reservoirs. They could not keep up with the amount of rainfall Houston got.
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Is there an engineer in the house? Rather than releasing a few million gallons in one fell swoop, why not just let the reservoirs overflow to the tune of the amount of rain that's falling? Are the reservoirs located so precariously that it's better to not let them overflow?

Or were they unable to bear the weight of a full load? (That's why I asked if there's an engineer in the house.)
 
Foolmewunz said:
Is there an engineer in the house? Rather than releasing a few million gallons in one fell swoop, why not just let the reservoirs overflow to the tune of the amount of rain that's falling? Are the reservoirs located so precariously that it's better to not let them overflow?

Or were they unable to bear the weight of a full load? (That's why I asked if there's an engineer in the house.)
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There was over 50" of water falling in some locations. That is an enormous amount of water, especially given the area.

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/8/28/16217626/harvey-houston-flood-water-visualized

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...rillion-tons-of-water/?utm_term=.89bf2adc945f

8 cubic miles falling until midnight on the Sunday in Texas and Louisiana

I don't think that there is much you can do to store water with that intense rainfall.
 
Foolmewunz said:
Is there an engineer in the house? Rather than releasing a few million gallons in one fell swoop, why not just let the reservoirs overflow to the tune of the amount of rain that's falling? Are the reservoirs located so precariously that it's better to not let them overflow?

Or were they unable to bear the weight of a full load? (That's why I asked if there's an engineer in the house.)
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I suppose a random overflow could damage the structure in a way that a controlled release doesn't. Erosion of soil, and the like.

Here's a (the?) spillway on the Addicks reservoir. If water gushes over the top it could maybe wash away the soil surrounding the concrete structure. Perhaps they waited until their hand was forced, hoping the rain would ease?

http://media.click2houston.com/phot...oir_1461708998914_2654339_ver1.0_1280_720.jpg

Factoid: dams don't care about 'the weight' of water they're holding back. The water could extend back 60" or 60 miles and the dam wouldn't know the difference. It's the water pressure they resist, and that's a function of the depth of the water.
 
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jimbob said:
There was over 50" of water falling in some locations. That is an enormous amount of water, especially given the area.

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/8/28/16217626/harvey-houston-flood-water-visualized

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...rillion-tons-of-water/?utm_term=.89bf2adc945f

8 cubic miles falling until midnight on the Sunday in Texas and Louisiana

I don't think that there is much you can do to store water with that intense rainfall.
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Got that. My question is why release a few brazillion gallons all at once, if that's what they did?
 
Foolmewunz said:
Got that. My question is why release a few brazillion gallons all at once, if that's what they did?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville_Dam_crisis

I think that by the time Harvey hit, they had no option. They might have had to open the overflow even if the dam had been nearly empty beforehand.

I have no idea what the capacity was, and how quickly they could have emptied the reservoir without causing flooding when they knew Harvey was going to hit.

If they kept the reservoir sufficiently empty to not cause a problem when Harvey hit, I suspect that there would be water shortages whenever it didn't hit.

What threshold do you start emptying it? 80% chance of a major storm hitting? 50%? 10%? What constitutes a major storm?
 
Meanwhile, the Global Severe Weather site and National Hurricane Whatchamacallit, still seem to be banking on a right turn. She's been heading NW for about 15 hours and Rita is history, so no huge weather system out thataway to make Irma turn, from what I see. (But I ain't a meteorologist.)

A right turn is really gonna need to be a right turn and not your usual hurricane swerve if it's going to make any of the predicted landfalls. I'd bet more on the FL panhandle and AL/MS gulf coast. Sharp right turns are not very common for hurricanes.

ETA: All the written reports, including the 2:00 AM updates say "moving NW a 6 mph". But some of those same sources have satellite imagery at that same time and the eye seems to be more towards NNW, so the "sharp" right turn may not be needed. Maintaining the visible track of the eye would take it right up the west coast of FL.
 
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Beerina said:
One can make a much more solid prediction that every hurricane will be exaggerated at the feet of AGW rather than the reality that a few percent increase in temperature yields a few extra hurricanes every century and a few percent stronger on average. Not a sudden massive increase in every-500-year storms.
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Global warming has nothing to do with the number of tropical cyclones (Hurricanes/Typhoons), but it will increase the odds of more severe storms in the future.
 
In the Weather Channel report I linked they explained why the computer models -- which are usually pretty accurate -- predicted the storm track would become northerly. As the storm approaches Florida a huge high pressure system to the northeast will pull Irma from a NW track to a more northerly track.

Meanwhile, the eye passed over the Florida Keys about an hour ago, upgraded to a Cat 4, with 130-mph winds. The storm is now tracking further west then originally predicted.


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Simon Brewer, a meteorologist and extreme weather journalist, is in the Keys right now as Irma's eye passes through. He's been taking wind readings with a handheld device -- I think the highest he got so far was 117 mph -- and it is wild, with knock-you-off-your feet gusts.

Segment
 
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