| Author |
Topic |
|
New Orleans, Louisiana
USA
301 Posts |
Posted - 08/28/2012 : 1:39 PM
|
Well, Hurricane Isaac has drawn a bead on the New Orleans area.
If interested, one can look at http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/ for information on the Big Wind and Rain, and http://www.wwltv.com/weather/radar?radar=111613794&img=5&type=ani&c=y for radar on what Isaac is doing. And www.nola.com is another place for reading things.
Obviously, we still have power, although the storm is not expected to come ashore for another four hours.
Entergy has been doing automated phone calls, reminding people that although they have extra crews available, it is unsafe for crews to do bucket work if the winds are over 30 mph, and they will repair as soon as the winds die down. By definition, a hurricane is 74 mph or greater.
This is where dehydrated foods come in handy. And at least 2 gallons of water per person per day.
My husband's work closed yesterday at 10a -- they wanted time to power down the IT systems and give the IT people time to get home and prepare. Schools are closed today, tomorrow, and at least Thursday.
Rain is expected to be between 8 and 16 inches. Storm surge could be as high as 5-10 feet or more. This is where the coastal wetlands come in -- if they're intact, they slow and flatten the surge before it reaches the city.
The winds are currently just tropical storm strength outside, with occasional sharp spatters of rain. There's a light gray overcast, but the heavier circular bands can be seen to the south. Really kind of weird to see a band of threatening dark cloud then a band of bright blue sky, and then a band of cloud.
Isaac shifted just slightly to the west over the last 48 hours, which means we will get the wetter north-east quadrant of the storm, and also the one most likely to generate multiple tornadoes.
Another Canadian friend observed, "Give me a snow storm any day!" With this rain, Isaac would be the equivalent of 80 to 160 inches of snow. That's a heckuva lot of snow to dump at a 48 hour period!
There's a certain irony to Isaac hitting on the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
We sit and keep our fingers crossed.
|
|
New Orleans, Louisiana
USA
301 Posts |
Posted - 09/11/2012 : 9:09 PM
|
Things are beginning to return to normal following Isaac.
The storm was only a Category One, that is, 74-95 mph / 64-82 kt / 119-153 km/h. According to the National Hurricane Center, this means, "Very dangerous winds will produce some damage: Well-constructed frame homes could have damage to roof, shingles, vinyl siding and gutters. Large branches of trees will snap and shallowly rooted trees may be toppled. Extensive damage to power lines and poles likely will result in power outages that could last a few to several days."
Of course, this doesn't take into account what happens when the storm gets stuck and refuses to come ashore for something on the order of 56 hours to actually came ashore. It first bumped into Louisiana at around 6:45p Central, just southwest of the mouth of the Mississippi, or about 90 miles southwest of New Orleans.
This was a bad scenario, because it meant the stronger, wetter northeast quadrant of the storm was sweeping water from the Gulf of Mexico due north only the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and worse, across the low-lying Plaquemines Parish. (Parish in Louisiana = County in any other state of the U.S.)
shows the area where the storm came ashore. The terrain featuremakes it easy to see just how ragged the coastal wetlands, which should yield protection from storm surge, are these days.
Worse, as the storm then proceeded to not come ashore, but bobbed along the coast, it meant that the 8-12 foot storm surge was pushed in through the Rigoles, the passage that connects Lake Pontchartrain to Lake Bourne, and the Gulf. Not only that, the water was shoved across Pontchartrain and into Lake Maurepas, and then south into the wetlands around LaPlace, flooding an area which has not, heretofore, flooded significantly. The north shore of Pontchartrain had the water come ashore, and flow up the various rivers which drain into Pontchartain.
Here's a shot from the NOAA:
It's easy to see how the storm would have swirled the water around like stirring soup in a shallow bowl.
°
Our power went out around 5:30p on Tuesday. Luckily, we've put enough insulation on the roof that the temperature in the house was usually about 15°F below whatever the ambient temperature outside was, but with temperatures in the 90s (32-35°C), that was not much comfort. Add in humidity of about 99%, and the heat index took it WAY up.
Two small battery-powered fans helped.
Unfortunately, we didn't have a generator, so cooking was done over cans of sterno. Myself, I could have done with the packets of salmon, but my husband didn't like it without some kind of sauce on it so I cooked up the packs of burger meat I'd removed from the freezer before packing it with ziplock bags of water on Monday so there would be plenty of thermal mass in the darn thing.
What I didn't count on was how hard the heat would impact my poor Sunny Dachshund, who has heart issues, and is 14 and a half. Her brother, the same age, was okay, but she took it very hard. I was truly afraid we were going to lose her. Babette Beagle, age 3, deserves the Beagle Medal of Honor for entertaining three month old Harper Longhair Dachshund who wanted to play, play, PLAY, and did not understand why he could not go out in the yard with the winds howling like a banshee. Or a bassoon. Probably with a split reed.
The entire time, there was a low droning noise, punctuated by piccolo-like shrieks as gusts played through the electrical wiring and the trees.
We had a battery powered radio for news. Oddly, the newscasters failed to give the coordinates of the storm in latitude and longitude the way they used to. Our wired phone did not go out, so I was calling friends in Wisconsin or New Hampshire or Utah for "Where the heck IS that d@mn storm?!" Another time, it would be nice to have a really solid battery to run the wifi modem, and a tablet so we could keep up with it that way. I missed the NOAA reports and graphics.
We had considered going to Baton Rouge, where we went for Katrina, but, hey, this was ONLY going to be a Cat One, right? Uh, yeah. But it was a SLOW Cat One, and that made all the difference.
