Hurricane Nate: US states on alert after storm leaves trail of destruction in Central America

Tropical Storm Nate has strengthened into a category one hurricane and is speeding towards the United States after killing at least 21 people in Central America.

Landslides have caused damage to towns and
roads, like this highway in Casa Mata, Costa Rica.

Forecasters said it was likely to strengthen over the Gulf of Mexico before making landfall near New Orleans.

Louisiana and Mississippi officials declared states of emergency and evacuations ahead of the hurricane's expected landfall on Saturday night local time.

Evacuations began at some offshore oil platforms in the Gulf.

Read the ABC News story - “Hurricane Nate: US states on alert after storm leaves trail of destruction in Central America.”

Irma reminds us of all we don’t know about the natural world

On Sept. 8, 1900, a hurricane drove 15 feet of storm surge over the thriving city of Galveston, Tex., maximum elevation 8.7 feet. At least 6,000 people were killed in what remains the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history. 

Trees bend in the tropical storm wind along
 North Fort Lauderdale Beach Boulevard as
 Hurricane Irma hits the southern part of the
state on Sept. 10 in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. 

Most of them had less than a day’s warning that a storm was approaching and had no inkling of its power.

I thought of that when I read a report by the Associated Press as a storm of similar intensity rolled over the coast of Cuba and headed toward Florida. The AP quoted a businessman from St. Petersburg, Fla., who was irritated that Hurricane Irma was headed toward his town and not toward Miami as predicted. “For five days, we were told it was going to be on the east coast, and then 24 hours before it hits, we’re now told it’s coming up the west coast,” the man complained. “As usual, the weatherman, I don’t know why they’re paid.”

Arguably, they’re paid for the thousands of lives they may have saved by sounding warnings that the people of Galveston never received. Thanks to radar and satellites and weather planes and forecasting supercomputers — to name only a few of the advances of the past century — the world watched for days as Irma whirled steadily westward across the Atlantic Ocean, a slow-motion bowling ball headed for the pins. The speed of its winds, the spread of its bands, the pressure in its eye were tracked like vitals in an intensive care unit.

Read what David Von Drehle has written in The Washington Post -  “Irma reminds us of all we don’t know about the natural world."

Hurricanes, Climate and the Capitalist Offset

Texans will find few consolations in the wake of a hurricane as terrifying as Harvey. But here, at least, is one: A biblical storm has hit them, and the death toll —38 as of this writing — is mercifully low, given its intensity.

Nature has no respect for our status symbols.

This is not how it plays out in much of the world. In 1998, Hurricane Mitch ripped through Central America and killed anywhere between 11,000 and 19,000 people, mostly in Honduras and Nicaragua. Nearly a decade later Cyclone Nargis slammed into Myanmar and a staggering 138,000 people perished.

Nature’s furies — hurricanes, earthquakes, landslides, droughts, infectious diseases, you name it — may strike unpredictably. But their effects are not distributed at random.

Rich countries tend to experience, and measure, the costs of such disasters primarily in terms of money. Poor countries experience them primarily in terms of lives. Between 1940 and 2016, a total of 3,348 people died in the United States on account of hurricanes, according to government data, for an average of 43 victims a year. That’s a tragedy, but compare it to the nearly 140,000 lives lost when a cyclone hit Bangladesh in 1991.

Why do richer countries fare so much better than poorer ones when it comes to natural disasters? It isn’t just better regulation. I grew up in Mexico City, which adopted stringent building codes following a devastating earthquake in 1957. That didn’t save the city in the 1985 earthquake, when we learned that those codes had been flouted for years by lax or corrupt building inspectors, and thousands of people were buried under the rubble of shoddy construction. Regulation is only as good, or bad, as its enforcement.

Read opinion piece in The New York Times by Bret Stephens - “Hurricanes, Climate and the Capitalist Offset.”

Australian lessons unfolding in Alberta

Alberta fires - too
big to control.

How do you stop a big, fast-moving wildfire like the one ravaging Fort McMurray, Alberta? The answer is, you can’t.

Don Whittemore, a senior disaster response manager from Boulder, Colo., who has trained teams of firefighters in the United States and abroad, compared the task to “trying to stop a hurricane from hitting the Eastern Seaboard.”

Wildfires are fought from the air and on the ground in a coordinated offensive meant to keep them from spreading. If the fire can be denied access to fresh terrain and fresh fuel, it will dwindle and burn itself out. But when strong, shifting winds are driving the flames, as in Alberta, the fire can move unpredictably and leap far beyond fire breaks and other obstacles like rivers and highways, making containment efforts futile and dangerous.

Read The New York Times story - “Forces of Nature Conspire Against Firefighters Around Fort McMurray.”

(Is this similar to Australia’s future? Bushfires we can’t stop, control and whose final conclusion rests with a burst of rain, a downpour that is in its affect the opposite of the hot, dry and windy conditions brought on by human-induced climate change, both, interestingly, are a product of climate change – Robert McLean.)