Tropical Cyclone Isaias

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Neither mundane nor pointless for those in the path, but this is the designated forum for breaking news.

Anyhow, Tropical Storm Isaias is soon to be Hurricane Isaias. It’s rained and mudslid on Puerto Rico and will continue for awhile. The Dominican Republic & Haiti are getting it now as I write (Thu late afternoon / early evening).

The Bahamas & FL are next.

So far the results have been damaging, but not disastrous. But the fat lady is just in the first verse & building up from there. So far the storm is large, but not very strong.

Right now we in Metro Miami are looking at a ~50% chance of tropical storm winds(=dangerous to be outside), a ~15% chance of damaging winds, and a ~5% chance of low end hurricane winds. All probably Saturday afternoon to Sun afternoon.

But it could intensify more or sooner or slide more westerly. Any of which would increase the impact on SoFL. At least we’ve got our COVID problem totally under control. NOT!

The Bahamas forecast is both worse and sooner.

At my place the staff is battening down the hatches on Fri to be done by the end of the workday. Then we wait and watch.

Anyone else in the area or in the Islands?

2

11am Friday update …

Still nice and sunny and warm here. NHC has bumped Isaias up to a Cat 1 hurricane & moved it closer to shore. Now the NHC hurricane watch area starts 500 feet north of my house, so I feel very confident I’ll be totally fine. Not.

Odds on damaging winds are up by 10-15% vs yesterday all along the Florida coast, including here. Timing for arrival here is about the same; heavy rain starting Fri night, significant winds starting Sat morning.

This is still not a big deal for FL as hurricanes go, but it will mess up a lot of people’s days.

Anyone? Bueller?

3

Wishing you well and good luck. I wonder if everyone is deep in crisis fatigue.

4

I was supposed to be on a tiny Caribbean island, helping rebuild from previous storms. We decided not to go (a number of aid workers said they wouldn’t want to breath the air in O’Hare, let alone on an airplane… good point).

As it turns out, we would’ve gotten there days before they closed the islands to American flights, and would probably still be stuck there. Cowering as Isaias shook our makeshift shelter.

5

According to https://stormcarib.com/ the impact on Vieques was relatively minor, but the main island of PR there is flooding and power outages.

FYI, before hearing I thought it was pronounced I-zay-us, when the pronunciation seems to be Is-ee-ay-us.

Brian

6

It is usually pronounced I-zay-us in English. I grew up knowing Isaias as a book in the Douay-Rheims bible - the King James version renders it as Isaiah, of course. I don’t know why English speakers who are broadcasting to English speaking audiences are using a Portuguese or Spanish pronunciation, but the hurricane is now known as Ee-sye-ee-us for sure.

7

The roster of names of tropical cyclones are chosen by an international committee of cyclone geeks / PhDs and are chosen from the languages spoken in the area. So the ones in Asia (aka typhoons) have names that sound normal / familiar to e.g. Chinese, Phillipino’s, Vietnamese, etc.

And ones that affect the Americas (aka hurricanes) have names that are chosen from English, Spanish, and Portuguese given names. In this case the Isaias is a standard Portuguese name, sorta cognate to English Isiah. And “ee-sah-EE-as” is supposedly the ordinary Portuguese pronunciation of an ordinary Portuguese name.

The largest lump of native Portuguese speakers on Earth after Brazil & Portugal is … Greater Miami. Surprise! I can’t go a day out in public without hearing some Portuguese. And of course some Spanish from other folks too.

8

As to the storm at 3pm on Sat …

So far we have very little to show for it. It’s been a breezy warm day, alternately fully sunny and a high thin overcast. The breeze has been slowly picking up, but if you didn’t know there was a hurricane behind it you’d have no reason to be concerned about the wind. Lots of folks at the beach even now. Thesurf is starting to pick up enough that most of the waders are coming onshore and the board surfers are just getting excited.

It rained a little before dawn, just enough to wet everything down. A few minutea go it started raining moderately for the first time since the pre-dawn rain. Radar suggests this scattered band may last an hour so. Not unlike what happens every other afternoon during rainy season.