Thursday, the winds began to drop down. In theory, this meant Entergy could start repairs. In point of fact, no one saw their trucks until some very pointed questions started being asked late Friday afternoon. We were told they had to repair the substations first and then work their way to the individual houses. Maybe. But there was plenty of work that could have been done -- removal of tree branches, repair of wiring, replacement of transformers, which could have been done to prepare the way.
Our power flared on for about 15 seconds on Friday, then we heard a loud CRACK! from the transformer behind us, and it died again, not to be seen again until late Monday. Seven days with no power.
My Dad, three blocks away, got power back on Saturday, so we packed up ourselves and the four dogs and moved over there. I cooked dinners for us. My poor Sunny planted herself under the air conditioner vent with a deep sigh of relief. She still, two weeks later, has not fully recovered.
I was impressed by the leadership of our current mayor, Mitch Landrieu, as opposed to the panic of the former mayor, Ray Nagin, during Katrina. They used reverse 911 -- phone calls going out to all people with wired phones and/or who had signed up for it on their cells to keep people appraised. Neither New Orleans nor Jefferson flooded this time, so the new pumps and floodwalls helped.
Slidell got hit with storm surge. The north shore of Lake Pontchartain got hit. There were major concerns that an earthen dam at a state park in Mississippi would give way and pour water down river, 8-10 feet for a mile on either side of the river. Fast work on the part of hydrologists and they were able to relieve the pressure on the dam and avert that catastrophe. Both the I-10 East and the I-10 West were closed due to flooding. The only way out of the city was the Pontchartrain Causeway, a 23 mile bridge across the middle of the lake.
Braithewaite, a community down river from us, was completely flooded. Plaquemines Parish may be beautiful the rest of the year, but you couldn't pay me to live in an area regularly swept by surges in hurricane season. Many cattle drowned; others took refuge on the porches of elevated houses. I'm not sure how they got them off those proches when the water receded.
Strong winds and storm surge from Hurricane Isaac's landfall forced the Mississippi River to flow backwards for nearly 24 hours on Tuesday, August 28. The USGS streamgage at Belle Chasse (slightly downriver from us) showed the Mississippi River flowing upstream at 182,000 cubic feet per second, surging to 10 feet above than its previous height. Average flow for the Mississippi River at Belle Chase is about 125,000 cfs towards the Gulf of Mexico.
We had no damage to our house, except for the loss of our external air conditioner which had to be replaced to the tune of $2600. Insurance won't pay, of course, because technically, it wasn't storm-related. Entergy claims that power surges have nothing to do with electronic systems going out.
Our 38 year old pines in the front yard survived, though the crowns were lopped off and deposited in the street in front of the house. Our magnolia in the back was half-stripped of its leaves, not wholly stripped as it was in Katrina.
Best of all, the contents of our freezer survived. Packing the freezer with the added thermal mass worked. We are typically told that you have 48 hours from the time power goes out in summer heat until you either get power back or you lose all your food. Our freezer was still almost completely frozen on Monday, 7 days after the power went out.
Trash pick up is still dicey, and there's a lot of infrastructure repair to be done. But we didn't flood in our area, thank goodness. And this was NOT another Katrina.
Of course, there's Tropical Depression 14 out in the Atlantic. Excuse me. It is now Tropical Storm Nadine. So far, the models have it as a fish storm, that is a storm which goes up the middle of the Atlantic and bothers no one except fish. May it be so for the rest of the season!
|
|
|
Powell River, bc
Canada
2611 Posts |
Posted - 09/11/2012 : 9:21 PM
|
| Glad to hear you made it through!! I was watching the news a lot,hoping for the best for everyone down there. It was SO ironic that it was on the anniversary!! Hope that's the end for another year!!! |
|
|
Maple Ridge, BC
Canada
359 Posts |
Posted - 09/11/2012 : 10:07 PM
|
| I was very relieved to hear it largely blew past without much incidence. Glad to hear you were relatively unscathed. If there was ever an area that deserves a break, it's there. |
|
|
New Orleans, Louisiana
USA
301 Posts |
Posted - 09/12/2012 : 12:19 PM
|
quote:
Originally posted by no quitting
Glad to hear you made it through!! I was watching the news a lot,hoping for the best for everyone down there. It was SO ironic that it was on the anniversary!! Hope that's the end for another year!!!
Definitely ironic... and very, very sad for some of the people in lower Plaquemines who lost everything in Katrina, and now have lost everything again. Not to mention folks in LaPlace, who moved there to after losing all in Katrina to get away from the flooding, since LaPlace normally does not flood.
Nadine is out there, but it looks like she'll be a fish storm.
<wry grin> Technically, the Season does not end until 1 December. But the worst time is the last two weeks of August and the first two weeks of September. Usually.
|
|
|
New Orleans, Louisiana
USA
301 Posts |
Posted - 09/12/2012 : 12:29 PM
|
quote:
Originally posted by Cherry Pirate
I was very relieved to hear it largely blew past without much incidence. Glad to hear you were relatively unscathed. If there was ever an area that deserves a break, it's there.
Oh, there were plenty of issues. Emergency power issues are a BIG problem. The fact that Isaac sat there and blew at 75+ mph for 56 hours was the major problem. Lower Plaquemines and lower Jefferson parishes had flooding. They need ring levees around the communities, and the means to get surge and rain out of those rings.
There's talk of putting Dutch-style gates across the Rigolets (the passage betwen Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne) in order to keep storm surge out of Pontchartrain, but if they do that, who knows where the surge will go, since the water has to go SOMEWHERE.
But yes, the area deserves a break. Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell Isaac that!
|
|
|
| |
Topic |
|
|
|
Hurricane Isaac
