Everyone on the Gulf Coast and up and down the Atlantic seaboard will shudder upon hearing this.
Forecasters are not just anticipating an “active” hurricane season, they are forecasting a “hyperactive” hurricane season, with conditions unseen since 2005. The year 2005 is embedded into some of our minds – Katrina. No one who went through it will ever forget it, it is embedded in our minds.
But a hyperactive hurricane season seems to in the works at the worst possible time. Brought to us from Wired [1]:
Michael Mann, author of the Penn State study, wrote in an email to WIRED that his team’s model indicates a “hyperactive” season. “The extreme current tropical Atlantic warmth is a key driver of our forecast,” he wrote, but added that other factors will contribute, including La Niña conditions, which are characterized by cooler water along the eastern tropical Pacific for several months at a time. This weakens high-level winds across the Atlantic, which allows hurricanes to grow in frequency and strength. “That’s the same combination of factors, incidentally, that was behind the record 2005 season (with 27 named storms),” he wrote. That’s the year that Hurricane Katrina pummeled New Orleans and was one of four storms to reach Category 5 levels.
We mentioned this is sort of a bad time:
Every hurricane season is tough, but this year, emergency experts worry that many vulnerable residents may ignore evacuation orders because of fears of contracting the coronavirus in a crowded shelter. They also are concerned that trust in elected officials who give these evacuation orders may have taken a hit over the Covid-19 pandemic, making it harder to get people to move out of harm’s way.
“Millions of families are in a different place than where they were 60 days ago,” says Trevor Riggen, senior vice president of disaster services for the American Red Cross, referring to the financial and emotional toll of the pandemic. “They need to ask themselves, ‘What should we change in our emergency plan, and who do we listen to?’ People need to adapt to a much different world. We don’t want a natural disaster to be the thing that crashes down on them.”
Not “just” shelters, but going anywhere, one will worry about crowded hotel rooms, eating at restaurants, and on and on.
At what point is this country going to regret electing a man so incapable of handling a normal hurricane season? (“Whoever heard of a category 5 hurricane?) A man that couldn’t handle a normal hurricane season without an epidemic? Now, emergency management personnel have to worry about all the yokels that believe everything is a hoax, and government doesn’t do anything right.
Why aren’t they pre-planning now? There are going to be hurricanes. So shouldn’t we name major areas as “congregation points” and start planning from there? Raleigh? Atlanta? Baton Rouge? Can’t we start a national plan; “Everyone in this zone goes …”?
It is a terrifying thought, hundreds of thousands on the roads, attempting to get out of the way, hundreds of thousands that can’t, left to “try” to get through it. Throw a contagious disease on top, and packed hospitals? Sprinkle it with a ton of MAGA and “only wussies are afraid of nature” attitude, and you have a national nightmare.
Start preparing.
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Peace, y’all
Jason
[email protected] and on Twitter @MiciakZoom