2024 Atlantic Hurricane Season Running Thread

If we can maroon all of them on Ceti Alpha V.

 

Damn you.

 

Opening day.

@hurrtrackerapp
Today marks the beginning of the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season. No development is expected the next 7 days. All indications are that this season may be well above average. The majority of storms occur August through late September. The season will end on Nov 30. We’ll be here to track each one to keep you updated without the hype. #hurricane #season #2024 #tropics

 

"Anything lower than Cat 2 is unnecessary hype."
[25yearSouthFloridaresident]

 

We just moved my mom into a condo on the island. She doesn’t sweat weather, but I told her I’d let her know if was time to leave. Otherwise, it’s fine. A Cat 1 is no different than an East Tennessee summer storm.

 

Worry about the water, not the wind.

 

A couple of weeks after I moved to Wilmington some 25 odd years ago, a Category 1 hurricane started making its way toward the Carolina coast. Everyone around had that attitude of: It's just going to be a Cat 1, no big deal, it'll be stormy for half a day, but the only thing you really need to worry about is the tornadoes on the backside.

Being a young and foolish Midwesterner, I thought OK. I can handle that. I know what to do if there's a tornado, so if that's the biggest worry, I'm good. I stayed in town with my roommate, who had just moved down from Rose Hill and seemed wise in the way of hurricanes.

Well, Hurricane Bonnie didn't weaken anywhere nearly as much as they were predicting before making landfall as a strong Cat 2 near Topsail. More importantly, Bonnie seemed to stall over southeastern North Carolina. We had several hours of moving in and out of the western eyewall while it kind of oscillated. And the water in our runoff ditch behind our apartment was slowly creeping up to our patio door as we piled as many towels and clothes as we could find to try to keep it at bay.

The whole thing lasted about 3x as long as any of the locals predicted. It was about 36 hours of getting pounded followed by a week or so without electricity. As a result, I've always taken even category 1 hurricanes pretty seriously.

My favorite part of my Hurricane Bonnie story was the guy randomly banging on our front door during the worst of the eyewall. I opened the door to find a probably 30-something, rough looking dude wearing a wetsuit asking "You got any coke? I ran out hours ago. Wasn't expecting it to last this long." He was not referring to Coca-Cola.

 

Imagine what it was like on Grand Bahama for Dorian in 2019, having essentially an EF-4 tornado parked over your whole island for 48 hours straight. The (official) death toll was 70 on the island, but even the unofficial count of about 300 seems miraculous.

 

The slow-moving 1s and 2s are bad for flooding the rivers because the water has no place to go. That's why my dumb ass spent the night sleeping in my truck in a parking lot in Pembroke in the middle of Matthew.

 

Topography is all the difference. Wind, rain and waves are all of a piece.

You live 285 miles inland like Dallas, the threat is different. You live hard up on Galveston Island, then Tebow bless you.

 

It's definitely the water, and not necessarily from the ocean.

Floyd closely followed David in 1999 and made of a mess of everything east of Raleigh. Thankfully, our duplex was on one of the highest places in Rocky Mount but the Tar River was about a mile wide when I went to try to go to work the next morning. Princeville was completely wiped from the map.

 

True "coastal" flooding ebbs pretty quickly. It's those slow-moving storms that dump inches of rain in inland areas that don't have a lot of drop that wipe stuff out. With storm surge at the mouths of the rivers, the water just can't escape. In 2018, Florence washed away the dunes and crossovers and tore up some siding and roofs, but the real damage was done 30 miles inland along the Northeast Cape Fear.