How natural are disasters?

Natural disasters often aren’t “natural” at all.

When a volcano erupts, when a big earthquake happens, when that earthquake causes a tsunami, a “natural disaster” has a natural cause, to be sure. (Usually. Fracking for natural gas now causes a lot of earthquakes in Oklahoma and Montana, but so far these are far too small to kill anyone.)

But in the cases of wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and electrical outages, often the “disaster” part is about not what nature has done, but about what we have done. It is a natural event made disastrous by human choices.

This is even true to an extent about earthquakes. Even a 9.0 earthquake would have a hard time killing people if we all lived in yurts or tipis. A few living such a life would die from rock falls, and on the coast many thousand might die from a tsunami were conditions right, but most people these days die in earthquakes from stuff—man-made stuff—falling on their heads. Roofs, facades, windows, paintings, lumber, facing stones, pediments, and bridges all come tumbling down when the earth shakes. In your own house, a heavy glass-fronted painting hanging on the wall could be the end of you in a quake.

If a hurricane hits an uninhabited island, there is no disaster. That’s just Mother Nature doing what she’s done for millions of years. Palm trees evolved to make it through hurricanes. And while hurricanes are certainly a force of nature, if we made better building decisions, wrote stricter zoning codes, and made evacuations mandatory on the mainland and built tough concrete shelters on islands, almost no one would die.

As the earth warms, as oceans warm, and as storms become bigger, incidents of extreme weather and wildfire grow bigger and more dangerous. This too was our choice—is our choice every time we drive a car or turn the air conditioning down or the heat up, with each child we have who goes on to have more children, all of them living the standard suburban life with its profligate energy use. This is our choice, not Mother Nature’s to drive worse weather disasters.

We make choices that can make weather and tectonic events worse...or better. All of those natural events are, whether we think of it often or not, necessary to life on Earth as we know it.

By law, in Miami, for instance, you must build better now to survive hurricanes. (But what do poor people living in sub-standard housing do? What do the poor of Puerto Rico do? Or the poor living in the flood plains of the world’s big rivers? I'll address this in more detail next week.)

Zoning regulations are also stricter in LA and San Francisco, which have some of the most stringent building codes in the US. (Japan’s are far better still--and there’s hardly a type of severe disaster Japan isn’t prone to.) Most of the buildings that lasted through the 1989 Loma Prieta Quake will last again through a similar-strength quake. And if buildings suffered cracks or survivable damage, the owners, if they were smart, did some retrofitting. I worked in an historical brick building in San Francisco, and the owners spent tens of thousands of dollars in the retrofit in the early 80’s, and the building came through the 1989 quake perfectly intact, though most brick buildings will crumble into a pile of bricks and mortar that has returned to sand in a big quake.

At a personal level, people can also get smarter. Once I experienced the quake, every house I lived in thereafter I did certain things to. I strapped the hot water heater to a support beam. I drove screws through the back of bookcases and knick-knack shelving and into studs in the wall. You pick up one disaster of a house in a quake, and you don’t do it again. You pay for a seismic inspection and do whatever the inspector tells you to do.

I know I'm being terribly judgmental here, but I do not understand when I see videos of Oklahoma post-tornado, and we’re looking at nice ranch homes, and the reporter says only one in 100 people have a basement or tornado shelter. People, you live in Oklahoma! Don’t you love your children? Apparently not, for there aren’t even laws about elementary schools in Oklahoma having tornado shelters or safe rooms. People standing in front of leveled homes will talk on TV about how they lost their new flatscreen TV and boat, which they apparently had the money to buy instead of a tornado shelter. That surely fits the definition of insanity. The absence of a legal requirement for schools to have shelters seems to me criminally irresponsible of zoning commissions and Oklahoma's state legislature, and I don't know about you, but I hate thinking of those children dying who do not have to. People, it’s only money. So, a better legislature passes a law mandating school shelters, and everyone in the district pays an extra $25 on their annual property tax bill for five years to build the school a shelter. Surely a human life, the life of an 8-year-old, even if you never meet that child, is worth that tiny amount to you. Isn't it? Apparently not, for it's still not happening there.

