Milton rapidly intensified to a Category 5 hurricane late Monday morning.
Within hours, Milton strengthened to a Category 2, then a Category 3, then a Category 4 and finally a Category 5.
Milton now ranks as the third-greatest 24-hour wind speed intensification for a hurricane in the Atlantic Basin. (Records are based on data since the satellite era began in the 1960s.)
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This storm has reached 180mph at its peak. Have you ever braced wind at that speed? I’ve ridden at 120mph on my motorcycle (at a drag strip). The wind, even with a full face helmet and visor, was so extreme that it was hard to hold on and my ears were ringing afterward despite having earplugs in. This insanity corresponds to a few seconds of a category 3 hurricane. This hurricane’s winds are like that felt by squids on literbikes doing top speed runs.
To add to what you’ve said: if you’ve ever hit a bug (or anything else) at those speeds you notice it. A junebug will leave a fairly decent bruise on exposed skin, and for comparison a paintball out of a marker travels about 190 mph.
Imagine the random far more substantial debris flying around during a hurricane near those speeds.
…i’ve done a buck fourty-five in my convertible with the top down: it’s LOUD…at one fifty-five, pushing with all two hundred horsepower, my car can’t make any further headway against the wind and buildings are a lot less aerodynamically efficient…
…i’ve ridden out a half-dozen hurricanes but category fives are get-out-of-town devastating…
Yeah, I def prefer octopuses on gallonbikes, imperial cephalopods with 8 arms only FTW!
This graphic from The Weather Channel is terrifying.
Most tsunamis are less than 10 feet high
https://www.weather.gov/safety/tsunami-about
Cities can’t be protected from this long-term.
Excuse me, is that feet???
Terrifyingly, yes it is.
Holy fuck people. It says right in the image that it’s in meters.
So not only lemmings can’t read, a comment asking for info staring you in the face has 55 upvotes… and the wrong answer has 38.
snekerpimp was responding to FlyingSquid, not baldingpudenda.
Well, that’s egg on my face. Thanks for the correction.
If it makes you feel better, it seems like you’re not the only one who missed the thread indent 🤷♂️
Indents are hard to do well. Maybe impossible? Should be effortless to read but seems to never happen. Maybe just one of those things.
The key says elevation is in meters, so it’s about 3 times less terrifying.
/s
Could be worse… at least it’s not in Meters.
Yet.
It is in meters and since that an elevation map of Florida, that is the better scenario.
Basically all the areas in purple and dark blue are low enough for the storm surge to flood them. If it was feet, then the blue-green will probably be underwater as well.
The question about ft came right below the elevation map, but it was a top-level comment on the OP and not a sub-comment about the elevation map.
Seems you were confused about this order of comments too but unfortunately you’ve taken downvotes for it.
SWEET! Surfs up!
To soon?
No. There’s always a bunch of surfers that go out for hurricane waves. I assume some have a death wish.
Ok, Bodie.
Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven wrote a book called Lucifer’s Hammer about a comet hitting the Earth. There’s a part where all the surfers in the ocean off of L.A. know they’re going to die, so they decide to ride the tsunami and get taken out one by one as they get smashed into buildings.
One pancake to go!
I think I heard about the book you were talking about
Unfortunately, at least from videos I’ve seen of the Indian Ocean tsunami and the Fukushima tsunami, tsunamis don’t really “break” like good surfing waves and instead seem to act more like a large swell that keeps going instead of ebbing.
(A mega-tsunami from a comet impact might be so large it would act differently, though.)
I’ll be honest, it’s one of the least believable parts of a book which overall reads as quite plausible, but it’s a fun chapter. Neither of the authors are/were scientists, so they were bound to get some things wrong. It was also written almost 50 years ago, so I’m guessing the science they did work with has been supplanted in a lot of ways since then.
That would make for a great scene in a disaster movie.
Honestly, the whole book would make a great miniseries. Probably too much for just one movie.
Too bad Larry Niven is and Jerry Pournelle was such right-wing assholes, because their published some great stuff.
You’re surfing all the way to sooner island from Florida‽
Where is sooner island?
before later island
Oklahoma, duh.
