Weather Permitting by Chris St. Clair

Author:Chris St. Clair
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2022-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10 Snowbirds

Florida, 2017

The rain blasted sideways, driven by steady winds of over 200 kilometres per hour. Metal trash bins, sheets of aluminum, tree limbs, lawn furniture, and other deadly projectiles filled the air. Storm chasers huddled inside the concrete stairwell of a parking garage. It was too dangerous to be outside.

Hurricane Katrina was making landfall in Buras, Louisiana.

Katrina went from a Category 3 to a Category 5 hurricane in just nine hours, making it, at the time in August 2005, the strongest storm ever recorded on the U.S. Gulf Coast. The levees that protected New Orleans were breeched, and the city, which lies at or below sea level in some areas, was instantly flooded.

In the aftermath, 1,800 or more lives were lost. It was the most costly natural disaster in U.S. history, with US$182 billion in damage. The federal response to the disaster was widely criticized, and there was significant environmental damage due to the large number of petroleum and chemical facilities in the area.

We are fortunate in Canada. Our location as a northern nation helps ensure that when a hurricane impacts us, it is usually in its decaying stages, and its most devastating effects generally lie behind it in the far-off Caribbean or along the coast of the United States.

But we do make up a large segment of the population in many of these warmer climates. More than half a million homes in Florida are owned by Canadians, and we make millions of trips to the U.S. Gulf Coast, Florida, Mexico, and the sun-drenched islands of Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Bahamas, and countless others every year. We have a vested interest in the people we meet and get to know in these places; we enjoy the natural beauty and climate of these regions. For a time there was even a strong movement to make Turks and Caicos our eleventh province.

We know these areas well; we also understand the power of these storms. All of Atlantic Canada has been hit by hurricanes, and many have caused significant damage and death. Even Toronto, in the heart of the Great Lakes, bore the brunt in October 1954 of Hurricane Hazel, which resulted in eighty-one deaths in Ontario.

Stronger, larger, and more frequent hurricanes are becoming the new normal. In 2017 a series of large-scale hurricanes wreaked havoc on hundreds of millions of people over a period of just three months.

Hurricane Harvey developed off the coast of Africa on August 13, 2017, and tracked westward to the Caribbean, where it evolved into a tropical storm just four days later. When Harvey reached the Gulf of Mexico on August 22, the unusually warm water helped it gain strength, and a strong high-pressure ridge over the central United States kept the storm over the Texas coast for several days in late August.

Rain fell in torrential downpours as Harvey literally inched toward the petroleum-refining heart of America. For days the massive oil refineries that line the coast and supply half of all petroleum and natural gas production on the continent ceased production as their crews evacuated to safety.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.