So before we blame Mother Nature for disasters, we should look in the mirror. Are you contributing to climate change more than an average person on the planet? Is your house in a risky area and you haven’t bothered to do everything you can afford to minimize your risks? Are you one of those fools who owns a working car but does not obey a mandatory evacuation order? (Do such people simply not understand the word “mandatory?”) And please tell me you’re not one of those fools who runs out to the dock to take a video of the storm surge coming in and the 12 foot waves breaking! If you want to live in wildfire area, you think hard before buying a place right up against the woods or dry grasses, asking yourself if the pretty view is worth the risk, and you consider concrete and tile construction before you fall in love with the beautiful hardwood and cedar shake ranch home. You keep the yard picked up and trees far away from the house, just as the fire marshal recommends. And if you're a developer, you do not fight sane zoning laws that keep safe distances between subdivisions that help prevent a wildfire jumping quickly from one neighborhood to the next.

Even if we do everything we can, some people will still die in natural disasters. A hurricane’s storm surge can be quick and powerful. A traffic jam in a n evacuation zone can be so terrible that people end up exposed to the disaster and die. You might already be disabled, and it’s impossible for you to get out in time. You might be poor and not be able to evacuate. Your state may have planned badly for evacuations and there's not enough gasoline for sale to get everyone out of the area. Bad luck happens.

But please, don’t make a natural event into a disaster it didn’t have to be. Live in as safe a place you can afford, and be as prepared as you can. (more information at https://www.ready.gov/make-a-plan)

I know I'll never convince TV to write copy about Mother Nature's "wrath" during disasters. She is not actually wrathful. She's doing what she is meant to do, what she did before people came along, and what she'll do after people are gone. The dramatic events like hurricanes and earthquakes are only disastrous to us when we've made choices that don't take their inevitability into account.

Emergency Supplies

It's a good time to revisit the concept of having an emergency supply kit that you can grab and take with you if you are evacuated because of flood, fire, hurricane, or toxic waste spill. You might build a three-day or a five-day kit. Some of what you might want to include:

• Water - one gallon of water per person per day for at least three days, for drinking and sanitation
• Food - at least a three-day supply of non-perishable food
• Battery-powered or hand crank radio and a NOAA Weather Radio with tone alert
• Flashlight
• First aid kit
• Extra batteries
• Whistle to signal for help
• Dust mask to help filter contaminated air and plastic sheeting and duct tape to shelter-in-place
• Moist towelettes, garbage bags and plastic ties for personal sanitation
• Cell phone with chargers and a backup battery
• Prescription medications
• Non-prescription medications such as pain relievers, anti-diarrhea medication, antacids or laxatives
• Spare glasses 
• Infant formula, bottles, diapers, wipes, diaper rash cream
• Pet food and extra water for your pet, plus their crate and leash
• Cash or traveler's checks (ATMs don't work in power outages)
• Important family documents such as copies of insurance policies, identification and bank account records saved electronically or in a waterproof, portable container
• Sleeping bag or warm blanket for each person
• Complete change of clothing appropriate for your climate and sturdy shoes
• Household chlorine bleach and medicine dropper to disinfect waterMatches in a waterproof container
• Feminine supplies and personal hygiene items
• Mess kits, paper cups, plates, paper towels and plastic utensils
• Paper and pencil
• Books, games, puzzles or other activities for children
• Duct tape, which is often useful
• A tarp for picnics or makeshift tent

Think through where you might end up: at a shelter, a friend's house, or stuck camping out of your car. 

Do this before you think you might need to. Dedicate a corner of your garage to it. If you have no garage, pick the closet closest to your front door and make sure everything is packed neatly into cheap duffle bags so the family can throw everything in the car within 15 minutes if they need to. Change the water and medications every year (your birthday is a good time to do that) and recharge the spare phone battery.

I also put a water filter in my supplies and parachute cord. Think through your locale, your situation, and add whatever you want.

And NEVER let your gas tank go under 50% full. Because you really never know.

Puerto Rico in Crisis

3 Days after Maria passed

A humanitarian crisis is ongoing in Puerto Rico, and its national government has been far too slow to respond. Some highlights, as I write this:

• Power is out throughout the island
• Safe water is a problem
• The death toll is not yet known
• It took five days for the territory’s governor to get in touch with the mayors of all towns large enough to have them
• Children’s hospital has been out of fuel for their generators for days
• Lines for limited gas create panic
• Agriculture is decimated for the year--no new crops of any kind for many months
• The infrastructure is damaged--power lines, water lines, roads, and more
• People desperate for food and medicine have looted closed drugs stores
• Opportunistic looters are making the streets unsafe
• Dangerous prisoners have escaped a storm-damaged prison
• People rushing home to loved ones are being price gouged by airlines
• For nearly a week hospitals did not have running water

And I hate to be a doomsayer on this, but I know there could be more to come. For instance, what if one dead body in a stream was a person with a communicable disease? An epidemic disease is possible. I'm not wishing for it. I'm dreading it.

