A lower amount of fatilties but a HUGE swarth of destruction and flooding in Florida after the Helene the previous storm…..
The deadly tornadoes, rising waters, torrential rain and punishing winds battered the state from coast to coast as Milton churned eastward before heading out to sea early Thursday.
The hurricane tore the fiberglass roof off a baseball stadium and sent a construction crane crashing into a high-rise building in St. Petersburg. It destroyed homes and inundated roads across a wide swath of Florida. About 3 million people were without electricity after power lines snapped.
On the state’s west coast, more than 700 people stranded by floodwaters were rescued Thursday in a single county, Hillsborough. Residents who had evacuated ahead of the storm after being implored to leave by local officials ventured home as roads and bridges reopened, navigating downed power lines, toppled trees and shredded debris….
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“Reverse storm surge”
In the days before Hurricane Milton hit Florida, forecasters were worried it could send as much as 15 feet (4.5 meters) of water rushing onto the heavily populated shores of Tampa Bay.
Instead, several feet of water temporarily drained away.
Why? “Reverse storm surge” is a familiar, if sometimes unremarked-upon, function of how hurricane winds move seawater as the storms hit land — in fact, it has happened in Tampa Bay before.
In the Northern Hemisphere, tropical storm winds blow counterclockwise. At landfall, the spinning wind pushes water onshore on one end of the eye and offshore on the other. Picture drawing a circle that crosses a line, and see how the pencil moves toward the line at one point and away at another.
The most pronounced water movement is under the strong winds of the eyewall, explains Brian McNoldy, a University of Miami senior researcher on tropical storms….
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Meanwhile, the water level abruptly dropped about 5 feet at a National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration gauge near Tampa late Wednesday night.
Hurricane Irma caused a similar effect in 2017. So did Ian in 2022, when people strode out to see what was normally the sea bottom.
In any storm, “that’s an extremely bad idea,” McNoldy says. “Because that water is coming back.”
Indeed, water levels returned to normal Thursday morning….
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Storms and Bull Shit Rumourmongers….
“If they’re telling you that the government is responsible for the disaster, that doesn’t help you at all in getting ready for it,” said Jose E. Ramirez-Marquez, an associate professor of systems engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology and a co-author of a journal article this month on how hurricane-related information traveled through X.
The increasing frequency and devastating power of major storms, heat waves, wildfires and other weather-related catastrophes tend to elicit an especially strong emotional response, allowing climate denialists, lobbyists for the oil and gas industry and rumormongers to exploit people’s concern and confusion.
“It helps them to regain some measure of control and sense of order at a time when everything feels quite bleak and hopeless,” said Jennie King, who oversees climate disinformation research and policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that studies online platforms.
The intensity of Helene and Milton’s one-two punch has been difficult to fathom. For many, it has been easier to blame human villains.
On TikTok, millions of users were exposed to conspiracy theories about the storms, according to research from the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters for America. There were claims that Helene was the product of a man-made land grab to enable lithium mining in North Carolina, though the hurricane also plowed through several other states. Climate scientists have said there is no way for humans to manufacture hurricanes….
image…A vehicle drives under a sideways tree in Bradenton, Fla., on Thursday. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post)
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