My thoughts are with the people of Florida, who are about to get hit yet again by nature’s worst. Here’s the Red Cross donation page if you want to help.
(Photo via NOAA)
Posted by: jeff on September 25, 2004 03:10 PM
Did you ever think that maybe Florida is being punished for what it did to us in the 2000 election?
This is a warning for this election!
Posted by: Scott McDonald on September 25, 2004 03:21 PM
Very amusing. Want to explain what the 1100 people dead in Haiti did to piss the weather gods off so badly?
Posted by: flame on September 25, 2004 06:12 PM
They approved of Bush’s policies.
Posted by: Buzz Bruggeman on September 25, 2004 07:12 PM
Dan:
Come on down, it is really blowing. Storm is supposed to hit here at dawn. This could be the worst one yet!
Buzz
Posted by: Spyware Remover on September 26, 2004 03:15 PM
This has nothing to do with global warming for Pete’s sake, it’s just a historical, albeit nasty, cycle that these weather patterns create.
Now, that doesn’t make it any easier for all those people on the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts.
A word to the wise, ocean front property will go cheap down there in the next couple of years, so if you buy in, don’t live there until ~2011+ when the current crazy weather patterns settle down. At that time you’ll be set for about 40 years.
AJ
Posted by: jeff on September 26, 2004 07:05 PM
What the people of Haiti did was to cut down most of the trees, thus creating an environmental disaster. The water isn’t soaked up by the roots, and it just runs off, washing out the soil, causing massive flooding and mudslides.
That’s what the people of Haiti did, they have destroyed their own land. Find an aerial or satellite photo of Hispaniola, you can see the dividing line between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Haiti has no trees left!
Posted by: anders on September 26, 2004 10:23 PM
2000 election vs. hurricanes 2004
http://www.bartcop.com/message-from-God.gif
A message from god?
Personally I think some people have got too much time on their hands but what do I know
Posted by: Anonymous Troll on September 27, 2004 04:08 AM
I have absolutely zero sympathy for Florida.
If you built your houses correctly, you would not have a problem.
How do I *KNOW*? I live on an island in the middle of typhoon alley. There’s no place to evacuate to. This season we’ve had just as many typhoons hit as hurricanes have hit Florida. Nobody’s roofs got blow off, nobody died, nobody homeless, minimal property damage (cars getting wacked by flying things, mostly).
Oh, BTW, building correctly means not putting your god-damned million dollar plus, shittly built house directly on the freaking beach… f-ing morons… you deserve exactly what you got, plus a little more for good measure.
What I find particularly delicious is that most of those folks could have defraid their building costs by a couple of hundred thousand dollars with a FEMA grant.
http://www.monolithicdome.com/plan_design/FEMA/
Meanwhile FEMA ships trailer homes to the Florida hurricane homeless (people who wouldn’t know a grant from a hole in the ground), resulting in them becomming homeless *TWICE* in a season despite the fact that disaster relief container homes
http://www.commetasa.com/ingles/products5.htm
provides safe, cheap, effective, quickly deployed emergency housing to folks who have lost their homes in a natural disasters.
Sometimes American government is increadly fscked in the head that it’s hard to imagine a more third world first world country.
Posted by: Scott on September 27, 2004 11:19 AM
A Message from God?
Interesting. THat map indicates that Orange County, Volusia County and others didn’t get hit by Frances or Charley. Sorry, those 2 counties got hit severely and voted for Gore.
Posted by: M. Mortazavi on September 28, 2004 09:35 PM
Because of the hurricane, I had to cancel a trip to Orlando: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/MortazaviBlog/20040926#should_i_go_or_should.
This would have been my first trip to Florida ever. My only hope is that my colleagues who did make it and those who live near the most devasted areas remain physically safe.
Posted by: steve on September 25, 2004 02:54 PM
I was chatting with a friend who is a climatologist at NCAR. While this can’t be correleated with global warming, global warming is likely to make this sort of thing more common in the future – energy into the water is what drives hurricanes.
He said it wouldn’t be surprising to see a half dozen category 3+ storms hit a place like Florida in four or five decades as the yearly norm. At some point it becomes too expensive to live in a place like that.
The real question is” “when will people in the US start to get serious about global warming?” Perhaps the silver lining of events like this is that it might begin to sensitize voters.