Gentle Decline 2/37: Hurricanes & Handling

Hello. I’ve had a number of emails about the two most recent hurricanes to hit the US; rather more about Helene than Milton. This issue is a sort of conglomerate of information about both (again, more Helene than Milton, because Milton has really only just left Florida and headed out into the Atlantic at time of writing), along with some longer-term advice and some thinking. I do want to point out up top here that I have never been in the line of an actual hurricane, and don’t really feel qualified to give advice about them - but at the same time, this is the stuff we’re dealing with in a world in climate chaos.

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So let’s look at what actually happened with both hurricanes. Helene formed up in the Caribbean on September 22, peaked at Cat 4 on September 26, and made landfall later that day in the Big Bend region of Florida (basically where the “panhandle” of the state meets the southward-pointing peninsula). It then moved up the Alabama/Georgia border, losing hurricane status along the way, went through the middle of Tennesee, and blew itself out on the border of Kentucky, more or less. It caused massive flooding and damage to places quite some distance from the centre of the storm, most notably in the western half of North Carolina, around the city of Asheville. Asheville is about 400km inland, and about 650m above sea level, so preparation for hurricane-related conditions there was minimal. There were 214 deaths attributed to Helene, so far.

Milton also came from the Caribbean; it was a massively powerful storm (the second-most intense tropical cyclone ever in the Gulf of Mexico, with Hurricane Rita in 2005 ahead of it), and it basically went westward across the Gulf and across the Florida panhandle. There was a lot of damage from associated tornadoes, plenty more flooding, and a death toll (to date) of 16 people in the US.

So there’re a couple of things here. Milton was a more powerful storm in many ways, and it had a lot more destructive capability in raw energy terms. But the damage and the death toll from it were far lower than from Helene. This comes down to preparation for the conditions. Florida is, at any given time, somewhat prepared for hurricanes. Buildings take them into account, there are evacuation plans, and people know what to do (even if some of them do daft things like staying in a boat in Tampa Bay because “boats float” (the guy in question survived)). Asheville was not prepared for any effects of a hurricane.

And there’s a degree to which I don’t really blame Asheville, either at the governmental or individual level, for not being prepared for a hurricane. I’m not prepared for a hurricane. But the North Carolina state climatologist, Kathie Dello, has said “If you live in a place that can rain, you live in a place that can flood,” and that’s the relevant point. And some of the recorded rainfall totals are huge: an NC State Climate Office weather station on Mount Mitchell had 24.41 inches (620mm) of rain, and an as-yet-unverified record from Busick has 31.33 inches (795mm), between September 25 and September 27. The highest rainfall totals I’ve seen in Ireland have been around 100mm, and that was enough to bring the Liffey up to very-nearly-over-running in Dublin city centre. Ireland’s absolute record for 24 hours is from September 1993 in Kerry, at 243.5 mm.

Asheville is also in a mountainous area; the Blue Ridge Mountains are the southern end of the Applachian range (pretty much the same set of ancient mountains as we have here and in Scotland, as it happens, due to continental drift; the Central Pangean range). So a lot of that rain was channelled down river valleys, and swept out everything in those valleys that was anywhere near the water.

Also due to that mountainous terrain, a lot of settlements in western North Caroline have effectively one or two roads in and out. This is in strong contrast to Ireland’s arrangement of roads and towns, where almost everywhere that’s not a port town is effectively at a crossroads, and the cities have up to ten major and dozens of minor roads going into them. This means that they can be cut off when that one road gets damaged, and that’s happened in a number of places there. This is what happened to Vancouver in 2021, too.

It is also worth noting before I get into talking about hurricane preparation for inland areas that Milton came so soon after Helene that the warnings around it were taken much more seriously, which almost certainly had a massive effect on the casualty numbers. Florida Man, as a species, can be pretty blasé about hurricanes, but there seem to have been fewer people with deckchairs on seafronts this time around.