Because of a lack of leadership from the White House, people finally went around that roadblock to help. The Mayor of New York organized shipments of supplies. Individuals begged FEMA and Health Corps workers to act anyway, even without orders from the top. And many did.

Most of my readers live in a safe place, a place where they can rely on police or fire coming to help. Certainly if there were a disaster, they’d see evidence of rescue workers right away. Puerto Rico residents waited five days before much happened at all. Five days without stores open. Five days without hot food. Five days without communication, not knowing if the water coming from the tap was safe to bathe in or not. It’s hot and muggy there as well, which must make everything seem so much worse.

I write disaster novels as entertainment, but I never want to see a disaster happen. And my heart goes out to my fellow Americans. I’ve donated money--including money to the American Library Association, to help rebuild and restock libraries there and in the USVI, when the immediate crisis is over. Donate to safe, known places: UNICEF, Save the Children, The Red Cross all have funds for Maria.

I’m ashamed of how late my federal government acted to save its own citizens. And poor towns in Texas still have terrible problems and dangerous pollution from Harvey. I guess this is the future we have to look forward to unless we are filthy rich. Very sad indeed.

It also serves as a warning to us all. We cannot necessarily rely on our governments, which may be in a crisis of whatever nature themselves. We have to take care of ourselves.

So I’m thinking “three days of food and water” may no longer be enough to keep on hand. Have a five-day supply on hand at all times for those disasters we can’t anticipate, like tornadoes, earthquakes, and power outages. If you are in the way of a hurricane, if one seems remotely likely to hit you in ten days, start buying extra supplies for ten or fourteen days that far in advance. If you can afford a hybrid car, that would help evacuate you when gasoline runs out. (You can still get 100 miles away from a dangerous coastal area on your electric charge, and as all-electric cars continue to improve, one day, they’ll take you over 500 miles on one charge). And a spare, portable solar panel and battery pack might see you through many days of power outages--not to live a comfy suburban life with TV and cold drinks, but to have the necessities and communication capability you’ll so desperately want.

lines for gas were 4-5 miles long

My heart goes out to the people of Puerto Rico. I wish I could do more to help them.

Hurricane Matthew

If you live on the east coast of the US or the Bahamas, do not take your eyes off this! 

I've been following this hurricane closely and studying the maps at sites I referred you to in Advanced Hurricane Links last month. (In fact, I've let my fascination with it cut into my writing time, which must stop!)

Friday morning I saw it had intensified overnight and was not going to stop. I tweeted that it was scary and predicted to a friend IRL it'd be Cat 5 before bedtime. It was. I began worrying about my Florida fans and all the Floridians I didn't know, and everyone in Kingston Jamaica, who looked like they were in for terrible times.

I admit I was befuddled about the models, which had it turning north, and I continued to be befuddled Saturday morning, when I pulled this 700hPa wind map off earth.nullschool.net.

I could see the cyclonic and anticyclonic areas over the Ohio Valley and Atlantic, respectively, and the likely path north between them is obvious, a channel right up the coast as of that moment.  But my question--and I couldn't find an answer for it anywhere--was what made forecasters think the storm was going to turn north within minutes of when I took this screen cap? I couldn't see any path north for it to get to the northward channel. It was obviously being steered west.

Leaving the mystery alone, I forced myself away from researching the question to write, did my daily words, and by nightfall my time on Saturday, it was moving NW. One strange thing about this storm (and it's a weird one!) is that on satellite, you can see a big area of convection, bigger than the core of the hurricane, to its east. This happened because that side of the storm was, for a long time, over high mountains in South America, which changed the storm's dynamics. When it moves entirely away from SA, that huge batch of thunderstorms may be wrapped into the main circulation, or it might stay just like that (looks like eyes, doesn't it?)...until it hits Haiti.

Infrared view of Matthew 1140 UT, 2 October

Deforested, poor, and still not recovered from the big earthquake, Haiti will not fare well under that powerful bunch of storms. Mudslides and flooding will kill, and if the death toll is in the hundreds, I won't be surprised.

As to where it's going after it's done with Haiti and Cuba? Too much about the future is uncertain. How far north will a low pressure system now in Ohio move? How strong will the high ridge now building in the Atlantic become? My feeling all day yesterday was that the official track was a little too far east, that Florida and the Carolinas are still in danger. One model (and a good model, not one of the weird ones that is never right) has a major hurricane slamming into Maine in a week! So everyone on the East Coast of the continental US needs to watch this thing.

