Good news! It’s gonna get worse! Much, much worse! Say thank you to petrol states and companies, preferably by blowing up their infrastructure
And a big thank you to politicians blocking major efforts to reduce carbon emissions thanks to lobbying by the industry and foreign governments.
The world finally needs to stop politicans getting huge donations and hold them accountable for their actions.
Helene’s size shocked me but the storm surge for Katrina was unusually extreme. It was a well organized Category 5 and then weakened to a strong 3 right before landfall.
To compare with Helene, which was similar in terms of (east to west) diameter but covered much more area overall, with category 4 winds at landfall: the Weather Channel was making a big deal out of the 8ft storm surges. During Katrina, the Mississippi Gulf Coast had a 28 foot storm surge. (The Miss. Gulf Coast isn’t that geographically different from the Fla. big bend region but that plays a role too.)
Helene’s unusual movement speed kept it strong very far inland and caused massive issues in places that rarely see tropical weather. Harvey was the opposite: it stalled over Houston and dumped days of rain on a major metropolis.
I wish we could update the Saffir Simpson scale to something that takes into account more variables. There are other measurements but no storm is identical in terms of damage potential. A category 5 can not even make landfall whereas something like Hurricane Sandy was a category 1 (or equivalent since it wasn’t technically still a hurricane) when it hit NYC and caused massive damage and flooded subway systems. Sometimes, a storm hitting a place that isn’t used to them can knock over all the trees or flood rivers while a similar storm would be nothing to Miami or New Orleans.
What surprised me most about Helene was the ground speed. I don’t remember seeing any hurricane make landfall in the US moving at over 20mph. As a casual observer I have anyways seen 12 mph as a quick storm and 6 mph as slow.
Yeah, I’ve lived in New Orleans or on the East Coast my whole life and don’t recall that sort of movement speed. Usually, you want a fast moving storm so no one area takes on all the rain but Helene was going so fast and was so massive that it’s probably unprecedented.
Helene is more deadly than Katrina if you don’t count the deaths after the boat broke the levee that was well beyond its lifespan in New Orleans, which you shouldn’t since that was a 100% fixable issue that was not taken care of.
We always say Katrina was a man-made disaster. I worry with climate change, that other places will be testing their infrastructure. Katrina should have been the canary in the coal mine and a lot of people just said, “Don’t live below sea level.” Old river damns can break just as easily as neglected levees.
It was definitely a man-made disaster when it came to New Orleans. I made this analogy to someone else: if lightning strikes a skyscraper and the skyscraper burns down and kills everyone inside due to a lack of a sprinkler system, is that really death by a natural cause? I would say it’s death by gross incompetence.
Are these pictures even on the same zoom level?
You are correct, they don’t appear to be. This one seems more accurate there, but the difference is still stark:
I was going to correct you on the comparison and I tried making my own scaled image … but I couldn’t because yours is a correct scale
I just couldn’t believe that Helene was that massive and widespread compared to Katrina which was known as a major event. wow
They are not, but I think the main focus is on how obscenely tall Helene was. There’s many parts of the US that weren’t prepared because they didn’t think it would reach them
Wasn’t a big part of Katrina’s destruction from the hurricane effectively stalling over the southern US which caused prolonged and massive local damage?
Not trying to discount either event, mostly worried about the time we get a stalled Helene sized hurricane
There were warnings for Georgia and the southern Appalachia, but the storm moved so much faster at the end and carried so much water inland. The ability to hold more water in the atmosphere has been an ongoing concern from climate scientists, and this is a clear example of how it can lead to disaster.
This bundled with droughts that cause the ground to not be able to absorb the water, causing serious flash floods, is just a start. I’m guessing in the next ten years, we’ll see this happening more and more each year for inland areas
We even got some excessive wind in Chicagoland, which was obviously from the hurricane, because it was coming from the east. Normally, the wind here comes from the west.
Reminds me of youtuber LGR’s latest video, he didn’t prepare much because the storms don’t normally reach that far inland, and unfortunately he had a lot of his collection damaged because 2 massive trees sliced his house clean in half. Makes me think that the midwest will soon get more populated due to its position away from coastlines
Makes me think that the midwest will soon get more populated due to its position away from coastlines
We have our own shit show of extreme weather. For example, derechos (an oceanless, inland hurricane essentially) used to be rare. We’ve had 2 massive ones in the last 4 years. This summer alone there were hundreds of tornados hitting places that rarely ever see them. Hell, it’s god damn October and we’re still having ~90°F days, which hardly ever used to happen.
We got one of those out of place tornadoes this year! My town had one set down basically in the middle. We lost so many huge old (50-150+ year old) trees because that just doesn’t happen here. And because it doesn’t happen here, and some of the trees were planted well before the roads were built (meaning a lot of the trees that came down were basically in the road, curbs built around them sort of thing), it really did a number on the infrastructure (to say nothing of the damage to homes and stuff).
