A Requiem for Florida

Irma Regains Strength in Route to Florida
At 2:00 am the National Hurricane Center updated Hurricane Irma's status to a Category 4 Hurricane with a minimum pressure of 931 mb and maximum sustained winds of 130 mph, moving NW at 6 mph.

Hurricane Irma is currently forecast to be just north of the Naval Air Station Key West at noon on Sep 10, 2017 (24.7N 81.7W).

In 24 hours the hurricane is forecast to be at about 26.8N 82.4W or just off shore of Boca Grande and Port Charlotte.

Overnight Sep 10 - Sep 11 the storm will likely pass over or very near Tampa, one of the few times in history that a major storm has impacted Tampa.

Expected impacts from Irma

Irma is still predicted to “run the peninsula”, taking an unusual track from south-southeast to north-northwest along the length of the state. This forecast track has steadily nudged west since Thursday, and Irma is now expected to track closer to Florida’s west coast than its east coast. Models are now in very close agreement, and we expect little significant shift to this track outlook.

Parts of the Florida Keys will experience extreme winds and storm surge. On its west-northwest heading late Saturday, Irma was aimed toward the west of Key West, which would put the the city on the storm's more dangerous right-hand side. However, Irma is beginning to angle rightward, and this will most likely bring its core somewhere near or just east of Key West between around 2 and 8 am Sunday. Winds of 120 mph or more can be expected just east of the eye, and storm surge is predicted to range from 5 to 10 feet.

CATASTROPHIC STORM SURGE

A catastrophic storm surge is increasingly likely from Fort Myers to Naples on Sunday afternoon as Irma passes along or just to the west of this coastline. Surge values of 10 to 15 feet are expected from Cape Sable to Captiva. Vanderbilt Beach at Naples experienced a peak surge of 10-13 feet during Hurricane Charley, and Captiva Island experienced a surge of 6.5 feet. Irma’s surge will be more widespread and devastating to southwest Florida than the surge experienced during Charley, since Irma is a much bigger storm and has had more time to build up a larger surge. Parts of this coastline may also experience destructive Category 2 or 3 winds if Irma intensifies as expected and its center remains just offshore. Assuming that Irma moves inland between Fort Myers and Tampa as predicted, surge values northward through the Tampa area will be somewhat lower, but still potentially 5 to 8 feet. It would take a significant jump westward in the forecast track to put Tampa on the more dangerous right-hand side of the storm.

If Irma’s track holds, the Miami area can expect top sustained winds of 60 - 80 mph, with a long period of tropical-storm-force winds. Expect widespread tree damage and power outages, and perhaps extensive damage to the facades and windows of the upper stories of skyscrapers, where winds will be considerably stronger. Winds will be somewhat weaker northward into Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach, but a few hours of 40 - 60 mph sustained winds are possible here. Surge in the Biscayne Bay area is not expected to be catastrophic, but it could be significant (4 to 6 feet), with sharp local variations as the storm moves by to the west.

A pocket of 60 – 80 mph sustained winds may develop Sunday night across central Florida as Irma passes just to the west. These winds could be as strong or stronger than those produced in the Orlando area by Hurricane Charley in 2004. Winds may also approach or exceed hurricane force along the northeast Florida coast, including the Jacksonville area, late Sunday night.

Significant storm surge of 4 to 6 feet remains possible in Georgia and southern South Carolina. The higher end of this range could rival some all-time records at coastal tidal gauges, including 5.06 feet set at Fort Pulaski, Georgia, during Hurricane Matthew in 2016. Expect widespread areas with damaging tropical-storm-force winds across northern Florida and southern Georgia, enough to down trees and power lines.

Torrential rains of 7 – 15”, with local totals exceeding 20”, can be expected across most of Florida and southeast Georgia. These amounts will not rival the 40 – 50” totals from Hurricane Harvey, because Irma will not be stalling over Florida as Harvey did over Texas. Rains of 2 – 5” may affect northern Georgia, including Atlanta, from Monday into Tuesday as Irma angles toward the west.

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What About Tampa?
Tampa's Hurricane History
Only 2 Major Hurricanes Since 1848

Tampa Bay doesn't get hit very often by hurricanes. This is because the city faces the ocean to the west, and the prevailing east-to-west trade winds at that latitude make it uncommon for a storm to make a direct hit on the west coast of Florida from the ocean. This is fortunate, since the large expanse of shallow continental shelf waters offshore from Tampa Bay (less than 300 feet deep out to 90 miles offshore) is conducive for allowing large storm surges to build. Tampa Bay is most vulnerable to large storm surges from storms approaching from the southwest or west and passing just north of the city, since the westerly winds in the hurricane's eyewall will force a massive storm surge directly into the bay. Tampa Bay is much less vulnerable to large storm surges from a storm approaching from the south, like Irma, since the hurricane's winds will be blowing offshore until the eye of the storm passes to the north. At that time, the winds will reverse and bring a storm surge into Tampa Bay.

