Yes, that is a bad pun, but I couldn’t resist, I hope you can forgive me. Well the whole Rita thing is pretty much over since the she has moved to the northeast of here. While the wind has been impressive, Dallas hasn’t seen a single drop of rain. Why did I decide to release a commemorative Rita post in a digest format? Mostly because it was bumping real posts off the main page, and since I maybe thought of as arrogant, I wouldn’t hide my mistakes. So now you can easily read from my early dire predictions to my admission that Rita was a non-event in Dallas. No sense starting revisionist history now, plus in this case I can place the blame for my poor predictions squarely on the people at weather.com. ;) Plus, all the odd little facts are still worth a read, and I stand behind my ideas for a quick efficient evacuation.
If you aren’t interested in the Rita stuff I encourage you to look to the right and pick a different topic to read.
Rita is here: The effects and the unknowns
Ok Rita came ashore last night last night and while Beaumont, & Lake Charles both took serious damage, the eye came on shore in a swamp so there was minimal lose in lives and property. Houston had high winds and some rain, but really not something you evacuate 2 million people for. (I would like to say that if they hadn’t ordered the evacuation, and Rita had hit Houston with 160+ mph winds and a 20’ storm surge the lose of life would have been staggering, so it was the right thing to do at the time.) Now they are afraid of all the people heading back to Houston at once and compounding the evacuation fiasco. Hopefully they can stage the returns so that traffic will be like holiday weekend return traffic, instead of a 100 mile long parking lot.
I doubt the Texas Gulf Coast will decent in lawlessness, those are tight knit communities, (for those unfamiliar with New Orleans it is a pretty lawless place normally, with only an iron handed sheriff keeping things together and protecting the tourists.) Speaking of New Orleans, it is screwed again, because the already damaged levees were over toped in places and the water has risen 6’ in several areas.
What’s next?
Sure the wind is inconvenient, with sustained winds of 20 to 30 mph and gusts to 40 in Dallas but the real unknown is the rain and the flooding. With the storm moving very slowly to the N/NE the rain fall is tremendous in a lot of places (like 12” a day). Dallas is expecting light rain for the next 3 or 4 days, but east and northeast of here they will see 3 or 4 solid days of heavy rains. So stay tuned.
My ideas for a good evacuation, w/ a Rita update version 2
I would like to start out with a Rita update. Dallas is now being affected by the winds coming from Rita. It is weird too, instead of the wind gusting then backing off it is a constant 15+ mph hour wind and it is from the NE, which in Dallas is not a direction the wind normally comes from. I just went outside and stood there pondering why the wind didn’t feel right. Then it hit me, the wind is very hot and wet, which is not normal especially in the middle of the night, you can feel the energy of the storm, and while it sounds strange the wind doesn’t smell right either. The clouds look weird too, since they are from one of the swirling arms of the hurricane. Overall the weather is very unsettling, not a drop of rain has fallen, but you can feel it is coming.
I have learned that they only say the hurricane comes ashore when the eye comes ashore. I feel this is a bit deceptive; the hurricane “hit” Louisiana yesterday but since it ran parallel to shore that didn’t count. Tell that to the people trying to stop the levees from breaking. Ok it is true that the area around the eye has the highest winds and most, but I don’t think I am being overly generous when I say that getting hit with 5 inches of rain and 75+ mph winds should count even if you don’t get to see the eye.
As I promised my ideas for a good evacuation:
This post has moved, since I thought it deserved its own heading!
Ready or not here comes Rita! Version 2
Well since Dallas will be only minimally inconvenienced by the remnants of Rita when they arrive late Sunday night-ish I have little to report, weather-wise. While it is true that there are gas shortages in Houston and Galveston, since tens of thousands of people deciding to take a long road trip at the same time quickly consumed supplies at the stations flanking I-45 and the other major roads out of the area. (The underground tanks at a large gas station only hold between 8-10 thousand gallons each, so they can only serve a few thousand cars a day max, then it takes 4 tanker trucks loads of fuel to completely refill the tanks.) Despite rumors to that effect there are no gas shortages in Dallas. Sure I saw long lines at places with regular going for $2.509 a gallon, as people try to save some money, but at the station down the street that has regular selling for $2.739 a gallon, you can just pull right in and fill up. For those keeping track the evacuation has gone poorly, (I don’t blame the government for this) I also don’t like to criticize unless I can present a plan to do it better. Accordingly I have given a lot of thought to evacuation and emergency management protocols, that I think could work in the case of an emergency. So, stay tuned and I will follow up with that post soon!
Hurricane Rita update: The anticlimax
Well it seems Dallas will be completely spared. The weather.com people seem to believe that Dallas will see less than an inch of rain, and only 10 to 20 mph winds. The storm is expected to kind of stall out over far east Texas and bring some serious flooding, but the DFW metroplex will be spared. This is a good thing because Dallas has absorbed tens of thousands of evacuees, so it would be bad if we had serious problems too. I have no real numbers but since 2 million people evacuated from Houston and Galveston, and there was a hundred mile traffic jam between Houston and Dallas I can imagine that more than few people have come here. Here is how bad it is: All 20,000 hotel rooms in DFW are filled and they are housing evacuees in the county jail, not moving people from the Houston jail to the Dallas jail, they are having to house regular people in the jail (as in the place with bars and guards.) I guess it is better than nothing….
Hurricane Rita, President Bush, Crawford, and floods
Just an aside for anyone who is interested, Crawford TX (where President Bush has his ranch) will be mostly spared the wrath of Rita. Sure it will get lots of rain and wind but I think it will see less rain and wind than Dallas since it is further west, and the remnants of the storm are expected to go N/NE after landfall. I don’t think Bush will ride out the storm there but doubt the Secret Service is boarding up the windows either. However, for all the protestors (if they are still there) I suggest you get wet weather work clothes from the local feed and seed, and park your cars on an elevated paved surface, since there will be at least light flooding.
