I hear ya… for the Weather Channel especially this is their bread and butter. Don’tcha love joking about the different media alert levels? “Honey, they are at goretex jacket level!” “The status is now at baseball cap with jacket hood secured over it!”
Goddamn pain in the ass storm! (This is the Pit, right?)
Here on the east coast it will likely be a major rain event, with enough wind to knock dead branches out of the trees and fronds off the palms. But that is usually more than enough for extended power outages. No power means all the usual (no lights, no stove, no refrigerator, etc.) but also no water, since we are on pump-and-well.
And there will be tons of nestling squirrels and birds knocked down and half drowned, vastly ramping up the work load. No power also means no incubators. And the walk-in freezer holding $10k worth of irreplacable specialty food items will be in meltdown. If we’re powerless (bad pun) for more than 8 hours we’ll have to get the generators out of “safe storage” and set them up. Probably just in time for the repair crews to restore regular power.
And, since this part of Florida is topographically challenged, the rain doesn’t run off anywhere, but stays put where it falls. We’ll be wading shin deep around the campus for days.
And, previous posters are correct-- all we get on TV is fear mongering, nothing useful.
Goddamn pain in the ass storm!
Not quite true. Warnings to stay off the water are useful to the surfers who put the bong down long enough to see them.
Plus, this being Florida, I’m sure there are some crazy people who wouldn’t otherwise figure out that going boating during a tropical storm might be a bad idea.
Not really, no. A number of people have already mentioned that the news media will freak out about anything given their tendency towards sensationalism. However, if you want to include memories of past disasters, it’s Wilma that we’ve got the most recent bitter memories from. We got hit by both Katrina and Wilma in 2005, and the former was a walk in the park as far as what it did to Florida.
If you’re speaking solely of New Orleans, you are correct. However, in Mississippi it was a horrific blow to our coastal communities.
90% of the buildings in the Mississippi gulf coast in the Biloxi-Gulfport area were completely demolished. The storm surge pushed 17 miles inland in some places. The surge was 28 feet at Bay St. Louis. Winds were still at hurricane force in Jackson, 165 miles from the coast. More than one million people were affected - that’s 1/3 of our population.
I think a lot of people missed that part of the story because of the crisis in New Orleans.
Would you mind elaborating on this please?
I got a generator, usually use it for a trailer but keeping the Fridge going is nice too. My pool overflows in really heavy rain, so pump is ready for that. That’s about it, come on Fay I ain’t scared o you.
No flood zones are areas designated by FEMA and local and state emergency management agencies as… well, as places that don’t flood. In Florida, counties and municipalities designate their own no flood zones, which is presumably what PX is talking about.
We brought in all the junk that might blow about on the porch, and I trimmed up the trees a bit. We’ll probably lose power, and that’s always no fun. A cat 1 isn’t that big a deal, BUT it only takes a few little gusts to knock a tree down on your house. My parents lost a 40+ ft sycamore in a storm with 40 mph gusts just a few months ago. A tropical storm nearly doubles that AND it hangs out with you for a few hours making a nuisance of itself. They don’t scare me, but taking a few measures like filling up your tub, and having some canned food and batteries handy isn’t freaking out. it’s good common sense if enough trees and power lines go down to screw up the roads.
Frankly, I’m looking forward to the rain and thunder. Fill up our swamps and lakes a bitsy.
I’m guessing that Perdita means that it’s in an area with drainage and storm drains, which are supposed to keep flooding to a minimum for normal storms. In Florida, a tropical storm doesn’t generally lead to flooding (or at least nothing more than the back yard being soggy) if the storm drains in the neighborhood are working properly, but a hurricane can and has been a different situation. IME as a person who’s lived in a hurricane prone region of Florida for most of her life, we haven’t gotten the kind of flooding that I saw in the Katrina aftermath footage.
As for preparation, Acid Lamp has covered what’s prudent in our area to do. My family always had extra water and canned food on hand (we’d keep a year round surplus, using the stuff as we went along), and, during the times when we didn’t have a grill to cook on, we’d have sterno to go with the matches, candles, flashlights, batteries, and battery-powered radio. It doesn’t take a lot to be prepared for a hurricane, and boarding up one’s house is unnecessary for most low-category hurricane activity when you’re as far inland as we are.
I’m asking because the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) doesn’t “certify” that an area isn’t flood-prone. I’m not hip to the mapping done by Florida counties and municipalities, but I doubt that their mapping “certifies” it either.
Here’s how NFIP mapping works: the flood mapping illustrates zones of risk. These zones of risk are delineated so that actuaries at the insurance company can set rates accordingly. These zones of risk are not produced by detailed hydrologic & hydraulic in every case. These maps should not be viewed as having been produced by detailed analysis. In other words, they may contain errors & omissions.
The Zone X used on the NFIP map is used for two areas: one is the 500-year floodplain (shaded) and the other is “not a flood hazard area” (unshaded). Now, sometimes these unshaded Zone X areas aren’t floodplains, and are relatively safe from flooding (hilltops & ridges). Other times these Zone X areas merely haven’t been studied - and may be flood prone areas. So, one has to be careful about thinking of unshaded Zone X as “not a flood prone area”. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t.
(The above is intended to be informative rather than snarky.)
If by “certifies”, you mean “guarantees you’ll never ever get your feet wet if you stand right here”, I also doubt it.
Still, they do have to send people somewhere in the event that somewhere else is flooding - hence the no flood zones.
It doesn’t mean there certainly won’t be flooding, just that this is a less floody area than place X.
That makes more sense, and with Mulberry being a good elevation (110+), I’d say it’s relatively safe from storm surge. I didn’t know if this was a Florida thing or not.
Well, she here.
Be careful, everyone- stay safe, etc. I’ll be in the office until 1ish.
That is a freakin’ riot.
Last I saw, the storm was taking a big swerve out to the ocean to avoid Gainesville. Damn it!
Actually, I think people were freaking out more due to Charley since it was taking a similar path and then did this crazy turn and last minute strengthening that made it even worse than imagined so that many people in the area that did get hit were unprepared.
You should always be somewhat prepared but I don’t think you should panic which it seems is what the media wants you to do, so instead of just giving you just useful information like projected storm paths, school closings, shelter openings and things like that, they have to make sure they rehash all the previous storms and how terrible they were.
Oh god, Don Germaise is on again. Excuse me while I mute the TV, that guy annoys the crap out of me.
We’re practically neighbors. I’m in Bartow.
I’ll be glad all this is over so newscasters can resume reporting from the Moderate Weather Center.
Or reporting on Caylee Anthony.