But in addition to a random tornado, we’ve just had a ton more super strong wind/rain events that cause damage in the last few years. I honestly don’t blame my neighbors for taking down their big old trees rather than deal with the weather damage. (I disagree with it, but I understand it)
In nebraska here under a Red Flag warning and a high of 91 today
EDIT : Correction, forecast updated with a high of 102… in fucking october. Holy shit
Hell, I think northern Nebraska had widespread, massive flooding a few years ago due to extreme weather causing one of the dams to fail. Wiped out several communities.
Are you in Tennessee? Because that sounds like the last four years here.
Not super far from there (~6 hours), WNW Illinois.
If you are ever fortunate enough to pay off your house DO NOT go without insurance because you can
Pretty much all home insurance doesn’t cover hurricane related damages if you’re on the east side of the US.
In some parts of Australia you cannot insure your home any longer due to climate change.
Florida and California are getting like that in the US. The lawyers and public adjusters are contributing to the problem by suing and shaking down every insurance company that stays in the state. In California they are begging them to stay…
Parts of Massachusetts are like that as well. As far as I know, flood insurance basically no longer exists on Cape Cod.
I wonder how deep inland hurricanes will affect the production of tornadoes up here (for good or ill).
Tornados seems to be moving eastward, so really the worst of the weather so far is hitting that side of the US
Not sure what the science is between 2 images with no source or timestamp and nearly 20 years of technological improvement between them is but this isn’t the peak of Katrina
Katrina ultimately reached its peak strength as a Category 5 hurricane on the Saffir–Simpson scale on August 28. Its maximum sustained winds reached 175 mph (280 km/h) and its pressure fell to 902 mbar (hPa; 26.63 inHg), ranking it among the strongest ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico.
It probably refers to its stats at landfall
Katrina weakened to a Category 3 before making landfall along the northern Gulf Coast, first in southeast Louisiana (sustained winds: 125mph) and then made landfall once more along the Mississippi Gulf Coast (sustained winds: 120mph). Katrina finally weakened below hurricane intensity late on August 29th over east central Mississippi.
But power doesn’t equal damage for weather
[Katrina] is the costliest hurricane to ever hit the United States, surpassing the record previously held by Hurricane Andrew from 1992. In addition, Katrina is one of the five deadliest hurricanes to ever strike the United States
Sources:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteorological_history_of_Hurricane_Katrina
But power doesn’t equal damage for weather
Only if you count what happened in New Orleans after the storm, which was an infrastructure issue, not a weather issue.
Why are you making this some type of competition?
I’m not. I’m explaining a difference.
What is the point of comparing Helene to Katrina? Harvey was also a 4.
Why discount the impact of Katrina just because there were systematic issues? It was a natural disaster and that was the impact.
Because it comes off to me like you’re trying to “well ackshully” about Helene being really the most devastating hurricane.
You’re splitting hairs.
No I am not. Those deaths were not the result of a natural disaster. The levee break was both predicted for years and preventable if the funds were just spent on it. Those deaths were directly the result of government incompetence.
So are you not going to count deaths from Helene resulting from people not evacuating properly? For not taking it seriously because it was preventable?
Individual choices are different from government incompetence resulting in mass casualties. You understand that, right?
If lightning strikes a skyscraper that doesn’t have sprinklers, causing it to burn down and kill 100 people- did the lightning kill those people or was it the lack of sprinklers?
Individual choices are different from government incompetence resulting in mass casualties.
There’s a systemic criticism here; people not evacuating Helene properly demonstrates we don’t have proper systems in place to facilitate evacuations in the case of a hurricane.
Someone who chooses not to evacuate because they didn’t understand the severity or don’t have a car or anywhere to go isn’t an individual choice.
I notice you didn’t answer my question. I will ask it again:
If lightning strikes a skyscraper that doesn’t have sprinklers, causing it to burn down and kill 100 people- did the lightning kill those people or was it the lack of sprinklers?
“Not evacuating properly”? Plenty of the people who died had no idea the storm was going to be as bad as it was when they were hundreds of miles inland in an area that had never had significant flooding.
It’s also good to remember that Katrina’s storm surge and the subsequent failure of the levees and flooding of the city is what was so damaging.
Besides the wind and rain the destruction of the levees took a huge toll on New Orleans.
Wow, so according to MTG, I guess Democrat technology has really advanced over the past few years!
If that’s who she means by They.
I guess “They” could have been me. I am voting blue, hopefully I didn’t vote blew and accidentally summon Helene with my democrat science/leechcraft.
Not necessarily. They might just be able to choose the strength at will and decided not to start out with the max output back with Katrina.
With Climate Change we’ll eventually run out of names. Unless Hurricane Karen manages to be the one that kills everyone before that happens.
There are something like ~500 million names.
Ok that may take a few years.
Helene looks like a thrice-divorced hurricane.
I think we’re just a few years away from the planetary cyclones in Day After Tomorrow.
I want someone to project that map onto a globe to illustrate how ridiculous it was. The elegantly circular arcs of the north sides of those storms would look bizarrely teardrop-pinched, if I’m not mistaken.
Really interesting. Is there a source for the pictures and data to share with friends?
I do not have a good source for that particular picture, but here are lots of links for you:
https://www.axios.com/2024/10/04/hurricane-helene-deadliest-us-storms-death-toll
Science!