Just never heard of it called sooner island
Some “Day After Tomorrow” kinda shit right there
I had to do a double take on that.
If only we could have foreseen this somehow
Agreed. Maybe we can measure the temperature globally and compare it to past readings. Nevermind, that would be crazy.
That sounds like socialism!
I’m surprised DeSantis hasn’t required that the storm surge be listed in meters to make it appear smaller and less of an issue.
Use decameters to make the number smaller and less people will understand or care.
Meters are communist. He’s dumb enough to require it be listed in leagues.
Florida’s elevation
That imagine is in meters, so it’s bad, but not quite as bad at first glance.
I wasnt trying to deceive, but everything in pink and blue is gonna get fucked.
That’s pretty bad… How is it so flat??
So hurricanes can pass across without losing too much energy.
It is all in the design.
He’s coming for his red stapler. You stole it. Now it is time for revenge.
Milton could put strychnine in the guacamole.
Headed straight for L Ron Hubbard.
Oh shit, those numbers are feet, not inches. That took me a moment. Fuuuuuck.
For those across the pond, 3658mm of rain (12’)
Really sets it in seeing it in mm
No that is storm surge.
So it’s the hurricane pushes that much water onto the shore through force and can get that high of water above sea level.So more akin to a slow tsunami where a hurricane pushes up to 3.6M of water up onto the land then it rains more on top of that. Storm surge is mostly the reason for the houses on pillars too.
Florida gonna look like Fallout4 post Hurricane Milton and Hurricane season ain’t even over…
Time to break out the Sharpie and fix this, Donald!
Longer article if you want more info: https://apnews.com/article/hurricane-milton-helene-florida-557c5c512135e0a8661b298e45e17c92
At least the insurance companies will only have to rebuild some houses once after 2 hurricanes
What insurance companies? They all backed out of Florida years ago. Now it’s state funded home insurance footing the bill.
I read a thing recently that insurance companies are getting increasingly skittish all over the country, even places that wouldn’t traditionally be considered risky, because yay, climate change.
The interesting thing about it was that insurance companies’ insurance is increasingly the thing that’s causing issues, because it’s getting harder for the risk to be spread out. That is to say that insurance companies financially rely on areas with low rates of natural disasters because they end up being a net positive due to insurance premiums and no need for payout. Fewer of these “safe” areas mean the insurance companies struggle to stay solvent and have to rely on their own insurance policies to have their back, but those meta-insurance companies have apparently been historically loud about climate change — probably because besides the government, they’re the ones who have to pony up
Here in Missouri, home owners insurance is starting to lose hail damage from coverage. Damn near 90% of the houses around my area have now replaced their roofs, and have the roofing signage out front. It’s almost a running joke now: guessing which house will be next to get one, and counting the company’s signs to see who’s making a killing.
No problem. The 0ld coots in Florida that vote won’t be around when the bill comes due.
Insurance companies don’t build shit. They just collect money from people, and sometimes give some of it back.
They’re actually required to give 85% of everything back, so they give back most of it. It seems like Florida is becoming too much of a hassle to insure, though. Some companies have pulled out of florida.
Everyone in FL should have pulled out.
This joke works on multiple levels and I’m happy about that.
Holy shit a triple entendre!
Does that 85% include their costs or is that the full amount returned to policy holders?
Full amount that is legally required to pay back out in insurer coverage every year. The other 15% covers pay roll, rent, buildings, bonus’, overhead, etc. Literally everything else. Same deal for medical insurance.
Begrudgingly cover*
unless they can find a way to screw you over for profit, then they absolutely will no matter how ridiculous the “reasoning”*
I believe it was Katrina where the insurance said it was wind damage when you only had flood insurance, but if you’re neighbor only had wind coverage they’d tell them it was water damage.
Right storm. Wrong details.
They (insurance companies) were claiming it as flood/surge damage, even if wind ripped off your roof to let the water inside. Wind was covered, water wasn’t. Companies were sued for trying to blanket deny an area based on one generic engineering report, or denying coverage if flood waters came through after wind destroyed a place. Insurance com0anies don’t typically offer flood insurance to a lot of places and if homeowners want it, they have to buy it through the federal government.
