Things the Media says ——
CNN: “Experts say it’s a visceral example of what climate change can do to the planet’s most fearsome storms — supercharging them with heat and moisture until they become almost unrecognizable from the Atlantic hurricanes of the past.”
The paragraph before: “The water around Jamaica had been simmering all summer. By the time Hurricane Melissa roared ashore Tuesday, that uber-warm Caribbean Sea had helped turn it into a monster: a Category 5 storm with winds reaching 185 miles an hour, tied for the strongest hurricane to strike land in the Atlantic.”
If it was tied for the strongest, than it was RECOGNIZABLE. In 1980, they claim that Hurricane Allen hit 190mph. And how are they measured? At sea and not on land. When did we start doing that?
The 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron was formally established in 1944 by the U.S. Army and the Navy and became known as the “Hurricane Hunters”. Now, I’m no genius, but that means that real wind speeds have only been measured for 75 years. So how can you definitively say that this is out of the ordinary in just 75 years. We’re talking about a planet that has been here for an estimated 4.5 billion years.
When you look at the history of hurricanes, the one that I always heard of growing up, was the New England Hurricane of 1938, un-affectionitly known as the “Long Island Express” in the media. When it passed Puerto Rico, three days before hitting New England, the National Hurricane Center history says, “likely as a category 5 hurricane” with NO wind speed listed.
The ONLY wind speeds listed for the hurricane are from Blue Hill Observatory, Massachusetts, which recorded sustained winds of 121 mph with gusts to 183 mph. It’s in BOSTON! Blue Hills is 130 MILES inland from where the hurricane made landfall. My mother talked about this hurricane her entire life, comparing it to Camille in 1969. My mother was 6 years old for the New England hurricane, I was 10 when Camille hit. She told me many stories of the devastation she remembered from both storms.
Hurricane Camille in 1969 devastated the Gulf Coast, with wind so fierce that all the wind-recording instruments in the landfall area were destroyed. The actual maximum sustained winds will never be known, BUT have been estimated at over 200 MPH. The only wind speed measurement came from 75 miles inland (Columbia, Mississippi) which reported 120 mph sustained winds.
Hurricane Sandy, which was the worst I ever lived through, was scary at my house just 2.5 miles from my office in Red Hook, Brooklyn, on the waterfront and 37 feet lower. On the waterfront, the storm surge reached 6 feet, with sustained winds of approximately 80 mph, and was devastating. We never lost power at my home.
The most interesting fact I learned researching this was the snowfall in the Appalachian Mountains caused by Hurricane Sandy. Though exceptionally rare, a tropical cyclone or one having just lost tropical characteristics can become a winter storm, and remember this was on October 29. In Richwood, West Virginia, and Wolf Laurel Mountain, North Carolina, 36-inches of snow fell in blizzard conditions.
Hurricanes are bad, but let’s remember history as well. When the media don’t have all the facts they report in assumptions. It is time to change that method of delivering information. When you can prove to me that these storms are actually worse, I’ll believe it. All my information came from the National Hurricane Center.