This is Texas, all those sticks you see on the roadside that are marked off in feet and go to 5, are there for a reason. I thought they were stupid too, until I saw that one was gone as in completely underwater. (During a flood in Brown County I have seen a bridge that is normally 40 feet above the water line submerged more than 10 feet underwater.) When the soil is this dry (and sun baked it is 100+ today) , it doesn’t soak up water very well, so it all runs off, and once the streams and ditches fill it quickly floods low lying areas. I remind people to be careful, if the road is ever submerged don’t try it, even if it is just a little water, cause the road might be gone from the culvert collapsing. (It only takes 10-12 inches of water to float a car.)
Hurricane Rita Update:
Hurricane Rita is now the 3rd largest hurricane on record. While Texan’s are stereotypically thought to do things big, I feel that this is not a time Texan’s wish to live up to that reputation. However, with the high pressure ridge that was keeping Rita in the Gulf weakening the threat to Dallas is also weakening, since she might make land fall more to the East and come up the Texas/Louisiana border. So, now Dallas is expecting 30+ mph winds and only 3” of rain, and frankly we could use the rain too. However, what we don’t need are tornados.
Side note: For my readers outside tornado country the sound of tornado sirens is truly eerie. The wind and rain will be pounding so hard you can’t hear anything else then it starts arrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrr……arrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrr….. At first you are wondering what is that?, then it hits you. Sure they test them occasionally, so you have heard it before, but it sounds different on a clear sunny day than it does against the background of a ferocious storm.
Back to the point:
For reference I can normally drive from Houston to Dallas in a little over 3.5 hours. My friend’s family came up yesterday and it took them 12 hours. My bother is headed to Austin, since they are further west so in theory should get even less rain than Dallas.
I just read a news story that the only major city in Texas with hotel rooms is El Paso. Being from El Paso I would suggest the Westin (it has a new name now), it is a nice hotel, and has the best remaining example of Tiffany glass in the world. One other thing to consider is that El Paso is several thousand feet above sea level so the likelihood of flooding is remote.
Correction
I miscalculated the conversion from watts to joules in yesterday’s post so I decided to do it again from scratch. I convert the AOML numbers to assume Rita is bigger than their estimates for the average hurricane by wildly underestimating the rain fall in 24 hours as only 1.8 inches to get 2.6x10^20 joules per day or ~3x10^15 joules per second. Since 3” of rain is expected over 24 hours in Dallas with 8-12 in Houston you can see how low I have shot, but you get the point. Now I am only taking rain fall into account with these numbers because the fictional losses due to wind are only ~6.9x10^17 joules a day which is less than the rounding error. (How cool is that 1.5 times the world-wide electrical generating capacity is rounded down as insignificant.) While 2.6x10^20 joules per day seems like a lot of energy it is only 1.7% of the total amount of energy the Earth receives from the sun every day.
Rita’s coming!
Well hurricane Rita is coming for Texas, oh sure I am in Dallas so it’s not like I have to evacuate, but still. Dallas is going to get the real short end of stick on this one. Why? Because the people who left New Orleans after Katrina mostly went to Houston and Dallas. Now that Houston is being evacuated, we are getting the evacuated evacuates too. I do feel bad for them cause just as they were trying to get back on their feet, it is time to flee again.
Interesting hurricane stuff:
Assuming that the compression of the storm as it comes on shore isn’t too bad the main body of the storm will make College Station easily before the eye wall comes ashore and the hurricane is cut off from it’s energy source. If you haven’t already go to weather.com and look at the satellite photos since that is the best way to appreciate the size of the storm. The main body of the storm is larger than Georgia, yes the most intense part of Rita is bigger than a state, and not on the tiny New England states either. If you put the map in motion you can see that the swirling cloud mass which isn’t the most powerful part of the storm, but still brings wind and rain, stretches from the panhandle of Florida on the northeast to the Yucatan in the Southwest-ish. Take a moment to ponder that, Rita is sweeping the entire Gulf of Mexico, plus a little of the Caribbean sea. I looked it up and the Gulf of Mexico is 615,000 square miles or 1.6 million square kilometers, (for reference Alaska is only 570,000 square miles), so this hurricane is truly massive.
Something else I looked up a hurricane of Rita’s size produces 2.9x10^18 joules a day or 3.4x10^14 joules per second, the Hiroshima bomb was only 1.8x 10^13 by the most optimistic calculations. Another interesting fact is that after W they start naming storms with just a Greek letter. BTW the remaining named storms for the year will be Stan, Tammy, Vince and Wilma. I bet it will be hard for the news people to say Tammy, Vince and Wilma with a straight face. (Try it, say in your best serious voice “As Hurricane Wilma, turns towards land… and not think of Fred Flintstone screaming Wilmaaaaaaa!) Back to the seriousness. Since we have nearly 2 months of hurricane season left, I figure hurricane delta isn’t beyond the realm of possibility.
Oh well what can you do? Dallas is expected to see 50+ mph winds and 5” of rain Saturday night and Sunday morning. Because the power will be going out, I guess I will have to watch TV by candle light like my pioneer ancestors. Yes, that was a joke, but with all my UPS’ I can surf the web and watch TV for several hours, or if I know power will be out for awhile I have enough battery backup power to have lights and radio for a week. Sadly, all my appliances are electric so no power means no: oven, stove, hot water, fridge or A/C. (Just on more reason gas appliances rule!!)
Like I said what can you do?
Nothing, I will just wait for my family from the coast to arrive and wait it out. Fortunately I like peanut butter crackers.
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