The last time Tampa suffered a direct hit by any hurricane was 1946, when a Category 1 storm came up through the bay. The Tampa Bay Hurricane of October 25, 1921 was a the last major hurricane to make landfall in the Tampa Bay Region. This low-end Category 3 storm with 115 mph winds at landfall brought a storm tide of 10 - 11.5 feet (3 - 3.5 meters), causing severe damage ($10 million in 1921 dollars.) The only other major hurricane to hit the city occurred on September 25, 1848, when the Great Gale of 1848, the most violent hurricane in Tampa's history, roared ashore as a Category 3 or 4 hurricane with 115 - 135 mph winds. A 15-foot storm surge (4.6 meters) was observed in what is now downtown Tampa, and the peninsula where St. Petersburg lies, in Pinellas County, was inundated, making St. Petersburg an island. A large portion of what few human structures were then in the area were destroyed.

Two mass evacuations in Tampa in the past 35 years

Two hurricanes have prompted mass evacuations of more than 300,000 people from the Tampa Bay area over the past 35 years. The first was Hurricane Elena of 1985, a Category 3 hurricane that stalled 80 miles offshore for two days on Labor Day weekend, bringing a 6 - 7 foot storm surge, wind gusts of 80 mph, and torrential rains. On August 13, 2004, another mass evacuation was ordered for Hurricane Charley. Thanks to a late track shift, Charley missed Tampa Bay, and instead hit well to the south in Port Charlotte as a Category 4 storm with 150 mph winds. More limited evacuations of low-lying areas and mobile homes in the 4-county Tampa Bay region were ordered for three other hurricanes in the past twenty years--Hurricane Georges of 1998, Hurricane Frances of 2004, and Hurricane Jeanne of 2004.

Tampa Bay's vulnerability to hurricanes

When the 1921 hurricane hit Tampa Bay, there were 160,000 residents in the 4-county region, most of whom lived in communities on high ground. Today there are 2.8 million residents in the region, and that number is growing by about 50,000 people per year. Most of the population in the 4-county Tampa Bay region lives along the coast in low-lying areas; about 50 percent of the population lives at an elevation less than ten feet. Over 800,000 people live in evacuation zones for a Category 1 hurricane, and 2 million people live in evacuation zones for a Category 5 hurricane, according to the 2010 Statewide Regional Evacuation Study for the Tampa Bay Region. Only 46% of the people in the evacuation zones for a Category 1 hurricane evacuated when an evacuation order was given for 2004's Category 4 Hurricane Charley.

Global warming may make extreme Tampa hurricanes up to 14 times more likely

Using a detailed hurricane model embedded within six different global climate models, hurricane scientists Kerry Emanuel of MIT and Ning Lin of Princeton University showed in a 2015 paper that the risk of extreme “grey swan” hurricanes in Tampa may increase by up to a factor of fourteen by the end of the century, thanks to human-caused climate change. Grey swan hurricane are storms so violent that they have never been observed in the historical record, but can be anticipated to occur in the future. See Jeff Masters’ blog post on the subject.

A Requiem for Florida

From:  A Requiem for Florida, the Paradise That Should Never Have Been
As Hurricane Irma prepares to strike, it’s worth remembering that Mother Nature never intended us to live here.

By MICHAEL GRUNWALD
September 08, 2017, Politico.com, Politico Magazine

ORLANDO, Fla.—The first Americans to spend much time in South Florida were the U.S. Army men who chased the Seminole Indians around the peninsula in the 1830s. And they hated it. Today, their letters read like Yelp reviews of an arsenic café, denouncing the region as a “hideous,” “loathsome,” “diabolical,” “God-abandoned” mosquito refuge.

“Florida is certainly the poorest country that ever two people quarreled for,” one Army surgeon wrote. “It was the most dreary and pandemonium-like region I ever visited, nothing but barren wastes.” An officer summarized it as “swampy, low, excessively hot, sickly and repulsive in all its features.” The future president Zachary Taylor, who commanded U.S. troops there for two years, groused that he wouldn’t trade a square foot of Michigan or Ohio for a square mile of Florida. The consensus among the soldiers was that the U.S. should just leave the area to the Indians and the mosquitoes; as one general put it, “I could not wish them all a worse place.” Or as one lieutenant complained: “Millions of money has been expended to gain this most barren, swampy, and good-for-nothing peninsula.”

Today, Florida’s southern thumb has been transformed into a subtropical paradise for millions of residents and tourists, a sprawling megalopolis dangling into the Gulf Stream that could sustain hundreds of billions of dollars in damage if Hurricane Irma makes a direct hit. So it’s easy to forget that South Florida was once America’s last frontier, generally dismissed as an uninhabitable and undesirable wasteland, almost completely unsettled well after the West was won. “How far, far out of the world it seems,” Iza Hardy wrote in an 1887 book called Oranges and Alligators: Sketches of South Florida. And Hardy ventured only as far south as Orlando, which is actually central Florida, nearly 250 miles north of Miami. Back then, only about 300 hardy pioneers lived in modern-day South Florida. Miami wasn’t even incorporated as a city until 1896. And even then an early visitor declared that if he owned Miami and hell, he would rent out Miami and live in hell.

