https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB3EwcDH8Ak
On Thursday evening before I went to bed, I noticed on a news site that there was a tropical wave somewhere off the coast of Mexico. This year, the Pacific has had a lot of waves, storms, and typhoons, so it didn’t strike me as unusual. But when I got up this morning and looked at the news, I was stunned.
The wave was now a category 5 hurricane with sustained winds of 200 mph and a central barometric pressure that surpassed anything I’d ever seen – 880 millibars. Hurricane Andrew in 1992 had a central pressure of 892. Hurricane Katrina’s lowest central pressure was 920 at landfall. Hurricane Wilma’s central pressure at her peak was 881 millibars. The barometric pressure of a hurricane is really the key to everything.
In about 30 hours, this wave had exploded into the most powerful hurricane ever recorded on the planet. Its barometric pressure had dropped 100 millibars, faster than the 97-point drop of Wilma in 2005. So throughout the day, I monitored the various weather websites. Patricia was headed to the western coast of Mexico, somewhere between Puerto Vallarta and Manzanilla.
It made landfall at 6:15 pm central time, winds at 165 mph, about 55 miles south of Manzanilla. CNN’s Martin Savage is in Mexico and CNN will probably have a scoop on the aftermath.
As of tonight, a few videos are dribbling in from people in the affected area, but it’s difficult to tell anything about the damage because it’s dark. By sunrise, it will be a different story. One of the weather tweets I was following earlier in the day was by a guy with the weather channel, who had stopped by one of the shelters in the targeted area. There was no inner room, no inner sanctuary; the shelter was all windows! A hotel in Manzanilla reported that it had secured its windows with masking tape.
If this type of preparation was common in the affected area, then the destruction will be beyond belief.
Before the hurricane made landfall, Mexico’s climate negotiator pleaded with his colleagues at the UN for some sort of global pact about taming greenhouse gasses – i.e., climate change.
This evening, Rob and I were talking about the hurricane and agreed that if a storm with winds of 200 mph was headed toward South Florida, we would flee. We would close up our storm shutters, secure the house, then pack up our pets and some books and our computers and get out of here. The problem in Mexico is that the government had about thirty hours to order evacuations.
In South Florida, just for the counties of Palm Beach, Broward, Miami/Dade and the Keys, it would take 3 days to evacuate everyone. And that figure is from 2005, our last bad hurricane season. Now, with the increase in population and tourism, it would probably take twice that. During this kind of panicked evacuation, it’s doubtful that we would make it beyond Orlando, less than three hours north of us in central Florida. But it’s at least more than a hundred feet above sea level, far better than the east coast of Florida!
The latest stats on Hurricane Patricia tonight just after midnight came from the Weather Channel. The storm is now a cat 4, with winds of 130 mph, but when it made landfall with winds of 165 mph, some gusts were up to 211 mph.
Ever since a hurricane figured into one of my novels in 1994 and then again in 2004/2005, I’ve been fascinated by these storms. There is something about them that suggests sentience, a kind of organized intelligence that you recognize when you see an eye as perfectly formed as Patricia’s.
In the larger scheme of things, what kind of creatures are these hurricanes? Yes, Patricia is evidence of climate change, but what’s the deeper message for us as a collective, a species? What’s this tell us about the future of this planet? That ubiquitous eye stares back at us from space, where this photo was taken, and seems to say, Hey, folks, guess what? I’m your wake-up call and where would you like to go from here?
There’s an odd postscript to this. When I woke up this morning my first thought was that it was Michael Crichton’s birthday. In retrospect, it seems that Hurricane Patricia is the kind of story he might have written.
A home in the mountains somewhere is looking very good right now!
Unfortunately, everywhere has something that can turn deadly. Living at 6500 at Lake Tahoe we worry about forest fires and earthquakes. In Portland, we worry about the big subduction zone right off the coast, volcanos, and earthquakes. When we are visiting Hawaii, we worry about tsunamis and hurricanes. I guess it is the nature of living on top of a volatile planet.
Leaving a Cat-5 storm behind seems wise, IMHO.
I can’t imagine what it must be like to be under the threat of hurricanes, very scary.
I wonder if the hurricanes will start to force migration to safer areas – it does seem as if a lot of the world is on the move.
The national weather channel hurricane experts were discussing the possibility of raising the hurricane stat from 1-5 to 1-6. A CAT 6 hurricane, considering that Patricia, at her worst, was actually ABOVE the criteria for a CAT5. They are also discussing the possibility of raising the earthquake stat from 1-10 to 1-11. Mother Nature is a force we cannot change. We simply must adjust to her tantrums, which obviously are getting much worse. The “superstorms” depicted in the books and movies are now manifesting in every aspect. Really, really scary! We didn’t evacuate a few years ago although we were sitting ducks, and I guarantee you, we will NEVER stay on this island on the beach again, and the one we rode out was just a CAT1. I don’t think folks in general realize the power that is in mere 70mph winds. We tend to think “Oh, that won’t be so bad”. WRONG!!! The bridges to the mainland CLOSE when the winds reach a sustained 39mph. That in itself speaks volumes. Nowhere to hide that is safe.
The hurricane looks like a spiral, or perhaps interlocking spirals. Jung and physics scholar Nassim Haramein say that at every level of the universe — from subatomic on up — some form of spin, or spiral, or angular momentum is how things are created or changed.
I’m trying to stay hopeful that this change doesn’t involve a floor sander polishing us pesky humans off the face of the Earth! Well, this go-around turned out much better than it looked like it was going to — maybe due to all of us who prayed? Maybe we’ll be forced to work together as a species and we’ll actually do it??? Let’s pray for the Benghazi Repubs to wake up tomorrow morning with an unconquerable urge to **collaborate** for the greater good…. 😉
Interesting about the spirals, Sheila! As for prayers for the repubs…I doubt that even prayer would help them!
It looks like Mexico came through this without catastrophic damage. But it has been difficult to find pictures of the aftermath in the areas that were hit the hardest, the poorer fishing villages.
Considering the magnitude of this hurricane, it’s amazing these towns weren’t blown off the map!