Jeff,

Where exactly do you live? I'm 12 miles west and 2 miles south of downtown West Palm Beach.

heath

I'm just above Clearwater. I'm about 1 1/2 miles from the Gulf.

Did Frances do much damage over there?

hwm

A big hi-rise condo right on the gulf had it's roof ripped off and they've condemned the building because of water damage. It dropped carports on cars and toppled signs and light posts. I just had limbs off my trees to deal with.

Yahoooo! No hurricane for most of Florida.

*PHEW*

And good riddance! Cat 5 will DESTROY stuff.

heath

At least I was able to get some good footage of a very well defined eye of the hurricane directly over our area.

(very quick video shot).
http://www.magoomedia.com/media/eye.wmv

That's cool.

hwm

I finally got the internet this morning... Been climbing the walls! Power was only out for a week or so, cable never died (BrightHouse).

My wife is an RN, and got locked inside the hospital for a 3 day shift (With the healthy bonus, we got an EU1000 i Honda generator... quiet little bugger, and runs 7 hrs on .61 gallons of gas). I loaded two kids, two dogs, a cat, a bird, a lizard, and crickets into our PT Cruiser and ran to Georgia. Unfortunately, Georgia was closed, so I came back to Florida and stayed at my sister's in Daytona Bch. It was eerie being the only car on AIA...

We lost most of our fence, a lot of soffit, facia, and shingles, and the skylight in our kitchen. It's not really lost... I found parts of it in the backyard ;) Traffic lights were gone at a lot of intersections, but it wasn't too bad.

It wasn't so bad in Palm Beach County, Keith, but we've never had something THIS bad. Not even Hurricane Irene, with it's "out of the blue" turn into Florida that gave us a foot of water five years ago!

BTW, got your email, glad you're okay!

heath

ps-"Georgia was closed" cracked me up!

Glad everything is working out. I, too, like the part about GA being closed. Good to have you back.

"ps-"Georgia was closed" cracked me up!"

I wasn't overly amused at the time... All I wanted was a room, and a few hours of sleep. I went as far as Hilton Head S.C. without finding a single room. Except for a Heritage Inn in Dublin Ga, that wanted $75 for 6 hrs... I didn't want it that bad.

Keith,

It was how you said it. Hurricanes stink, but hey, we got through it. I feel bad for the third world countries...Mudslides killed over 700 people in Haiti by a TROPICAL storm, rough, but not a hurricane.

heath

Imagine how bad it was in the old days, before doppler radar and satellite imagery. The weirdest thing about hurricanes is that the day before you get it, it seems like the most beautiful day of the year. No evacuations = deadly outcome.

Galveston, Texas on September 8, 1900 - 6,000 people died. I've read in some places that it was 8,000. And it was only a Category FOUR.

I helped do a documentary/special in 2002 for the Hurricane of 1928 that nailed Palm Beach County. Lake Okeechobee overflowed and went over the dikes, and killed thousands in Belle Glade. They buried them in West Palm Beach in a mass, unmarked grave. In 2002, they were honored with a special marker over the area.

heath

And now, out of the blue for me (I don't watch much news after working in it for 7 years), Jeanne made a u-turn and is heading for, well, either the Space Coast or Daytona, but it sure makes a beeline for south Florida...

ARGH!

heath

ps-Ivan loved the Gulf of Mexico so much, it made a u-turn at Jersey and headed back down.

Chicago has been having one of the best summers in decades. The weather here has literally been like San Diego for weeks. I cannot remember a longer spell of clear-sky days, and the forecast for the coming week remains largely clear and sunny, with the fall temps beginning to dip into the low-to-mid 70's from the current low 80's. I'm almost tired of clear, sunny days; it's getting downright monotonous!

We really do feel badly for Floridians. You've had a truly miserable hurricane season...and it looks like it's not over yet. I saw a veritable conga line of tropical storms on the Carribean.

It's the peak of the season. Speaking of conga line, in Sept. 1995, there were 5 storms IN A ROW dancing out of Africa on a westward journey of "fun."

i swear, the storms keep making u-turns, like Jeanne and Ivan, and are likely gonna become snowbirds down here! I can see it now, Ivan driving his old Cadillac slow down in the fast lane down the highway with his right-blinker on and Jeanne causing problems over her grocery receipt that totalled $4.97...

heath

It will offer no current comfort, but the cover story of the current issue of Scientific American features a theoretical way in which hurricanes might be somewhat controlled in the future. It's basically a combination of the largely discarded cloud seeding technique and a space-based (of course) laser or solar reflector that can heat large sections of the ocean to attract hurricanes to higher energy (like dogs to meat).

Of course it's pretty far-fetched and will never happen in our lifetimes. Can you just imagine such a James Bond-movie-like gizmo in the sky at the beckon call of a White House politician itchin' to BBQ something in 'tween 'cane-baitin'? But it's an interesting think-piece.

These guys with a name like a laundry detergent decided to use some sort of absorption stuff to make hurricanes (and clouds) disappear. They took off in a plane, flew into a cloud that was visible on radar, and sprayed their absorption stuff into the cloud. Apparently, the cloud disappeared from radar.