There are two things hurricanes do directly: high winds, and rainfall. The high winds can be directly damaging themselves, or they can blow debris. You avoid that by being indoors in a solid structure during the winds, and not touching downed power lines or the like when you emerge. The rainfall can lead to immediate spot flooding - half a metre of rain in an area that hasn’t adequate drainage means you can have about half a metre of accumulated water - but it also leads to river floods and landslides. River floods in steep valleys can be both deep and fast-moving - depending on where and when the water accumulates, they can be a literal wall of water coming downstream, and it’s astonishing how much force even 20cm of water moving at speed can exert.

And then there’re the effects of being cut off, either in terms of utilties, or actual access. Unless you own a lot of land, there’s not much you can do about that except not be home when the hurricane hits (which is entirely valid, and frequently the best option) or stock up well.

So: live in a solid (stone, concrete, etc) building with a secure roof, away from large trees, that is not low down in a wide river valley or anywhere at all in the more canyon-like ones, on the inner side of a bend in the river if relevant. Have heating and cooking facilities that work independent of power and gas supplies, food and water enough for a few days, and some plan to get out on foot to where you can get more food and water if a road or other travel route is taken out. Keep a stock of essential medications, candles, power packs, and books or board games in the place. Have a paper copy of the prescription for essential medications. Do not go out in the storm. If you’re in an area that’s subject to an evacuation order, evacuate.

Once the storm blows over, there’s going to be a period of disruption. It might, if you’re lucky, be measured in days. Some places, as after Hurricane Katrina, just never recover. Most issues seem to be sorted within a couple of weeks. These can include remaining flood waters, mud and debris from flooding, power, gas and water disconnections, road and rail damage, and stuff torn up by winds and floods. If you’ve evacuated, this can make getting back challenging; if you’ve remained in place, it can make everything challenging. My feeling is that the aftermath, and trying to deal with it, drives more change than the actual storm - people deciding to rebuild in more storm-proof materials, move to higher ground, or move away entirely.

This, more than the storm, is where long-term preparedness has effects. If your dwelling is set up to have cooking and heating independent of utility connections, and you have a stock of fuel in, and you have food and water stored, then you’re going to be in a much better position than others. The Be Generous principle applies strongly here; quite aside from the moral position, you’re safer if you’re seen to be helpful than if people think you’re hoarding to your own advantage.

Don’t enter flood waters if you don’t have to; they’re almost always filthy from sewer overflows, and anything more than a few centimetres of running water can knock you over if you’re off balance. Flood waters are also invariably opaque, and you can step on all kinds of unpleasant stuff under them. Similarly, don’t go near landslides, downed power lines, sinkholes, or the like unless you know what you’re doing. Keep animals indoors or confined to secure outdoor spaces. Communicate with your neighbours as best you’re able about local hazards. If other connectivity isn’t available, turn on a radio; depending on your local infrastructure there may be emergency broadcasts, and at the very least local news stations will give you some impression of how things are on a wider basis. It’s pretty frequent that people outside the affected area have a better view of what’s happening than people in it, so if you can get an outside connection, ask for available information.

It’s unlikely that we’ll face storms of this magnitude in Ireland just yet. It’s by no means impossible, though, and every tenth of a degree rise in ocean surface temperatures in the Atlantic makes them more likely here. Occasional storms gust here have gusted to hurricane level, and we’ve had a few that approached sustained wind speeds that would qualify. And honestly, if a storm the size of Helene moves over Ireland at the speed it did over North Carolina, and drops the same amount of rain, we will be in a lot of trouble regardless of wind speeds. Weather forecasts are good enough now that there should be about three days of solid warning of such a storm, and there should be at least an idea of it a week in advance.

And please note the weasel words “just yet” above. Unless we get cooling effects from the North Atlantic currents stopping - in which case we’ll have other problems - then the continued rise in sea temperatures absolutely will bring us these super-storms in the next few decades. Usefully, the work currently being done on flood-proofing (such as it is) will work well for this, and Irish architecture tends much more toward stone and concrete than wood and plastic, so many buildings are inherently more storm-proof. But please do pay attention to forecasts, and in the rare cases where Met Eireann issue a red warning - and they absolutely will for a hurricane-magnitude storm - don’t go out in it.

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