If your policy covers wind they claim the damage is from water. If your policy covers water, they claim the damage is from wind. If your policy covers both, they claim a hurricane is exempt as an act of god.
Which, to be fair, is really about all they can do. You CANNOT stop a hurricane from obliterating a house. There is NOTHING the average American can do about it except leave and hope it survives.
Then its dishonest to accept money for your fake business.
they are not real businesses in the insurance sense. its all federal money for flood insurance. they’re just servicers kinda like mortgage originators.
That sounds like capitalistic socialism to me. I dont even understand the notion of what you said there.
this goes into it a bit and is a good listen in general. https://overcast.fm/+AAyIOzvst0E
I want to bitch about insurance companies but insurance is for something that is unavoidable.
All this shit is becoming more and more avoidable.
If people don’t have the common sense to not build houses in places that are guaranteed to be destroyed by a natural disaster sooner than later, then I shouldn’t have to subsidize their rebuilding costs through my insurance premiums.
Yeah, used to be that insurance costs were almost directly skewed based on risk. But then people were upset that it costed so much to insure some places(the ones that should be prohibitively expensive to insure). And then slowly over time they baked in little increases in price everywhere else to subsidise huge price cuts in those areas to out-compete the companies that put the onus entirely on the people taking risks. Eventually, as it became more and more widespread to do that, it became financially more viable to spread it out rather than have drastically more expensive areas. And now we all have to partially cover people who are taking way more risk than we would.
That’s communism in a nut shell, Republicans should be up in arms over it
That’s what the people in the North Carolina mountains thought.
That seems like a perfectly reasonable place to build that’s not obviously at threat from hurricanes. But sometimes shit happens that couldn’t be easily foreseen, and THAT’S what insurance is for.
My point, however, is that insurance is NOT to make other policy holders foot the expense of someone repeatedly repairing/rebuilding after completely foreseeable/inevitable events.
To anyone that insists on having a house right on the beach on the Gulf Coast, I say, “Insure thy self.”
That or build something that can stand up to being hit. Tall order, but the inner armchair engineer in me thinks it’s like, totally possible.
I think you forget, building it stronger once would cost 50% more upfront. Better to build it twice, or three times at only 100% cost each time. That way you can be the lowest bidder every time.
Many insurance companies won’t even insure homes in much of Florida.
And the rest are probably planning to.
So, fun fact. There’s an unorganized storm with category 1 winds just sitting over Mid Florida already. Also NOAA changed Milton’s heading on Hurricane.gov to plead with people to listen to evacuation orders.
We’ll all be very happy to feel silly if this doesn’t go the way it looks like it’s going to go. But please for the love of humanity get out of the way of this thing.
My friend lives in Florida and has not, nor his words “will ever” evacuate for a “stupid hurricane.” I’ll give you one guess who he’s voting for.
That’s one way for Florida to go blue
The game I almost never lose!
oh fuck me. Well I lost a different game after typing that.
I just lost too…jerk!
I’ve lived in the Tampa Bay area my entire life, never evacuated before, and I left last night. Fuck Milton. Not worth riding this one out.
Did you mean https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/ ? Your URL doesn’t seem to work.
i don’t understand how to use this website. where do i click on to see who needs to get out
You need to go to FloridaDisaster.org
The evacuation orders look super random. I guess it depends on the politics of the county. Great
I need only three things:
- Where is the hurricane
- What path did it already take
- How strong / fast is it
Bonus: Prediction path it will take.
I was thinking this would be very easy to visualize. From such important data sources you’d expect more.
If your address has “FL” in it, you should evacuate.
I’m not sure NOA is responsible for evacuation orders, IIRC they advise state and local governments on who should evacuate and it’s up to the local government to coordinate and reach out to their populations.
That’s the same site yeah. Mine left an s off, I’ll go fix it.
I was listening to a live stream with a couple meteorologists explaining everything. they were fairly jovial and laid back seeming guys but at one point, one of them got a deadly serious tone to his voice and started talking about how this one can’t be rode out, can’t be survived.
Why evacuate? Just write your name, DoB, and SSN on our arms and legs, and use a waterproof sharpie for that. Just in case, you know?
