How would the air get sucked out? Wouldn’t it just get replaced by different air?
For those who can read Spanish, the Mexican NWS page on Patricia. As of 18:15 Central Time:
*
“The eyewall of hurricane PATRICIA, Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale, has begun touching the coastline of southern Jalisco, from 18:00. The eye has a diameter of 10 km and the impact is in the vicinity of the bays of Tenacatita, Cuestecomate and Navidad, where are located the towns of El Estrecho, La Manzanilla and Melaque, in the municipalities of la Huerta and Cihuatlan, State of Jalisco.”*
By 1am it’s expected to be 62 miles WNW of Guadalajara as a Cat 3 and to fall from Hurricane to TS by 1300h local tomorrow, and be a TD by the time it exits Mexican territory. Projections of at least 6 to 12 inches rain with 19 inches possible locally. Surf/surge of 3 to 4 meters as far as the East side of South Baja.
Holy shit. Does anyone know if they were able to evacuate most people?
My mother’s name is Patricia. I’ve been kinda teasing her about the hurricane. “Way to go, Mom.”
But in all seriousness I pray that everybody affected by the storm will be all right.
All webcams close to the beach are down, they remain active in Guadalajara:
They were able to evacuate quite a few, but there was very little lead time. Reports are saying that many residents and tourists are still in the area, hopefully all hunkered down somewhere safe.
I believe that’s because power was deliberately cut off to those areas. We’ll just have to wait to see what the morning brings.
I just checked the tide chart and it appears that: Landfall coincides with a a high tide at 7:44pm.
The storm will push the high tide out of bahia de banderas but everything to the south will be inundated with unprecedented flooding along with the fierce winds.
If the storm was on a path just few degrees further to the north…there would not be much left standing on the beaches of Puerto Vallarta.
There will be hundreds of casualties.
I suspect the Red Cross has been ramping up for this all week…that’s where you need to go if you want to help.
I doubt it, as it seems to me this storm just came out of nowhere…or am I wrong? I didn’t even hear about it until within the last 24 hours (really, this morning.)
Not just you. This storm revved up out of nowhere… TS to cat 1 in one day, cat 1 to cat 5 in one more. Landfall less than a day after that. Terrifyingly fast evolution.
Some good news is that a hurricane hunter aircraft flew through this afternoon and reported the strongest winds were only near the center in an area about 15 miles across. The eye also clouded up and pressure increased somewhat and it was thought that it began an eyewall replacement cycle, which signifies weakening. Not that it means much if they only get 180mph winds instead of 200, but every little bit helps. And at least it’s moving at a decent rate and won’t sit there and shit on them for 2 days.
No, the storm came out of nowhere basically within the last 24 hours. Even if the Red Cross wasn’t so corrupt and actually did what they claim to do for their mission, they don’t have psychic abilities. This a extremely bad situation and a whole lot of people are going to perish from it in the next 24 hours. Unfortunately, there is nothing anyone can do to save them at this point. All anyone can do is wait it out and help the survivors.
Do people really understand what a Category 5+ hurricane really is? That doesn’t mean that you can seek refuge in your house because it is raining really hard and the wind if fierce. Your house itself is probably about to be destroyed by the equivalent of a sustained tornado. You might be able to survive in some type of cement bunker as long as it doesn’t get flooded but most of it is just luck.
Again, there has never been a recorded storm this powerful in the Western hemisphere. 200+ mph winds are tornado levels and they can destroy anything in tens of seconds let alone sustained for minutes or hours over a large area. You would be killed quickly if your structure failed and you get thrown into winds that strong. The infrastructure in that part of Mexico isn’t noted for being even adequate in the best of times. I have been there myself and, outside the resorts, basic services are still iffy.
The Mexican government barely works at all on the best on days. I assume it will be up to the U.S. to organize a major relief effort very quickly because nobody else can do it on that scale. That is also a resort area so I also suspect there will have to be a search and rescue effort for the thousands of Americans that were caught up in the storm.
No. The drop in air pressure is unusually strong, but is nowhere near what is necessary to kill a person on its own. Normal atmospheric pressure is around 100 kPa, Hurricane Patricia is around 88 kPa, and lethally low pressure is around 35-40 kPa.
