This thing is now a Category 4 hurricane. That’s bad. Sustained winds of 140 miles per hour. It is going to bring 20 foot waves and over a foot of rain. Coastal Texas and Louisiana are going to get obliterated.
There are mandatory evacuation orders but as always I’m sure there will be plenty of morons who stay and elderly who can’t leave in time. It is going to hit land around midnight tonight.
2020 sucks.
It is what it is.
This is what it’s like in Biden’s America!
Text “Trump” to 80222
From The Weather Channel:
And the coronavirus case map:
Yikes.
Nothing Trump’s sharpie can’t fix
Once again the models underestimated the strength a few days out, I think they’re still failing to account for the full effects of climate change.
Lake Charles and I-10 are about 30 miles inland, looks like Lake Charles is forecast to be under 6+ feet of water, 9+ in some places. I imagine that is going to put long stretches of I-10 underwater, and if it’s damaged significantly I would imagine that it could be a major disruption for oil and gas shipping.
Like the magnitude of 9+ feet of storm surge 30 miles inland is staggering. Yet we’ll still have a majority of people in that area thinking climate change is a hoax.
Trump’s response team is going to be worse than W’s, man this is gonna be bad.
“The floodwaters are going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
These aren’t very densely populated areas, at least. Probably significant infrastructure damage, but hopefully minimal loss of life.
Good thing we have competent people in leadership positions. We’re gonna be begging for Brownie to come out of retirement by tomorrow afternoon.
We are looking at that very closely. Very strongly.
I’m from there originally and there’s a mandatory evacuation. Large parts of I-10 are elevated and all of I-210 is but I’m not sure how much of the highway is legitimately in danger of flooding.
Yeah I’ve driven from Houston → Lake Charles → New Orleans three or four times, and played poker in Lake Charles once. I’ve stayed overnight there 2 or 3 times. If I recall, I-10 is elevated but not a ton. I can’t recall if it’s like 10 feet above water level or 20 feet, but it’s somewhere in that range, right? I have to imagine stretches of it are at a very high risk of going underwater with 9+ feet of storm surge, my bigger question is how well it’s built to withstand that and be usable in the days after the storm once the water recedes.
I talked about more of the logistical impact on the national economy in terms of oil and gas being shipped, but it could also be a major issue for rescue response and getting much-needed supplies in the days to week after the storm.
For those who don’t know, parts of I-10 are basically a really long, low bridge over swampy areas that I assume are tidal marshes.
“I’ll be right eventually”
is it too late to try and take this thing out with a few thermonuclear missiles?
WaPo’s weather group is as excellent as their opinion page is garbage. It’s obviously geared towards mid-Atlantic weather, but they have great coverage of hurricanes and winter storms. They’re quoting the Hurricane Center as calling the storm surge in Louisiana “unsurvivable.” Yikes.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/08/26/hurricane-laura-updates-texas-louisiana/
I think this is an important point. Is it confirmation bias? It certainly seems like most recent storms have ended up towards the more-destructive end of their originally forecast range.
Port Arthur is a city of 50,000 people that’s got a 16 foot seawall and faces projected storm surge of 15-20 feet. It’s 7 feet above sea level. I’m not an expert on these matters, but I would assume if the storm surge hits 17 feet, Port Arthur will be under 10 feet of water, and the average height of a floor of a home is like 9 feet. Single story homeowners who stay would be on their roofs facing 130-150 mph sustained winds.
If the surge hits 20 feet, people with two story homes will have to choose between floating on a few feet of water on their second floors and being out on their roofs.
My guess is that the models are based on historical data and are weighting the last 5-10 years equally to older data instead of weighting more toward current trends. I have no evidence for this, I haven’t researched it, that’s just my guess.
To be fair, last week the predictions were that this hurricane would team up with the other hurricane to form some kind of Voltron super hurricane that would challenge Godzilla for supremacy of the seas and that didn’t happen because the other hurricane displayed an acute lack of WIM. So maybe the planet isn’t ready to global warm itself to death just yet!
