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I am reminded of the admonition: Pray as if the world depended on Hashem, act as if the world depended on you.
Fidel Castro implemented a hurricane readiness program for Cuba, a country which has many more intense and more frequent hurricanes rhan here. They evacuate most of the coastal population inland at the threat of a hurricane and have cut the death tolls to small fractions of what they were. If that godless country can do it, so can we!
80- you are being the navi again. or news reporter.
80,
make that a weakening category 1
Irene is inevitable for the east coast. Enjoy the ride, stay inside and don’t do anything stupid. It’s dangerous out there.
“i suspect in the florida keys this hurricane received all kinds of names”
Meterologists began giving names to hurricanes only in 1953, after the style of a 1941 novel, *Storm*, by George Rippey Stewart.
“Today, many scientists, pilots, flight crews, meteorologists, computer programmers, historians have used their time and great minds, given to them by their creator, to solve the hurricane prediction problem.”
Absolutely! And we should remember that the National Weather Service is a government agency; all that weather science, all those prediction models, all that information that allows us to prepare is because of the government. We need to remember that when we start bashing the government; the National Weather Service has been hit by pretty bad budget cuts that will hamper its ability to do as good a job at forecasting in the future.
A hurricane that struck Galveston, TX, in 1900 wiped out the entire city with a loss of live of at least six thousand people, probably more. The 1938 hurricane mentioned earlier killed around 700 people. In neither case did anyone know that a hurricane was coming. I had relatives who moved to the Rhode Island shore in the 1960s and you could still see damage from the 1938 hurricane 30 years later.
Until when did no one know beforehand that a hurricane was coming?
Yes, prediction is the true miracle here. It is the true gift from heaven. We shouldn’t focus completely on the destruction and terror of this natural event, but on the bravery, tenacity and brilliance of the people who learned to predict hurricanes.
These days, only a handful of people die in each severe hurricane, many of them because they are doing something stupid, have ignored evacuation orders or are nobly trying to rescue people who did something stupid or ignored evacuation orders.
After the storm has passed, when you say a bracha for the safe survival of ALMOST everyone, don’t forget these heroes.
We had days to prepare for this hurricane. Charlie is almost right about the hurricane of 1938 – the only warning the Boston area had was when the hurricane hit Rhode Island. Then by extrapolating the landfall in Long Island and Rhode Island, they figured it was heading straight for Boston, giving them about an hour to prepare. That’s not even enough time to get the word out to the police force.
For many years following WWII, hurricane prediction was accomplished by having brave (perhaps crazy is a better word, except their insanity was so noble) pilots and flight crews fly into the eyes of the storms.
One good definition of a hero is one who runs into danger to help others while others are fleeing the same danger. Those aviators and meteorologists were true heroes who saved tens of thousands of lives, while risking their own.
For those of you who think this is a funny topic, it is anything but that. Far Rockaway was one of the areas ordered to evacuate because it is a narrow low lying peninsula between the Atlantic Ocean and the Bay right in the storm’s path and the hurricane is supposed to get there at high tide, pushing a wall of water anywhere from 3 to 6 feet high. Many frum people wouldn’t leave on Shabbos despite the saccana and by the time Shabbos was over ( after 8:30 ) it was too dangerous ( Mayor Bloomberg just announced that if you didn’t leave, stay where you are )
When, and what, technology allowed predictions of hurricanes – and when was it developed?
Thank God, it is expected to hit New York “only” as a category one and the worst is expected to pass by noon tomorrow.
dear Tomche, until the 1950s, we would have an idea that a hurricane was coming if its eye went across land. Even then, the mechanics of these storms were not well understood and the predictions were not very good, but a poor prediction was better than no prediction at all.
Today, prediction is done with the help of the most powerful supercomputers available, along with satellite photos and measurements done by airplanes flying into the storm, along with a much better understanding of the dynamics of the atmosphere.
As you’re sitting through the hurricane imagine that you had no warning. That you and your loved ones were out at school, work, shul, shopping and a storm such as this started. For a while it would be relatively indistinguishable from a violent thunderstorm, but you would soon realize (probably too late) that is was much more. Then you’d be in real peril. That’s why hundreds or thousands of people would die.
Just to add to that story: When I was a boy, in the 50’s 60’s and 70’s hurricanes would be tracked by having planes fly into the storm and try to find they eye. You can imagine how tricky and dangerous it was to fly a large plane loaded with a few people and hundreds of instruments through 100+ mph winds, monitoring the barometric pressure, air flow, rains and other indicators to try to find the eye of the storms. This was the only reliable way to track big tropical storms.
These missions were typically flown by United States Air Force Reserve’s 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron and later also the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Hurricane Hunters.
Many of these hurricane hunters never returned. Another plane would be dispatched to do the same chore in a few hours, so the storm could be tracked.
People still fly planes into the storms because there’s some data that just can’t be gotten from satellites and other means.
I hope you will keep these people in your prayers tonight. It’s their efforts, bravery and sacrifice over the last 60 years that are the reason that only a dozen or so people will die from this storm, whereas 60 years ago a storm of this magnitude that passed through so many major urban areas would have killed hundreds if not thousands of people.
Weather prediction, which we take for granted, is in itself a miracle.
Before regular weather prediction, many more people died from weather.
I read a book recently about the Childrens’ Blizzard of 1888 – a particularly severe and fast-moving blizzard on the Plains.
It’s called the Childrens’ Blizzard because many of the hundreds of people who died in the blizzard were children walking home from school. The day started as a mild, sunny day, their parents sent them off to school (often they had to walk many miles) without hats, coats and mittens. The blizzard moved in so quickly that they died on the walk home from school.
This one event slowed the western expansion of America and was further impetus for the Army Signal Corps (the original scientific weather forecasters) to improve the prediction of severe weather.
first report from immediately west of boston – it is very quiet here, no wind, no rain, few clouds. We are supposed to have the tropical winds starting in about three hours.
I am going to close the windows and go to sleep.
best wishes to all.
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