And remember, if you see a forecast for four days down the road and it isn't aimed at you, that's no guarantee you are safe. On average, that far in advance, they're wrong by 200 miles, which the NHC itself mentions in some of its updates. Weather is complicated, which makes long-range forecasting difficult. Get your supplies today, just in case. If the hurricane curves out to sea, you can be thankful, and the supplies will serve you well for the next storm, power outage, or earthquake, too.

ETA, Tuesday 3 Oct. I answered my own questions about the steering.

1) The turn north did not happen for 30 hours beyond when I looked at steering maps. By then, it made sense to me from looking at the maps. So some forecasts promised the turn too quickly.
2) I've read--but haven't thoroughly investigated--that which steering level to look at depends on the storm itself, barometric pressure, cloud heights, etc. I'll have to dig into that one and see....
3) The blog moderator at WU pointed out that all Northern Hemisphere storms want to "visit the North Pole." I thought about it for five seconds and realized why. I did a thought experiment of the sort that we did physically in junior high physics, imagining a drop of colored fluid on a spinning top, just "north" of the top's equator, and I could see it. This is, of course, another part of the Coriolis effect. If nothing else is steering a hurricane--or if all the forces that are trying to do so balance out, it'll move north. If it's caught in trade winds (as from Africa to the Caribbean), those will steer it. If there are high or low pressure areas, those can steer it. Otherwise, it does indeed want to "visit the North Pole."

..and the models and forecast tracks are inching west today, so that part of my guess did come true. If you're in Florida or the Carolinas, it's time to do early prep: take in the lawn furniture, clean out the freezer, put a bunch of bottles of water in there to freeze solid by Wednesday and keep it colder longer, fill up the spare gas cans on your way to/from work tomorrow, buy or charge batteries. As the forecasts narrow it down, you may need to do more. If they tell  you to evacuate, please, evacuate.

Advanced Hurricane Links

earth.nullschool.net via Mr. Masters

After this post, I promised to give you more links on hurricanes. Here they are!

One important factor in if a tropical wave will develop into a storm with a closed circulation--and possibly into a dangerous hurricane--is the wind sheer. Here's one map with sheer. Sheer can tear apart a hurricane.

I originally found these U/WI maps through this site, which explains in brief many of the maps you can link in the above UWisc site. The first time I looked at many of them, I thought “what am I looking at?” But the more you look, and the more you go back to explanations, the clearer the maps appear. Those of you who might watch The Weather Channel but have not dug deeply into how hurricanes form will have heard many of these terms: sheer, vorticity, convergence, and divergence. So here is that information which those forecasters look at before summarizing it for the broadcast audience. 

A great map to look at when you want to become a thoughtful amateur forecaster is this one, the depth of the 26C ocean layer. The redder, the deeper. This matters because hurricanes derive energy from hot ocean water, and because as they strengthen, they churn up deeper layers of ocean. If those deeper layers are cold, hurricanes can "turn themselves off" by doing this churning. But if the heat goes deep, they can churn and churn and still get fed. Katrina is a textbook example of one that had a deep 26C isotherm to feed from.

NOAA 22 August 2016

Large-scale weather patterns help determine where hurricanes are likely to develop in any given month. Dr. Masters at Weather Underground revisits the basics of the CCKW (convectively coupled Kelvin wave), MJO (Madden-Julian oscillation), and La Nina/El Nino,  from time to time. Here is a link to his recent post on these. I was particularly happy to see this one because I’d been watching the TIW -- that wavy cold temperature thing off South America in the top image of this post--developing and getting colder, and I had no idea what it was called. I was fairly certain “wavy cold temperature thing” was not the term the pros would use. I’m relieved that now I know: Tropical Instability Wave.

Let's return to the super-cool site earth.nullschool.net. I'm linking you here directly to the No. Atlantic. Watch the winds blow for a moment. (Soothing, isn't it?...except maybe for Floridians.) Now hit "I" on your keyboard. And keep hitting it. What this will do is take you upward through the layers of air, all the way up to the stratosphere. The redder the lines, the faster the wind is blowing.

You’ll notice that if you hunt down more and more links that explain these images and why they're important, you’ll start seeing calculus equations...and I admit, that’s where I stop my researches. If it takes calc to unpeel the next layer of understanding, I’ve learned enough for fiction-writing purposes. This ends up being a good thing, for if I didn’t have some sort of trigger to stop me, I’d do nothing but research and write no novels!

