One of these things is not like the others.
It caused well over $2 Billion in damage just to the Medical Center area in Houston. Incredible amounts of flooding. In terms of damage to the Houston area, it’s certainly up there with the more recent Hurricanes Ike and Rita (also both retired names). I think Allison is still in the top 10 in terms of economic damage and was only kicked out of the top 5 costliest storms after that ridiculous 2005 hurricane season.
Here’s a wiki link. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Storm_Allison
The big problem was the storm decided to stop and just sit in the same spot for several hours. It led to a crazy situation where one part of town got a few feet of rain in a single night while Katy (suburb on the west side of Houston) got a half-inch out of the entire tropical storm.
The storm did eventually move on, and its effects led to flooding as far north as Pennsylvania and New York.
Several hospitals in the Medical Center were also affected due to poor planning. Several hospitals had backup generators in the basements (in a flood-prone city!). So, the hospital situation was crazy for a while.
And since the Med Center has a lot of medical research going on, tens of thousands of lab animals died, many of them due to drowning. Lots of research samples were lost. The Medical Center didn’t really return to “normal” for several months, and they were dealing with the aftermath for a few years, really. Some funny stories out of it, though, including finding random cows and monkeys in odd parts of buildings.
The downtown area was also heavily affected. Since it’s densely built up, a series of tunnels and basements had been built over the decades, and those, of course, all flooded. Fortunately, few people really live downtown, but as it’s the central business district, it had a big impact.
There weren’t any direct deaths due to flooding. But there were a few deaths to electrocution, attempting to drive through flooded areas, poorly advised attempts to swim, etc.
I happened to be living in the area at the time, and the devastation in some areas was ridiculous. A few of my friends ended up homeless for a while due to flooding. Many of them lost their cars due to water. We ended up taking in some of them for a while.
And the low lying parts of the area, especially in the south, were completely inundated. Tens of thousands of people were without homes and possessions were entirely lost.
One plus we pulled out of it was one of my best friends met his future wife the next day. Her apartment and car had flooded out, and a mutual friend brought her and her visiting mother over to our place to regroup. Didn’t knock though, which meant she (and her mother) saw him (before their pre-Allison pre-arranged blind date) in his shorts on the couch playing video games. Love at first sight, I guess.
This is true in the Atlantic at least. I don’t think they do that in the Pacific, though. Do they have a hurricane (or typhoon) season in the Pacific?
Hurricane remnants do hit Pennsylvania, and do cause damage. We don’t often get hurricanes that still have hurricane-force winds, but they don’t have to be to cause a lot of damage. Hurricane remnants can travel quite far inland- the remnants of Hurricane Ike caused flooding in Chicago several years ago, and caused wind damage here in Pittsburgh.
Ike actually caused serious wind damage here in Ohio, which is almost unheard of. We sometimes get heavy rains from hurricane remnants, but almost never winds. There were massive power outages lasting longer than a week in some areas, and lots of tree and roof damage as well.
I didn’t mean to sound disbelieving; I was only remarking on the odd combination of locations. Of course, around here, we consider Charlotte to be “far inland,” and yet Hugo did a shit-ton of damage.
Rampant Coypu
Meteorologists say there is no connection between an early TS and a severe hurricane season.
Water temps must be at least 80 degrees F to support a hurricane. It is around 6/1 that sea surface temps adjoining the US reach that temp. Right now they are in the high 70s. Alberto was formed in the Gulf Stream. which has higher temps. Wind speed got no higher than 50 mph, and once it meandered out of the stream, it quickly weak.
Predictions are for a low number of total hurricanes and for lower intensity this year. Of course, the same people predicted a very bad season last year and it was mild.
http://hurricane.atmos.colostate.edu/Forecasts/2012/apr2012/apr2012.pdf
(.pdf)
Yeah, they retire names. They do this so that there won’t be any confusion as the weather people refer to past destructive storms.
Allison is the only storm that did not reach hurricane strength to have its name retired. Freakiest storm ever. Formed near Houston and hit it twice, with 20 inches of rain in one night on the second blow. Moved back to sea a second time and trashed Louisiana. Moved inland and stayed coherent enough to go out into the Atlantic and gather strength to flood Philadelphia.
I misspoke: Alison dropped 20 inches of rain in an hour and a half that Friday night, and I lived just north of Hermann Park at the time. The Texas Medical Center, Houston’s second downtown which is larger than downtown Denver was the victim of Noahs’s flood. I saw National Guard black copters airlifting patients to points west.
I banged on my neighbors’ doors so we could push their cars up to an elevated are of a playground at MacGregor Elementary.
Hurricane Hazel in 1954 hit Haiti as a Cat 2, ramped up to Cat 4 before coming ashore in the Carolinas and moved north over land through Pennsylvania and New York to hit Toronto still as a Cat 1 hurricane. It passed over northern Ontario and crossed James Bay into northern Quebec before finally fading away. That’s about 1,500 miles over land (although it barely qualified as a hurricane by the time it reached Canada).