The fuel necessary
Are we there yet? I think we are.
Catastrophic hurricane approaches popular low-lying state
Hurricane Milton tore towards Florida’s Gulf Coast on Wednesday, leaving residents with one final day to evacuate or hunker down before the “catastrophic” Category 5 storm is predicted to hit, triggering a life-threatening storm surge.
With more than 1 million people in coastal areas under evacuation orders, those fleeing for higher ground clogged highways on Tuesday and gas stations ran out of fuel, in a region still recovering from the devastating impacts of Hurricane Helene less than two weeks ago.
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Milton is on a rare west-to-east path through the Gulf of Mexico and is likely to bring a deadly storm surge of 10 feet (3 meters) or more of flooding to much of Florida’s Gulf Coast. Officials from Biden to Tampa Mayor Jane Castor warned people in evacuation zones to get out or risk death.
But of course we’re talking about millions of people here. Getting out won’t be a walk in the park. When gas stations run out of fuel, well, that’s game over.
Milton became the third-fastest intensifying storm on record in the Atlantic, growing from a Category 1 to a Category 5 in less than 24 hours.
“These extremely warm sea surface temperatures provide the fuel necessary for the rapid intensification that we saw taking place to occur,” said climate scientist Daniel Gilford of Climate Central, a nonprofit research group. “We know that as human beings increase the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, largely by burning fossil fuels, we are increasing that temperature all around the planet.”
So it’s not even that people should have left sooner, because they didn’t know they had to leave until it was too late to leave.
More than a dozen coastal counties issued mandatory evacuation orders, including Tampa’s Hillsborough County. Pinellas County, which includes St. Petersburg, ordered the evacuation of more than 500,000 people. Lee County said 416,000 people lived in its mandatory evacuation zones.
Evacuation is mandatory and impossible. We’re going to be seeing headlines about thousands of people trapped in their cars as the hurricane takes everything out.
Bumper-to-bumper traffic choked roads leading out of Tampa on Tuesday, when about 17% of Florida’s nearly 8,000 gas stations had run out of fuel, according to fuel markets tracker GasBuddy.
What’s the % now? What will it be 12 hours from now?
Unless you have one of those fancy Teslas, then you have it made, right?
Maybe not.
Well, if a shark is right over there, and my Tesla is sinking…
Should that not be “populous,” rather than “popular?” Did the writer mean to suggest that a lot of people like Florida or that a lot of people live in Florida?
“Popular” makes sense too – lots of people go there for recreation or to visit NASA or similar. It has a kind of glamour that your Kansas and North Dakota and similar don’t.
Kansas has a weird sort of glamor, though, in the form of Toto and Dorothy. Now, if you want lack of glamor, try Nebraska!
It looks like we might be gearing up for another Katrina. The stories are sounding extremely similar to the run up on that storm. I was hearing last night that there might be a lot of people living in gymnasiums. Sounds all too familiar, but when you don’t learn the correct lessons from one storm, you are sure to repeat the problems in another.
Yebbut Baum’s whole point was how horrible Kansas is.
The people in hospitals and prisons are sitting ducks. No evacuation for them.
Yeah, I was sort of making a joke…not a funny one, though.
We’ve gotten better since Katrina, but these storms seem to have gotten much worse for some vague and menacing reason… (which is to say, neither vague or menacing, just inevitable because humans are the creature that flips a switch and thinks that what turns on the lights).