A friend wrote me an email this morning and said, "What, are you psychic? How did you know to post these hurricane links when you did?" No, I'm not psychic! If you watch African weather and do it from year to year, you learn to see them coming a long way off. To someone living in 1888 on the Gulf Coast, your or my ability to forecast hurricanes would seem like magic, wouldn't it?

And yes, there will be a hurricane novel one day to take its place beside my tornado, earthquake, and volcano novels, Storm, Quake, and Erupt. I have many ideas, and a person can only write a handful of books every year.

Hurricane links

As the North Atlantic hurricane season is starting in earnest, I wanted to mention some of my favorite links that I, an amateur weather nerd, follow enthusiastically when a tropical depression has become a hurricane, particularly one that will hit land. Most of these will work for anywhere in the world, so you don’t have to be a North American to find your local storm information.

Image, NOAA/Wikimedia commons

NOAA National Hurricane Center advisories. http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/ The top NHC meteorologists break it down for you every three hours during an active storm.

Maps. http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/satellite.php Click through the various loops: Dvorak, satellite, funktop, and others, and you’ll learn a lot simply by comparing the images. (Read up a little, and you’ll learn more) Some show cloud height in different colors and some show wind speeds in different colors, some show water vapor. Interesting stuff.

Earthnull.net.  https://earth.nullschool.net/ Surface winds, and a beautiful presentation. Being the nerd I am, I can spend an hour spinning the globe, magnifying, moving back out, figuring out what’s happening and how it all connects, watching the dance of the winds on this tiny planet we call home. Isn’t the internet cool?!?

capture 15:12UT, 13 August 2016, Pacific Ocean

Weather Underground’s hurricane update, https://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/ , often updated 2-3 times a day when the winds are blowing. Dr. Masters and the other scientists are great (link to that blog on right side of page), and the comments on the blog run from the head-scratchingly silly to the brilliant amateur with good insights and of course with plenty of needless internet bickering.

When a hurricane develops, for video storm coverage, nothing is better for me the writer, wanting to know what it feels like on the ground to normal people, than finding a local news station that streams and is covering it full-time. I can’t give you specific links, for my crystal ball is at the shop and I can’t tell you where the next hurricane landfall will be in North America. Name a big city in the area of likely impact, google that and “live streaming television” and you should find something.

Also, there are often webcams on beaches, on boardwalks, and at resort hotels aimed out to sea. Whereas live TV coverage streamed from Mexico is nearly impossible to find, webcams are common enough at resort towns, so even Mexican landfalls can often be watched. Switching between cameras at various locations can give you that feel of being there, watching the thing come at you. Often, the weather knocks out the feed when winds are over 80 mph, but until then, it’s fascinating to check in on the images from time to time. Again, googling should find some for you. Sometimes, a city’s chamber of commerce or tourism site has links to several.

You may ask me, “Lou, so after your morning hours of writing or revising or proofreading are over, how many hours can you spend moving from one of these sites to the next when a full-scale hurricane (or something akin, like Sandy) is moving in?” And the answer to that is, 12 hours, easily.

All together now. “Weather nerd!”

Stay tuned for part two, some more advanced links.

My bug-out bag

A bug-out bag, if you didn’t know, is “a portable kit that normally contains the items one would require to survive for seventy-two hours, when evacuating from a disaster.” (Wikipedia)

I keep my bug-out bag in the trunk of my car at all times. It takes up about a third of the space. Even though I live in one of the lowest-risk areas in the US for natural disasters, there’s an outside chance of a nuclear disaster upwind. It’s better to be prepared than not. Also, I can easily decide on the spur of the moment to go camping and not have to run home to gear up. There are things in the list I didn't fit in the photo:

Sleeping bag (a cheap one from my childhood, but it still works for most weather)
Pillow
Outerwear
Hiking boots
Bike helmet--nearly as good as a safety helmet for earthquakes
Backpack containing all the rest
Mylar blankets--two, with one for use as ground cover
First aid supplies, including a few aspirin, Benadryl, and Imodium I replace twice a year
Food
Water (more than shown!)
Water filtration device
Metal cup with handle (can serve as one-person saucepan)
Swiss Army Knife
Paracord (more than shown)
Magnesium fire-starter with whistle
Candles and matches
Duct tape
Survival fishing kit in film can: lead weights, hooks, safety pin, and coiled monofilament
Pad and pencil. Emergency phone numbers and addresses are written on the inside cover
Bandannas. (My readers will know my characters always have them! So do I.)
Brightly colored plastic bags--for trash and to help rescuers see me more easily.
Entertainments. When the SHTF, or any other time, I'm always up for a poker game

The items in bold/italic, I recommend. You can purchase them at Amazon, and I’ve included those links here.