I mean I’d rather have you, not your pieces.
Hurricanes don’t like it when you ban books. Prayin for you, florida man.
TBH a lot of whats about to happen to Florida in the coming months will be self inflicted because of their politics.
florida is like 55% republican. I’d wager many know how dumb it is
Good thing they removed climate change from being a thing discussed in the legislature. That should fix things.
They are manipulating the weather! It would be clear as day if there wouldn’t be one hurricane after another.
Where’s the magic sharpie when you need it?
Anyone got a nuke? I have an idea.
I guess nuking Florida before the hurricane gets there would reduce the damage inflicted by the hurricane.
They forgot to make a law against it!
\s
SCOTUS should declare climate change unconstitutional.
We’re supposed to go to Tampa this weekend for a tattoo. In the grand scheme of things I know, we’ve got very little to worry about, but I am wondering if we should just cancel now, or if there’s a chance of Tampa being back online by Friday.
Probably not.
If it’s only for a tattoo, maybe post pone it? Are you driving there? Only asking cuz plane ticket cancellation vs driving is different cost wise if you can’t get a refund. I guess it wouldn’t hurt to call the place and ask them what they think is appropriate.
We have flights and hotel booked. It’s my husband’s appointment, I’m just there to show him memes and distract him. He’s going to ask the guy today.
Did everything turn out okay?
Aww thanks for checking in! We ended up cancelling last minute and booking a random flight in the opposite direction, to Omaha NE. We’d never been and it seemed like a good time. I ended up getting a duck butt tattoo, and we rescheduled his. His appt just happened and he was good all 5 hours of it!
We also explored the coast a little and got to see the devastation first hand, houses completely wrecked, timber everywhere, whole neighborhoods ruined. Got some cool shark teeth tho!
I’m glad to hear it all worked out Lenny! (Duck butt tattoo as in a duck’s butt?) You should turn the shark teeth into jewellery of some sort haha
Yep, imagine a duck digging in a pond with its butt in the air… that. Hahah.
Within hours, Milton strengthened to a Category 2, then a Category 3, then a Category 4 and finally a Category 5.
Someone had a word quota to fill.
Probably submitted the article with 1.1 line spacing and 13 point font
Currently in my house in Florida, where I am looks to be not on the direct path but not completely free. Hurricanes can move a lot, especially when they get on land and staet losing speed.
Once we evacuated 5 hours in a car with all our animals (at the time 2 big sweaty dogs) in a car that wasnt even the size of a minivan. We packed everything we needed just in case. Once we got inside the hotel we booked we took a ~2 hour nap and upon checking the storm again it had moved to come right to where the hotel is. We then had to drive 5 hours BACK home where we began.
Anyhoo, wish us luck! I don’t wanna evacuate with 4 cats and a large dog haha
I wish you luck trifling toad🤞 Escaping a situation with just people is difficult, with additional animals makes it so much more stressful. Especially cats since they have to be put in a crate and need a litter box etc.
Good luck to you and your family. I don’t know anyone in Florida, so I will be thinking of you as a proxy for all the people I am concerned for in the potential path of this hurricane.
My first thought was, “5 Amber alerts amd a hurricane… good god what’s going on in Florida?!”
You had me even more worried there for a second.
I’m gonna tell myself that this is finally bad enough to spur widespread action on global warming as a way of feeling better about it and you can all preemptively shut up with your reality checks.
Are you doing okay? I feel kind of the same way I think.
In Germany more than 200 people died in a severe flooding in 2021. Just 2 month prior the conservative party CDU removed flood protection laws in one of the states most affected. In one of the towns completely destroyed they were again voted strongest just a few months later.
I’m gonna tell myself that this is finally bad enough to spur widespread action on global warming
I, too, want to believe that humans are capable for caring enough about themselves, each other, and their descendants in order to put in place measures to make the world better for everyone.
Tbh I’ve learned a lot about how thermal energy affects these storms and I gotta say, the only people who are gonna be living in Florida 20 years from now are people who live in submarines.
We ought to be executing oil company CEOs for treason.
Let’s go Milton
