2022 Atlantic Hurricane Season Running Thread

I thought this is how we got the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company.

Florida Shrimpers Rode Out Hurricane Ian

 

In real life Bayou Le Batre got strafed by Camille but only mildly. Well east of the eyewall but Camille was so big, it had effects elsewhere.

 

It was Carmen, not Camille, IIRC.

 

Holy cow. Deaths from Ian.

“The decedent was outside her residence smoking a cigarette when a gust of wind from the hurricane blew her off the porch and she subsequently struck her head on a concrete step,” was the description of how a 71-year-old Manatee County woman died Thursday.

A 54-year-old Lee County man died attempting to flee rising flood waters. “The decedent attempted to get out of a window and became trapped,” was how the report said he was found Thursday, the day after the storm slammed into southwest Florida.

“Decedent shot himself after seeing property damage due to hurricane,” was the summary for a 73-year-old Lee County man who died Friday.

A 96-year-old found dead under a car in Charlotte County was among five Floridians age 90 or older killed in the storm.

“Decedent was crushed by sliding glass door and pool cage,” was how a 65-year-old man was found there Friday.

A 70-year-old Lee County woman with high blood pressure, recovering from a stroke and other medical issues, was “found in flood waters up to chest.” Her death Saturday was attributed to “delayed medical access due to hurricane.”

An 89-year-old man who died Friday in Lee County was described as “oxygen dependent.”

“Lost power and had generator failure,” the medical examiners’ report concluded. “Decedent unable to use required equipment.”

 

My second cousin and his wife got their power back in Cape Coral yesterday. Running water the day before that. By the time Lee County gave the evacuation order, there simply wasn’t gasoline to be found. (And I kinda get why many didn’t leave on their own before then. For most people down there, evacuation means driving up through Tampa Bay, which is where they thought this thing was going originally.)

 

Hindsight, yada, yada, but it looks like the logical thing from that general area would have been to head east.
Of course, riding out the hurricane might have been preferable to riding out a night in Belle Glade.

 

I see a common theme among those.

 

This was a tricky storm. For about 5-6 days I thought my house in Pinellas County, Florida was right in the direct path. When I decided to go to my parents house in Palm Beach County, that was the day the storm track shifted a little south and eventually it landed 100 miles south of the original track. Older residents in those areas, if they couldn't drive or didn't have family that could help them escape, it was going to be tough because that area went from "stay cautious" to "everyone get the fuck out and you got 24 hours to do it".

My Dad is on oxygen now so any storm that even threatens his area and could result in a loss of power, we have to act fast to get him some place where I know he's going to be safe.

 

It's been a week now and I've been through about 15-20 hurricanes/major storms in the past 30 years. I never thought I would see one more destructive than Andrew or Katrina...those two were pretty much the apex of storms. But I lived in Lakeland, Florida during Andrew and I can tell it was a mostly cloudy day with sun peeking through, the wind was whipping up pretty good and every now and then you would get a outer band of rain that would last a few minutes. But 60-70 miles south of me all hell was breaking loose. Andrew was very powerful and destroyed Homestead, Florida, but it was also a tightly packed storm.

Ian was something completely different. This was storm was huge.The reach was so wide and it moved really slow, but didn't weaken quickly once it hit land. Last Tuesday I was driving through all those inland areas that got smashed the next day like Zoffo Springs and Arcadia. And driving through there there wasn't the impression that Ian was going to be a direct hit and hit them so powerfully. The gas stations weren't overpacked. Traffic wasn't bad. I don't think those areas thought they would get obliterated like they did. And then it moved through 2/3 of the lower half of the state, causing almost as many issues in Daytona Beach as it did in Fort Myers.

Never seen a storm like it before.

 

Older folks are comparing the track and intensity to Donna in 1960. But remember, there were fewer than 5 million people living in the state then, and very few on barrier islands. The entire center of the state was swamps and orange groves. St. Pete had 181,000 people and Tampa 275,000 in 1960. It's now 3.15 million.

I don't know if the comparison is apt, but with both COVID and Ian, the people living on the margins (or the people too stupid to know better) were hit with the worst of it.

We tend to think of retirement communities like The Villages with their golf courses and pickleball courts as "where old people end up." But in reality, there's a huge population that's really infirm and immobile, just living out their days in poorly constructed mobile homes and condos, or single story assisted living. The whole "God's waiting room" joke in a nutshell. And that's all over the state, not just concentrated on the coasts.

Those are the people who didn't have a chance, unlike the morons who built fancy mansions on Sanibel and decided to risk a Cat 4 because their courage outkicked their brains.

The question going forward is: How do you move millions of people to a safer location in less than 48 hours? I don't know the answer to that. Hurricanes are going to hurricane. Insurance companies are going to price people off those properties, because in order to build homes that can withstand winds and tidal surge, the costs are prohibitive.

Maybe that's a good thing in the long run. But people have always risked the danger for the allure.

 

The real heartbreaker is that there are lots of old people and low wage earners who were living in cheap old housing, trailers and the like. They're gone, and what is rebuilt is going to be much too expensive for them to afford. They're going to have to go somewhere, and there's nowhere near enough such housing left in Florida to take them. No telling where they're going to go. Alabama and Mississippi I guess, for cheap housing.