As you can see, I didn’t run out and spend thousands of dollars on this gear. Some is old, some people gave me when I mentioned I was putting this together. The water filtration device, using technology developed in the Haiti earthquake, is new.

Hurricane forecasting: musings on accuracy, science and politics

Those of us who watched Atlantic hurricanes closely in 2015 saw a number of spaghetti models, predicting the course of the storm, that looked like this:

Weather Underground November 2016

Clear as mud where that thing is headed, isn't it? In other words, there was little consensus among models about where this storm would head, how bad it would get, and who should prepare. I had selective remembered a number of models like this and guessed that I could write a post about how it was a tough year for models. To prepare for writing this, I first went and studied predictions versus outcome.

As it turns out, despite a few spaghetti models that looked like a four year old's scrawls, models were no less accurate this year than in the past four years. (At least not as far as I can determine by studying the charts. It will take another year to hear a detailed number-crunchy analysis from NOAA.)

Every decade, the modeling of hurricanes improves, but we don't have 100% accuracy at even 24 hours out. 120 hours out? We're not anywhere close to predicting that. It might be wise to check out your storm supplies at 120 hours from a predicted landfall in your region, just in case you need to buy more sandbags, plywood, or gas for your generator, but there's no reason to panic or evacuate that far ahead of a predicted landfall. The storm could come ashore 500 miles from where it was first predicted, or it could turn back into mid-ocean, or it could dissipate altogether in five days (as did Invest 93L, the storm in the graphic above.)

Forecasting is not perfect yet. It may never be. Many variables determine the course and strength of a hurricane. Airborne dust, steering winds, sheer, humidity, ocean temperature, ocean depth, and terrain passed over are among the variables that can alter the course and intensity of a tropical storm. Unusual changes occasionally defy the most rational predictions.

The European model (usually labeled ECMWF on spaghetti plots) continues to outperform any other hurricane forecast model for the coming 12 to 108 hours. The reasons for this are, you may be surprised to know, not primarily scientific ones but political. Knowledge about the physics of atmosphere is widely held and not proprietary. The ECMWF is funded better, and steadily, and more computer power is allocated to running that model. More detail can be entered, more calculations performed, and a more accurate model results.

There is nothing new in the influence of politics on weather safety. Weather forecasting has, in the US, always been subject to political whims of Congress who vote funding one year and take it away the next. In one horrible moment in the 1980's, barely averted, weather forecasting was going to be privatized. (Imagine a pre-Internet world where only people rich enough to afford a subscription service could receive the warning of a hurricane or tornado. That would have been the likely result of the proposal.)

The history of the US official weather services is not an entirely lovely one in any case. Arrogance, ego, greed, narrow-mindedness, and even nationalism have cost many lives of citizens over the years. Erik Larson recounts some of this history in his excellent book on the Galveston hurricane, Isaac's Storm. Caribbean Island forecasters understood hurricanes better than anyone else in the early 20th Century--which makes sense, as they saw more of them--but the US weather service refused to accept what those people knew and ignored their warnings of coming storms, refusing to pass along the information to its own citizens.

Other problems in the bureaucracy have caused deaths from tornadoes. The weather service kept local news outlets--who might have had access to on-the-ground storm spotters or purchased new technology (such as Doppler radar) more quickly than the government--from reporting on a coming tornado. It wasn't until 1950 that the official ban on using the word "tornado" in forecasts was lifted. It is rather difficult to hide in your storm cellar from a specific EF5 tornado bearing down on you when all you're being told is that "Bad weather is forecast this evening."

Like so much in politics, not dedicating sufficient, regular funds to modeling hurricanes in the US doesn't even make cold financial sense. Forecasting a hurricane's landfall wrong by 200 miles can cost millions in lost wages, unnecessary preparations, and a hit to tourism. The billions in property damage where a big storm does hit might be unavoidable no matter how precise the models, but loss of life could be averted by issuing evacuations based on better models. (One would think that even short-sighted politicians might understand that, apart from the moral considerations, dead people are notoriously bad at paying income taxes.)

Luckily for Gulf and Atlantic coast residents in the USA, the less short-sighted Europeans are sharing their superior forecasts and should continue to do so for many seasons to come.