No. The air pressure will drop but it will not drop to anywhere near lethal levels.
No, they couldn’t evacuate everyone. Those that couldn’t get out, they were trying to bed down in the best-built resort hotels, interior rooms without windows but above expected flood levels, to wait out the storm.
They will lose power. Drinking water will be in short supply for the next few days. The building windows will blow out if they aren’t boarded over, and maybe even then. There will be impact damage to the buildings due to flying projectiles - debris, cars, parts of buildings, entire small buildings, that sort of thing. Possible structural damage, but as long as the walls hold the roof up they should survive.
Uh..no. This storm did not exist three days ago. It went from category 1 to 5 in 24 hours. There has not been time to mount the usual preemptive efforts.
Not just tornado level winds - MAJOR tornado level winds. You know those news stories where they show a Midwestern town that looks like a bomb hit it? Just stone foundations and splinters left? THAT kind of tornado. Only it won’t be hitting the area for just a few minutes, it will be hours of that.
If you were outside, even if you weren’t blown aloft or killed by large flying objects you’d probably be flayed alive by grit and small debris. That sort of storm strips bark off trees, it would do the same to a person caught in the open.
I know it isn’t a primary concern but there are also ships out there ranging from cruise ships to freighters that would not be able to get out of the way of such a fast moving and violent storm. Keep them in your thoughts as well. That is certainly not good. We will have to see how bad the damage is by Sunday but I can’t imagine it being anything less than catastrophic on lots of levels. It is going to be impossible for anyone to do any significant rescue or damage assessment until it is all over.
Airborne airplanes are the only machines that can successfully engage a storm that strong and that is only because they work with the prevailing winds rather than fighting them head-one. The latter is a losing strategy.
There was a ship lost in the Atlantic to a hurricane recently, and that storm was less intense than this one. Really, this is putting a lot of people at risk and there’s just not much that can be done.
That storm also did a quick increase in strength. It was the El Faro that went down. Hurricane Joaquin.
Over 20 people lost their lives in Dominica just a few weeks ago Hurricane Erika and that one had downgraded, it was ‘just’ a tropical storm when it hit them. We had the storm warnings up here further north, but while we waited for it word started coming from south - Dominica had around 10 inches of rain and they had NO storm warning - I don’t think they were even under a storm watch and we got next to nothing. We’re getting a lot of African dust and it might have been that it stopped the storm from gathering intensity, so it sort of flopped off to the south and dumped a killer amount of rain.
Last season we had some weather coming, I woke up early, flipped on the internet to see what it was going to do and - bang - the electricity came off and my neem tree broke in two. Not the first time we’ve had a hurricane form over us but damage it did was partly due to almost total lack of preparation - there was a lot of damage to boats. We were all very lucky. I think that one got named posthumously.
Initial reports seem to indicate that damage & loss of life from wind and storm surge is below - perhaps well below - what was predicted. Flooding threats from heavy rain persist.
Yes, thankfully no deaths have been reported. Whew, I am glad.
It’s pretty clear there was no major loss of life, but given that the storm was still continuing as of this morning and the area it hit contains many small towns and villages, some in terrible locations for mudslides and flash floods, don’t count on the death toll remaining zero. Or even “low” by any standard.
But if this monster punch only took a few lives, total… it will be amazing.
Cross your fingers but I would not expect reliable casualty reports until later from outside the bigger towns.
Already at the 7am MexCity Time report it was down to Tropical Storm, 6 hrs sooner than forecast before landfall – seems those mountains do a job on storms! Cat5 at 7pm, Cat4 at 10pm, Cat2 at 1am, Cat1 at 4am,TS at 7am.
At the large scale level there was a fortunate combination that (a) the radius of extreme winds was very tight around the eyewall and (b) landfall threaded right between the larger population centers, through a rural area of sparse population and natural parks. However I would be quite worried about the smaller rural communities on the shore side or up in the slopes, where the infrastructure is likely to be less than adequate. That remains to be seen, I suppose, as soon as the weather clears enough to have a close look (Manzanillo is a main base of the Mexican Pacific fleet so there should be resources for that close by).