In other words we’re all dressed up and no need to go. So far. It’s starting to look like our area will just “get our hair mussed”. Farther north in FL and especially in NC are gonna get hit harder, though still not catastrophically.

The Bahamas are getting the worst of it now. We shall see.

9

Left one more idea out of my post on names.

To facilitate communications over two-way radios, TVs, etc., and for folks who aren’t first speakers of the local tongue, there is an official worldwide prescribed pronunciation of each standard name.

Which for the Atlantic storms, pretty thoroughly pronounces the names as they’d be pronounced by native speakers of whichever language: English Spanish, or Portuguese.

So for Hurricane Jane the announcers in Spanish-speaking countries don’t say “Whan” or Whaan-eh; they say “Jane.” And English language broadcasters do the same “exaggerated” foreign accent thing when dealing with Juan, Isaias, etc.

It’s not really exaggerated; it’s just that lots of people in the US are used to everything being American-ized for their benefit thoughtless convenience. These words aren’t.

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One of my favorite typhoon names was Aere, pronounced eye-ear-ee. It was the word for “storm” in a Pacific Islander language that isn’t spoken by very many people.

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I missed this thread last week, but the OP made reference to it here. Anyway, here is my response, which included the impact of Isaias on Connecticut:

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Yowza! You guys got whacked pretty good.

I admit to losing interest in Isaias’ progress after my friends in Virginia said it was no big deal to them. And by then this thread had dropped like a stone to the 4th scroll of the Latest page.

Better luck to all of us on the next storm. And storm thread.

13

Not sure if I’m doing this correctly, but I’m trying to quote (most or all of) robby’s post in the other thread so I can reply to it here:

No joke. The timestamp says you wrote this post at 6:25pm Sunday evening. My town in Southwestern CT lost power Tuesday the 4th at 2:25pm, and didn’t get power restored until Sunday at 4:25pm, which means we had no power for 5 days and 2 hours. You wrote this quoted post exactly two hours after our power finally came back on. Cablevision finally restored cable/internet/phone about an hour ago, Tuesday at 5:30pm. So a full week (+3 hours) without cable and internet.

The 5 days without power was particularly harsh for my town because pretty much everyone is on well water, meaning without power you have no running water. Not just no hot water, no water at all. So I found myself running around town looking to buy four 1-gallon jugs of water just to flush one toilet once. Exactly four gallons to flush my toilets, so clearly not a modern eco-friendly low-flow toilet. I can report that water is heavy. Specifically, a gallon jug weighs 8 pounds, 9 ounces according to my postal scale. So when I went out on day 3 and bought 30 gallons of water in the hot sun, it sucked that I had no shower to come home to.

Now I’m off to shop for and buy new water storage jugs and possibly some shelving units to store them. I may end up posting a few threads on here about emergency preparedness, because my experience in the past week tells me my current preparedness level is for shit.

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As a FL hurricane veteran here’s some advice on fresh water.

As to eating, cooking, and personal hydration:

Buy cases of bottled water. 1 case of 24 half-liter bottles = 3 person-days. I pay about $3 per case at the grocery store, so that’s a dollar per person-day; not too exorbitant.

Have enough cases on hand for 14 days per person in your household. Figure about 1/2 person-worth for each child under 10 and each pet. Rotate your stock so no case gets more than about 3 years old. They keep, but not forever. The half-liter bottles are much easier to consume in the normal course of daily life than big jugs. So the stock rotation happens pretty automatically

As to water for flushing and washing …

Buy the 15-20 gallon “tupperware” storage tubs from a hardware store or a place like Bed, Bath & Beyond. They’re about 2’ x 1.5’ x 1.5’ and are meant to organize & store the excess crap we all own too much of. You want 1 or 2 such tubs per person in your household.