Sources include:
Erik Larson, Isaac's Storm, 2000
Nancy Mathis, Storm Warning: The Story of a Killer Tornado, 2007
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado_warning#Early_history
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2015/10/06/what-the-european-model-win-over-the-american-model-means-for-weather-forecasting/
http://stormfacts.net/models.htm
http://www.ecmwf.int/en/about/news-centre/key-facts-and-figures

Hurricane Patricia

It's going to have to be a short blog post this week, as I'm nearing the end of the first draft of Gray III and need to focus on that.

This week, a storm came out of nowhere and became a record-breaker in 48 hours. I look at the tropical storm page at Weather Underground every morning during the Northern Hemisphere season and often look back a second time each day. I play through the various satellite loops at NOAA and watch windmaps spin. I looked at this invest on Wednesday and it was three random blobs. I doubted it would start spinning and come together. Olaf looked much prettier.

We all know now--I was wrong!

It led to one of those afternoons disaster freaks like me so enjoy. On Friday, I sat in front of The Weather Channel (down the street--I don't have a TV) with my laptop and simultaneously watched live beach webcams, blog posts from storm chasers, and anything else I could find. I wasted four hours at it and had a fine time.

I didn't even have to suffer the guilt about deaths and serious injuries that comes after a disaster-watching binge, for there have been none reported so far. People who could little afford to lose anything lost everything, though, and I am sad for that.

There may be a stand-alone novel about a hurricane one day. I've drafted one on a tornado (a year ago! yikes!) and plan to have it out in the spring, but after that I'll turn to writing a new series and stand-alone disaster novels will have to take a back seat for a year.

Why did the El Faro steer into a hurricane?

Ship (not a container ship) in rough seas, Wikimedia Commons

People all over the world are asking the question posed in the post title. The container ship El Faro steered directly into Hurricane Joaquin, which was nearly stationary at that time. This means there was no rapid overtaking of an unaware ship by the storm, and the captain would have had a good idea for many hours before engine failure of where the storm was and where it was heading. The three-day forecasts for the hurricane when the ship left port were correct. The storm did not take a bizarre turn. It was just where every dependable model said it would be. It was coming nowhere near the departure point of the ship. The ship could have delayed its voyage. Or steered more to the south. Or turned around at the halfway point and been well out of danger.

Yet the captain kept heading into the heart of the storm. When the engines failed, the ship sank. As of this writing, no living crew member has been spotted and only one body was found, which was left where it was so as not to delay the search for survivors. Thirty-three people have most certainly died.

I searched the major news media outlets looking for answers, but the news was (as it too often is these days) repetitive and unhelpful, largely an uncritical quoting of press releases, and then I found a forum of merchant seamen at http://www.gcaptain.com/forum/ and a few similar sites and read their comments with growing interest. Some had worked on that ship, others on identical vessels for that company. One had loaded the ship. They were more helpful by far than the news media in helping me understand what might have happened and how it might have felt to be there.

These people posed interesting questions and helped me understand why you might lose a boiler in those seas, why you couldn't get it restarted even if the equipment was in good order, and how difficult it might be to deploy a life raft with physical conditions as they were, and otherwise made possible scenarios come alive in my head. They referred to both the company's interests and any captain's need to consider financial/employment issues in ways that made my heart sink. Could it be that captains are directed into dangerous seas for purely financial reasons or feel they can't say "no" lest they be blackballed from working ever again?

Ye gods, I hope not. It was a hurricane, for pity's sake, not a minor gale or tropical depression. And if they were directed into it, you'd think the lawsuits alone would erase any profit made from a hundred such successful voyages. So this seems unlikely. Nor is it possible it's like one of those murder/suicide deals with airline pilots smashing planes into mountainsides. Too many people had to cooperate with the captain for that to be the explanation.

In an aside, I found that those working on these ships are quite critical about the Coast Guard, which surprised me, as the posters must potentially rely on the Coast Guard to save their lives. They did not say that anyone could have been saved in this case, however, with any other approach than that the USCG took. Probably by the time it was safe enough to fly in and look for survivors, all hands were lost.

There will be an investigation of the sinking of the El Faro. Still, it could be a year or two before there's a report issued on the findings. And the answers might not be as disinterested as we would hope. All sorts of pressures, including political and economic ones, are brought to bear in such an investigation.

My heart goes out to those families, and to the seamen themselves. You read those expert discussions, and you start to imagine those last moments, perhaps not being to get off the ship at all, the list, the roll, the containers breaking loose... or gaining the water in your survival suit and yet drowning in the spray and crashing waves, or being battered to death by debris...and it's impossible not to get a lump in your throat.

