jm1220

The rebuilt homes there will likely have to be on stilts or have their main living area 9ft or higher above ground level in order to get any kind of flood insurance after this (and FL already has an insurance crisis ongoing). It’s going to be a rough road. I’d say that some of those islands may not be worth rebuilding but given the population boom, I’m sure they all will be.

Storm is moving quicker too. High tide at Myrtle Beach is 11:30am, can’t imagine this is great timing. Tide will be going out as it comes in, so that’s a plus I guess.

Unless they’re building sea walls after this, one day the devastation will just happen again on those barrier islands/surge zones. Not sure what building code can keep the building from taking horrible water damage. Saw it firsthand after Sandy, buildings from the outside looked not terrible but inside- totally wrecked and in many cases needed to be demolished. The barrier islands may be easier, in those cases the demolishing was already taken care of.

Exactly, anywhere that had surge flooding has tons of water damage inside and has to be gutted, if not torn down because mold will start up soon. Unless these building codes have mold resistant walls.

Core is trying to tighten up again, looks like convection is attempting to wrap around. It’s interacting with a trough to the west and I agree it definitely looks more like a nor’easter but it’s trying to make something of a comeback.

Hopefully it’s right but I don’t count rain for the parched areas until it’s in the bucket. Conditions are favorable for a soaking if it comes together, but it could also be a bunch of light showery stuff if the coastal development doesn’t happen or happens too far offshore.

Hopefully real to some extent. We could also get a lot of light/scattered crap that adds up to maybe 0.75" in a day which wouldn't be helpful. Would be remembered as just a raw, blustery weekend.

Hope it’s right. Would be worst for people who need it.

It had the pressure of a Cat 3, huge overall size and the funneling effect of NY Harbor and back bays to channel in the surge. The winds weren’t Cat 3 level but the same energy was just spread over a larger area. The surge was devastating for millions of people. Actual Hurricane Gloria made landfall in my town and was nowhere near as bad, as well as actual borderline TS/Hurricane Irene. Again there’s no magic delineator between “non-tropical” and “tropical” that defines how dangerous a storm is. It’s why so many changes were made to the NHC products after Sandy. My hometown on a barrier island had scores of people that stayed because they heard “Sandy won’t even be a hurricane” when it gets here.

Some places preemptively cut the power in FL where surge intrusion was expected, which was probably a very good call if it happened. Another mistake my town made was keeping the power grid on even as the surge was charging in.

My town had no power for a month because of the power infrastructure problem FL will be dealing with. Places that didn’t flood in Sandy did get the power back in a week or so, and crews from IN and MO were in my town working on it. In areas that had saltwater intrusion into any power infrastructure it likely needs to be rebuilt entirely. Anything electric/metallic, the salt water destroys.

This will be rough for SC. Huge area of TS to minimal hurricane winds will move a lot of water. It's more the size of the high wind area vs the strength of the wind that determines the surge. That plus any harbors/rivers to funnel it in which SC especially near Charleston has plenty of.

There’s already an insurance crisis in FL which I won’t get further into but I’m sure this will make much worse. I’m not too familiar with the Gulf FL coast, but it’s the same story in SE FL which I’ve visited many times since I have family/friends there. Every time I go it somehow gets more built up, and tons of developments around easily flooded canals/drainage ditches. I think the one thing that’ll finally stop the influx of newcomers is insane cost of living and unavailability of insurance. Basic 1 bedroom apartments are $2000+/month now without the corresponding salaries you’d get in the NE. It’s just insanity.

Agreed 100%. But the peaking before landfall isn’t unheard of but it seems more common especially in the last 10 years. Camille 1969 slammed into the N Gulf as a Cat 5. S FL’s population explosion was a catastrophe waiting to happen. And you can make building codes as tough as you want, people will still die when 6-10 feet of water comes charging through the neighborhood. The next one is the PBI to MIA stretch. Way overdue for a massive strike and even north of West Palm Beach is becoming overdeveloped. Thankfully that stretch isn’t too surge prone but when so many live just over sea level it doesn’t matter.

Not to go too far down this rabbit hole but “not tropical” doesn’t make it less severe. The most devastating part of any storm tropical or not is the surge, and “not tropical” Sandy was horrendous on that end as was 1938 and Fiona which just hit Canada. That’s another bias people need to get out of their head.

Hopefully for the south shore there’s a good soaking. It’ll be a nasty Saturday anyway with the increased winds/clouds so hopefully we can at least get the rain up here.

It’s already 70 mph and high end TS gusts are still happening in NE FL so it wouldn’t be a stretch at all for this to reach 80-85mph before landfall. There’s a lot of dry air and shear around with a disrupted core so it won’t come back more than that.

Doubt if they know for sure they stayed or if they got out at the last minute. No one knows for sure how high the death tolls are right now, hopefully it’s a significant overestimate. Too early to speculate on something like that and I’m sure crews are out doing rescues, but it wouldn’t be surprising if many did decide to stay that there’s a high death toll. Hundreds of thousands of people live in that area.

Very densely populated down there, and anecdotal stories that many decided not to evacuate. Hopefully not true and hopefully many can still be rescued if they decided to stay.

We take what we can get.

The surge would be that height above ground level plus the height above normal water level. So if a location is 13 feet above normal water level, 10 feet above ground level, and got flooded the surge was at least 13 feet. The surge is the height above the normal water level at that time.

Charlotte Harbor lucked out. Maybe the eastern shore got hit with surge as the eye pulled away but the big surge looks to be from Naples up to Sanibel. The major impact for Punta Gorda was wind, and I’m sure they got rocked. I wonder if it was worse than Charley. Probably lasted longer.

And water still rising in Ft Myers. Up to 8.57ft.

If that’s how bad Naples is I can’t imagine how bad Ft Myers Beach and Bonito Springs are near the eye.