When not needed you can leave them empty or put all your dedicated power outage batteries, solar flashlights, solar phone chargers, solar radios, 24-packs of AAA, AA, C, & D batteries, etc. into. Pus your tarps, ropes, duct tape, work gloves, etc. Your complete emergency management kit. Do not EVER raid those supplies for a non-emergency use. But do rotate your stock of batteries even if that means throwing away unused packages 3 years later.

When a wind-, ice-, or snow-storm might threaten your power, empty the tubs of emergency supplies and put the tubs in your showers or bathtubs. Then fill them with water & leave them there. If it’s not freezing outside and you have a garage or shed you can put even more out there and fill them with a hose; I live in a high-rise, so it’s the showers or nothing for me.

When you need to wash people or dishes, use a saucepan to scoop some water out of a filled tub into the stoppered bathroom sink & do your washing & minimal rinsing there.

For toileting, designate one for #1 & one for #2. Only flush the #1 toilet once a day. Quickly pour a saucepan-ful of tub water into the toilet and that’ll flush it adequately for #1. For #2 you probably need to flush via the normal flush handle every time then refill the tank using the saucepan-from-tub method.

Once those tubs are filled with water you’re not going to move them easily or safely. So put them in their final resting spot before filling them. But when the crisis is over they’re easy enough to tip over to drain while they’re still sitting in the tub or shower or outside. Not so much inside your shed.

15

Some good tips there, thanks much. (I have no idea why the automated quote tags don’t work in this post.)

[quote=“LSLGuy, post:14, topic:916877”]For #2 you probably need to flush via the normal flush handle every time then refill the tank using the saucepan-from-tub method.

Once those tubs are filled with water you’re not going to move them easily or safely.[/quote]

Saucepan-from-tub to fill a toilet tank is a nonstarter for me. Way too much work. For many years I’ve been storing emergency toilet flushing water in 16 Arizona Iced Tea gallon jugs. They’re super thick plastic and free (I was drinking the tea anyway when I assembled the collection) and it seemed like at least I had put some effort in. But 16 gallons (4 flushes) no longer feels sufficient; I want at least 8 flushes, preferably 10, on-hand and easy to carry up my narrow stairs and refill toilet tanks. Especially if it happens without warning so I don’t have time to fill up the bathtub. Typically I fill the bathtub normally and just use those several-gallon buckets to scoop the water out and fill the toilet tanks.

Anyway, the main problem with 4 Arizona tea jugs per flush is that I can’t carry all 4 at once, so that means two trips up and down the stairs per flush. Definitely looking to cut that in half.

I looked into Military Water Cans (5 gallons) with the idea that I could just put 4 gallons in them. That’s a perfect solution for carrying up the stairs, but then I’m picking up the entire weight of 4 gallons of water (32 pounds) high into the air and balancing it while pouring the water into the tank that’s 3 or 4 feet off the ground. That’s a non-issue with 1-gallon bottles but would definitely be an issue for me personally with 4 gallons in 5-gallon canisters.

So I’ve decided on 2-gallon jugs, where I can carry one in each hand up the stairs to flush a toilet, but only have to pick one of them up off the floor at a time when actually filling the tank. I figure 16-18 of them depending on how many fit on the shelving unit I’ve mostly settled on for storing them. It’s 4 feet x 4 feet x 18 inches, three shelves, each shelf rated for 1500 pounds. Should be plenty sufficient for the 300-400 pounds of water I’m looking to store.

16

Because you don’t have them on separate lines.

17

Ah, good to know, thanks much. Sadly, that’s how I always formatted my quote replies since I joined in 2003. I wonder if my old posts are all messed up with broken quotes. (Rhetorical; none of them are with preserving for posterity anyway.)

18

They are. As are about 100% of mine for the same reason. vBulletin left extra line breaks around the quote box if you didn’t run the surrounding text up against the quote tags. Which was annoying then but the fix for that is broken now.


Back to Isaias and the earlier hijack about name pronounciation ... here's an oddity I ran across.

This USMC press release is about post-Isaias cleanup at Camp Lejeune NC. The two photos are credited to Lance Cpl. Isaiah Gomez.

Missed it by that much!