RIP, crew of the El Faro.

For more, go to youtube and type in "container ship high seas" and get a small taste of what the start of the experience may have been. For further reading about an important disaster at sea, try Robert Frump's Until the Sea Shall Free Them.

Links to hurricane articles

I read a couple good articles on hurricanes the past two days and wanted to share them with you.

First, why the Atlantic hurricane season is unlikely to be very bad (again) from scientist Angela Fritz.

The City of New Orleans recently updated its hurricane preparedness information. Cool graphic design makes it an appealing site to use.

Results of a Yale study suggest Connecticut residents are surprisingly reluctant to evacuate in case of a hurricane.

NOAA's Response and Restoration blog gives an interesting perspective on hurricanes and recovery.

What natural disaster frightens you most?

From Wikipedia Commons

That's easy for me to answer: Wildfire. I was living in San Francisco when the Oakland wildfire of 1991 happened. I was entirely safe--there was a big body of water between me and it--but my heart was still pounding hard for hours. My logical mind could not convince my body that I was safe.

This was before the internet was anything but a few thousand nerds sending text over phone lines, I didn't own (and don't) a television, and I had no radio on, so the disaster made itself made aware to me directly. I was sitting and reading a novel in front of a window. Suddenly, the sky changed colors. The smoke cloud had dimmed the sun, coloring everything a strange burnt orange. I could hardly breathe--not because of the smoke, which was well above me, but because of the adrenaline surge. An animal urge to flee swept over me, and I had to hold on to my chair not to follow that imperative and run barefoot out of my house, trying to escape the danger. My body knew instinctively what it was. (Who knew that knowledge of wildfire was hardwired in humans, too?) I didn't have to see the flames or hear the crackling of popping trees or smell the smoke--I was still plenty scared.

It was hours before the adrenaline buzz left me, and the whole time, I thought, I'd take another Loma Prieta quake before this, any ol' day.

I also had a heart-in-throat moment the only time I saw a wedge tornado in the distance. They're mean-looking. (Beautiful, too, if kept at a distance.)

Earthquakes have been exhilarating to me. When they fade, the adrenaline rush is a positive one--like skydiving's rush or the rush I got scuba-diving when learning to doff and don. I don't mean to be insensitive to anyone who has lost a loved one in a quake, but for me, it's been a thrill ride every time. I hope I'm never in a situation where it's otherwise.

The only volcanic eruptions I've experienced have been St. Helens' minor ones from a distance (pretty, and safe if you're not right on top of it), and Kilauea (the kindest eruptions imaginable--slow-moving and lovely to view). I stood at the edge of the ocean, on the moving lava of Kilauea; as the red-hot lava at the leading edge of the flow hit the water, clouds of steam rained little glass shards over me, and it was beautiful and filled my heart with joy. I don't know that I've every felt more connected to Nature than at that moment.

I've been in three ex-hurricanes (2014, in Arizona, which should be against the law or something--seriously, Arizona? Hurricanes?) which had no more wind than any other rain storm, but I've never been in a real, powerful hurricane at its peak. They sure look scary. I've been hit by a downburst of over 100mph, while in an RV--that was a little worrisome, but it was over with in a couple minutes, and the RV was still upright, much to my surprise.

For real terror, for me, it's wildfire. I'll no doubt write a novel about wildfire within the next three years--but I suspect it'll upset me to write it, to mentally put myself into the midst of the smoke and flames.

How about you? Through personal experience, or what you've seen on the news, which natural disaster frightens you the most?

Hurricane Gonzalo

I was so glad to hear that Bermuda suffered no deaths or serious injuries from this week's hurricane. Emergency preparedness works!

By MODIS/NASA [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

I'm hysterical...and I'm wet!

Getting hammered from Hurricane Odile. In Arizona. Two hurricanes in Arizona this month? Crazy. (But now I know what a hurricane smells like. It does smell like something in particular, which I'll try to describe one day in a hurricane disaster novel.)

Heya, Norbert

I've been getting a drenching from the outer band rains from Hurricane Norbert for 24 hours (very little wind, this far out). Phoenix got a haboob, in addition:

A haboob, not yesterday's

I've been in just one haboob, in Yuma, five years ago. (I seem to attract natural disasters, even when I'm not actually running towards them.) I was driving. You can't see two car lengths ahead, so you really shouldn't drive in them.