Slashdot Mirror
Was That A Tsunami?
Rebecka Schumann writes "The East Coast was hit by a tsunami earlier this month, but apparently, no one was the wiser. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration a rare six-foot wave collided with the region in early June, a phenomenon currently under review. The wave is being considered 'complex' and is believed to have been caused 'the slumping at the continental shelf east of New Jersey' or a strong storm according to the West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center. While speculation regarding the mystery tsunami is rampant, another individual is claiming the surge could possibly be a 'meteotsunami,' meaning it was not caused by seismic activity but merely a change in meteorological conditions. Paul Whitmore, an NOAA tsunami center director, said a weather system's ability to change air pressure is enough to 'generate waves that act just like tsunamis.' The alleged tsunami caused three divers to be swept off rocks, two reportedly requiring medical attention after suffering from non life-threatening injuries due the storm. The tsunami, which also caused damage to boats and docks, reportedly lasted a total of five minutes." For less obtrusive advertising, see similar stories at The Verge, and at NPR.
Learn to swim.
You can only be young once, but you can be immature forever.
I was four years old. We were at Myrtle Beach, SC. We were on dry sand, quite far back. I seem to recall the waves being large and clean, with very little chop; but not threatening to people up on the beach. A wave charged in, all the way to the boardwalk. The beach is relatively flat there, so the actual depth was only about a foot. My mother picked me up. My sister and my father were large enough to fend for themselves. I have no idea if anybody was hurt. The beach cleared. In the panic, my yellow plastic shovel was lost; but I spied it from up on the balcony of the motel. "Mommy, can you pllllleeeeease get it?". She went down, but another wave or a person must have taken it.
Since then, I've heard of at least one other incident like this. I think it was in Florida.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
or are you glad to see me?
In almost every case, the big, impressive waves arrive LONG before the storm itself, and the weather deteriorates & becomes unpleasant long before it actually becomes *dangerous* to be within sight of the waves. A hurricane isn't an event, it's a process. A *tornado* is an event... the storm quickly rolls in, the funnel drops from the sky (while the condensation cloud forms and makes it visible from the ground up), and it's *there*. Hurricanes? Hours, if not DAYS, of getting bitchslapped by rainbands that generally get worse and worse, until the eyewall FINALLY makes landfall and passes nearby (or directly above). Then, you get hit with a tornado-like windfield, have a few minutes of calm, another hit by the windfield (in the opposite direction), followed by a few more hours/days of the process in reverse.
Now... the authorities might certainly *prefer* that everyone just leave instead of making their jobs more complicated by having to manage tourists and traffic as a hurricane is approaching, but it's not like the beach suddenly becomes a lethal place to be just because a hurricane is approaching and will be there in a few hours.
The local road network matters, too. In Southwest Florida, yeah... there's a ~25 mile stretch of beach between Bonita Springs and Fort Myers with a 2-lane bridge at each end, another 10-15 miles of traffic just to get to I-75, and literally no other route to the mainland in between. Getting everyone "off the islands" is a major exercise in logistics. Contrast that with South Beach, where there's a 6-lane freeway and multiple other roads connecting it to the mainland, and a quarter of the population drives ashore every weekday over the span of 2-3 hours just getting to work. If anything, at the "Miami" end, the problem isn't evacuating Miami Beach to the mainland... it's the fact that people who live in western Dade County -- many of whom vividly remember being lied to by the government(*) -- trying to evacuate to Orlando (or worse, get frustrated when northbound I-75, Turnpike, and I-95 turn into parking lots, and head WEST across I-75 towards Naples, not realizing that they're going to encounter even WORSE northbound traffic on 75 long before they even make it across the county line).
(*)When Andrew hit, the county authorities were ADAMANT that it was going to directly hit South Beach, because they wanted to scare people who lived there into evacuating. The National Hurricane Center wasn't happy about it, but grudgingly went along with it because the county's rationale sounded reasonable. The problem was, it was a total lie from the first press release, and they knew it. As a result, people who lived in places like northern Coral Gables, Coconut Grove, Brickell, and downtown Miami fled SOUTH to the homes of friends and family members... and ended up evacuating INTO the area that was the hardest-hit. NOBODY who remembers Andrew trusts the authorities anymore. It's 80% of the reason why I learned how to run GFS myself and got into stormchasing in the first place... so I could independently run my own sims and do my own fact-checking instead of being forced to take the authorities' word at face value and hope they weren't lying again.