Of course, I think that we'd drop some of that stuff into a hurricane, we'd probably screw something up (like in a schlocky horror film/cautionary tale) and the hurricane would become a never-before-seen category 35.

heath

I heard about those guys - it was called Dynamat or something. I've heard that they are going to soon attempt attacking a hurricane with their moisture reducing material. You're right though - I'm betting this will probably trigger something else. Probably a swirling mess of tornadoes where the whole pressure system gets altered a little too quickly? It'll be like that scene in Day After Tomorrow.

I read a while back about how, I think back in the 60s, they were thinking of nuking hurricanes to see if that has any affect. Luckily they decided not to, since the potential radioactive runoff would've proven pretty eco-destructive. Plus they were misunderestimating how powerful these things are. They say that a typical hurricane contains the energy of a several megaton nuke going off every 20 minutes. I think I read that on the noaa.gov site. The hurricane would just absorb it without effort.

Now if only there was a way to capture and store some of that energy. Maybe we'd be a little less dependent on oil.

I was already wondering if they couldn't drop one or more MOAB bombs in the middle so as to disrupt it. However, it would probably just re-form if you can't alter the conditions that sustain it in the first place. It might require a combination of several things to have any chance.


=gb=

Snake Oil Sales!
 

Imran is right on the money, considering that even a small hurricane harnesses the energy of thousands of nuclear bombs, dropping one into, in front of or around the storm would be equivalent to...let's see...


PISSING INTO A HURRICANE!

No matter how you look at it Mother Nature has some incredibly beautiful attributes, but...she can also be one 'ornery bitch!

The only way to stop these storms is to take away their fuel, so, I propose we drain the Atlantic Ocean! Hah!

That will also make fishing alot easier!

:)

RB

Plus we may also finally find Atlantis!

We'll BE Atlantis!

hwm

Palm Beach county is gonna get hit pretty hard this time. Up to CAT 3 and strengthening. Good luck all.

Ugh, ugh and triple ugh.

I'm FED UP with these storms! Where's the Bermuda High when we need it?!

heath

ps-It's gonna hit two counties up from Palm Beach County, but it's gonna stink.

I'm waiting for it... I stocked up on supplies earlier. The city stopped all alcohol sales around 1:00 today, so I had to go across the city line to finish up ;)

What's funny (odd) is we've had so many watches this year, there wasn't a rush at the stores for last minute supplies. Everyone is stocked full from the last three hurricanes. I think I have more water stock piled in the house than in my pool.

Well... We lost power about 6:00 last night, cable went shortly after. Since I still had the generator ready from Francis, I fired up the PC to give one last shout- and the internet died. Funny thing is, that was the last thing to come back last time, but it's back now. Now, if I could get cable going... ;)

Oh... we also lost the rest of the fence, more shingles and the patch I did, more ceiling dropped in the garage, and we have running water inside.

How's everyone else?

Glad to hear you're okay, Keith. I'm over here in the Pensacola area, wondering if it's going to head our way, or go up or East as they're saying.

Things have gotten worse, I'm running out of mixer! For the love of God, somebody send Coke!

I think you'll be ok John, we wore it out. You'll probably just have nasty rain, if it should get to you. Either way, I hope things run smooth for you.

Our lights are flickering and I've lost cable, but I think you got the worst of it last night and wore it out. If you were drinking Scotch, I'd send you some water.

*shudder* Ewww, Scotch! hehe... Thanks for the offer Jeff, but we have plenty of bottled water, and running water too. It's running down the walls, the ceiling fans, the vents...

Anything to help out a friend. But if you decide you need some water, you just let me know.

It hit one hour earlier and three weeks after Frances did, and in the same area, around Sewell Point, in between Stuart and Jupiter, Florida. We lost power at 10 PM (though some to the north didn't lose it at all) and most of us have it back in my town. But I hear, as of 8:40 PM Sunday, 500,000 residents in Palm Beach County are still without power. My fiancee Marlene's parents, where we stayed, still don't have it.

Not a lot of damage, but I think Frances took care of a lot of stuff earlier. Then again, we couldn't tell which damage was which. Mostly trees and fences and shingles out here, worse out east and to the north.

heath

Well I made it ok, just lost power, as usual. Strangely enough, my intersection is the only one without power in my neighborhood. Around 6am Sunday a gigantic oak, which I thought would have gone down in Frances, went down. Its limbs were so widespread, it actually snapped a light pole in half which ripped the line out as far as two light poles down, one of which feeds my house. I guess it was a big enough occurrence to have Channel 9 come down and video some firefighters attempting to hack it up.

Poor firefighters - it was still very gusty, and their training isn't really in tree hacking. They got the chainsaw stuck in the tree twice. They got about half done and I guess got a more important call and left. Tree's still there.

One thing I've come to learn from all these outages, is exactly where my power comes from - which direction and which exact line. Not that I couldn't have gone without having that knowledge. But hey, info is info.

I was without power for about a day. It cam e back on around 3 p.m.. I only lost two limbs in the tree out front. Frances actually did a good job preparing us for this storm.

Yeah, Frances did, didn't it?

heath

Half an alphabet to go... let's keep our fingers crossed.