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Welcome to Ana, Bill and Claudette. Never in my memory have we got half-way through a hurricane season without a single-named storm. Then, lo and behold, three tropical depressions strengthen into tropical storms within 48 hours of each other. Storms are indeed like buses, and I am sure that some meteorologist will be able to explain exactly why the "bunching" phenomenon of buses also applies to tropical storms in the Atlantic.
Although Bill has the potential to be the strongest hurricane, it's also likely to be a long way away from land. However, if it veers right it might smack into Bermuda, and if it veers left, it might hit Cape Cod.
Hurricanes are paradoxes in that you have to be very unlucky for a hurricane to form and to happen to hit a highly populated land mass. Remember, if hurricane Katrina had not veered east and weakened to category 4 at the last moment, New Orleans would have been virtually destroyed. It seems hard to imagine describing the impact on New Orleans as a "near miss", but that's what it was. Far more devastating to New Orleans was the failure to maintain the levees properly. It was flooding, not wind, that did for the Big O in 2005.
But, although you have to be unlucky for a hurricane to form and for it to hit a populated land mass, you have to be very lucky for a hurricane not to hit at all. That's because, like cancer, hurricanes require an unusual set of circumstances (say, two successive number 36s on the roulette wheel), but that wheel spins all the time, frequently. If a hurricane hitting Florida is the equivalent of hitting a straight flush in a live game, the chance of a hurricane hittting SOMEWHERE in the Atlantic land mass is the equivalent of hitting a straight flush when multitabling online. it probably won't happen this hand. But it will happen sometime.
Ana and Claudette are unlikely to be nasty bastards either. Then again, given the fragile state of the US economy (I saw some numbers on Ginnie Mae which were frightening -- a topic for a future post, I think), a stonking hurricane or a major California earthquake are probably not what the doctore ordered. What was it about sod's law?
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Although Bill has the potential to be the strongest hurricane, it's also likely to be a long way away from land. However, if it veers right it might smack into Bermuda, and if it veers left, it might hit Cape Cod.
Hurricanes are paradoxes in that you have to be very unlucky for a hurricane to form and to happen to hit a highly populated land mass. Remember, if hurricane Katrina had not veered east and weakened to category 4 at the last moment, New Orleans would have been virtually destroyed. It seems hard to imagine describing the impact on New Orleans as a "near miss", but that's what it was. Far more devastating to New Orleans was the failure to maintain the levees properly. It was flooding, not wind, that did for the Big O in 2005.
But, although you have to be unlucky for a hurricane to form and for it to hit a populated land mass, you have to be very lucky for a hurricane not to hit at all. That's because, like cancer, hurricanes require an unusual set of circumstances (say, two successive number 36s on the roulette wheel), but that wheel spins all the time, frequently. If a hurricane hitting Florida is the equivalent of hitting a straight flush in a live game, the chance of a hurricane hittting SOMEWHERE in the Atlantic land mass is the equivalent of hitting a straight flush when multitabling online. it probably won't happen this hand. But it will happen sometime.
Ana and Claudette are unlikely to be nasty bastards either. Then again, given the fragile state of the US economy (I saw some numbers on Ginnie Mae which were frightening -- a topic for a future post, I think), a stonking hurricane or a major California earthquake are probably not what the doctore ordered. What was it about sod's law?
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