Trying to reason with hurricane season…
– Jimmy Buffet
As I sit here waiting to see if “Dorian” the latest “summer squall” is going to miss our house I watch the panic as the media are wetting themselves at the prospect of a catastrophic landfall which will provide countless hours of film footage. We natives, for whom this is not our first cyclonic rodeo, know better than to listen to the media. We know the only way to tell if we are in a hurricane is to look outside. If the rain is horizontal, and the trees are bent over – we’re in a hurricane. And we can judge the “category” by how far the palm trees are bent. If bent in half, it’s a “Cat 5″ – the only category which really gets our attention.
So while we natives sit back and wait, the recent transplants (of which there are far too many), hyped into a frenzy by media “weather experts”, empty store shelves of things that odds are they won’t need or use. The Publix supermarket chain, Florida’s largest (which I recommend BTW), does a land office business during the pre-hurricane frenzy.
My first real job was bagging groceries at my neighborhood Publix (as it was/is for many Florida teens), and the Publix founder who had a home nearby would occasionally come in our store. He was nice old guy – at least to us lowly bagboys – but also a very shrewd business man. Because Publix is a big advertiser throughout Florida, the cynic in me wonders if the media generated panic is just to facilitate Publix fleecing the Yankees (an even longer-standing Florida native tradition). But I’m getting tangential to the real topic of this column – why is the Tropical Cyclone Guidance Project (TCGP) located in Boulder, Colorado ?
I don’t recall experiencing a hurricane during the time I’ve spent in Pagosa – so do they get them up in Boulder? The only way I can figure the TCGP got located in Colorado was as political pork for an influential member of Congress from that State.
Apparently the TCGP is responsible for compiling the computer models used to predict the path and intensity of our hurricanes, and they rely heavily on “European models” – which explains a lot. Like how we natives learned long ago those predictions are guesswork at best and usually as reliable as consulting the Eightball I had as a child. To put this into perspective, what would Colorado natives think of “experts” in Florida predicting Colorado blizzard conditions based on European computer models, and having local public officials telling you how to prepare based on those predictions. If that makes sense, then welcome to hurricane season in Florida !
I’ve been experiencing hurricanes since the 1950’s. While some have been be pretty nasty, for us natives most hurricanes are just an inconvenient PITA. We ride them out. Where are we going to evacuate too? By the time we fight the traffic to get somewhere, there is no food, gas, or a place to stay. And the smart ones among us know better than to build/buy a home right on the coast.
There is also the possibility the storm will change direction and hit the evacuation location. Since just 2000 hurricanes have defied predictions and changed direction as much as 90 degrees in a few hours. Another headed out into the Atlantic only to turn 180 degrees overnight and come back to hit the coast. When that happens, the “experts” remind us their predictions are only “educated guesses” based on their computer models. I’d rather rely on John’s weather forecasting stone which, though low-tech, is infallible:
Before the wife and I left for vacation last Wednesday morning we checked the weather. The “experts” had Dorian as a tropical storm heading for Puerto Rico, and as likely to break apart as form into a full-blown hurricane. By the time we got to our hotel Wednesday night, the talking heads on the Weather Channel were reporting Dorian was a Category 1 hurricane, with predicted path right at our Florida east-coast home by which time it would be Cat 4+ when it made landfall Saturday evening! Though we knew the chance that prediction was accurate was only minimal, we had no choice but to scrub our trip and return home to prep by putting up shutters.
Now (Monday afternoon), of course, the prediction has changed. It won’t make landfall until (take your pick) Monday, Tuesday, the next full moon, or it will turn out into the Atlantic – meaning all we will likely experience are sub-hurricane force winds, and a few feet of rain. My neighbor who has friends in Puerto Rico say Dorian missed them completely. So much for the Wednesday evening prediction.
But non-natives statewide are in full sky-is-falling mode. By last Thursday afternoon, shelves in many stores throughout Florida had been stripped clean. Public officials all over the state hold stern-faced news conferences telling us how they are “preparing for the worst, but hoping for the best”, and ordering mandatory evacuations – while the media breathlessly warn us it is “a very dangerous storm”. All because an “expert” with a dubious track record sitting in Boulder, Colorado is making an educated guess based on European computer models about what is going on in the tropics! You cant make this stuff up.
I live one mile inland directly east of the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), from where I’ve watched Space Shuttle launches while eating breakfast at my dining room table. KSC is located on Cape Canaveral, which juts out into the Atlantic. ‘The Cape’ was originally selected for US space launches because it is the one location on the southeast coast that never had a direct hit from a hurricane. A perfect record which held true when the last one came up the coast a couple years ago (Matthew) on the same track the experts now predict for Dorian. Matthew was headed directly for KSC, and (the “experts” said) was going to hit us within a few hours. But just as the leading edge was approaching the Cape, it turned east out to sea, and we just got grazed.
There are a number of theories why Cape Canaveral has never had a direct hit. Most “experts” espouse some variation of either geography creating a natural buffer because the shelf that extends out from the Cape under the ocean which pushes them away, or the Gulf Stream off shore makes an eastward turn there which pulls hurricanes out to the warmer water. All these theories are based on science, but I prefer a non-scientific explanation.
The Cape was a sacred gathering place for local pre-Columbian native Americans throughout central Florida, and is still protected by their Mojo.
Given a choice between an expert scientific explanation, and Indian Mojo, I’ll take Mojo every time.