There was really just one reason South Florida remained so unpleasant and so empty for so long: water. The region was simply too soggy and swampy for development. Its low-lying flatlands were too vulnerable to storms and floods. As a colorful governor with the colorful name of Napoleon Bonaparte Broward put it: “Water is the common enemy of the people of Florida.” So in the 20th century, Florida declared war on its common enemy, vowing to subdue Mother Nature, eventually making vast swaths of floodplains safe for the president to build golf courses and Vanilla Ice to flip houses and my kids to grow up in the sunshine. Water control—even more than air conditioning or bug spray or Social Security—enabled the spectacular growth of South Florida. It’s a pretty awesome place to live, now that so much of its swamp has been drained, much better than Boston or Brooklyn in the winter, and, for the obvious economic and political reasons, much better than Havana or Caracas all year long.

But Mother Nature still gets her say. Water control has ravaged the globally beloved Everglades and the rest of the South Florida ecosystem in ways that imperil our way of life as well as the local flora and fauna. And sometimes, as we’re about to be reminded, water can’t be controlled. Hurricanes routinely tore through South Florida even before hundreds of gleaming skyscrapers and thousands of red-roof subdivisions sprouted in their path. Our collective willingness not to dwell on that ugly inevitability has also enabled the region’s spectacular growth.

I was thinking about all this on Thursday while evacuating my family from our home in Miami to my mother-in-law’s home near Orlando, which, incidentally, one Seminole War veteran called “by far the poorest and most miserable region I ever beheld.” Our house is about 17 feet above sea level, which is practically Everest in South Florida terms, but we were still in a mandatory evacuation zone, because nothing in this part of the world is safe from a killer like Irma. Over the last century, we’ve built a weird but remarkable civilization down here in a weird and unsustainable way. This weekend, history’s bill might come due.

More than a half-century before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, a Spanish adventurer named Pedro Menendez de Aviles landed in North Florida, and began preparing for battle with French Lutherans who coveted the same territory. Then a hurricane destroyed the French fleet on the open seas. Menendez took this as a sign from God, and gleefully slaughtered the rest of the “evil and detestable Protestants” in an inlet he proudly named Matanzas, Spanish for “massacre.” He went on to create St. Augustine, America’s oldest permanent settlement, an enduring reminder that Florida’s history was forged by storms as well as blood.

Menendez dreamed of colonizing the whole peninsula, but he made no progress in the backwaters of southern Florida; as his nephew reported to the king in 1570, the entire region was “liable to overflow, and of no use.” And it stayed that way for the next few centuries. That’s because it was dominated by the Everglades, an inhospitable expanse of impenetrable sawgrass marshland, described in an 1845 Treasury Department report as “suitable only for the haunt of noxious vermin, or the resort of pestilential reptiles.” White men avoided it, because they viewed wetlands as wastelands. As late as 1897, five years after the historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared the closing of the Western frontier, an explorer named Hugh Willoughby embarked on a Lewis-and-Clark-style journey of discovery through the Everglades in a dugout canoe. “It may seem strange, in our days of Arctic and African exploration for the public to learn that in our very midst, in one of our Atlantic coast states, we have a tract of land 130 miles long and 70 miles wide that is as much unknown to the white man as the heart of Africa,” Willoughby wrote.

But white men began to realize that South Florida had real potential if they could figure out how to drain its “monstrous” swamp. Governor Broward vowed to dig a few canals and create an instant “Empire of the Everglades,” a winter garden that would grow food for the world and cities larger than Chicago. Swindlers sold swampland to suckers, turning Florida real estate into a land-by-the-gallon punchline. Pioneers flocked to long-forgotten marshy boom towns with names like Utopia and Hope City and Gladesview, buying lots that looked great in the dry season only to find that they still flooded regularly during the rainy season.

Meanwhile, the Standard Oil baron Henry Flagler built a railroad down the east coast, luring tourists to beachfront towns like Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale and Miami, setting the stage for a wild 1920s land bubble that rivaled the 17th century Dutch tulip craze. Motor-mouthed “binder boys” in knickers known as “acreage trousers” mobbed the streets of Miami, harassing pedestrians to buy and sell lots that often changed hands three times a day. One entrepreneur bought and resold a contract for a $10,000 profit on a stroll down Flagler Street. The New York Times started a stand-alone Florida real estate section. “Nobody in Florida thinks of anything else in these days when the peninsula is jammed with visitors from end to end and side to side,” the Times reported. The insanity was immortalized by the Marx Brothers movie Cocoanuts, with Groucho capturing Florida’s sleazy new land ethic: “You can even get stucco! Oh boy, can you get stucco.”

Pretty soon, South Florida got stucco. In 1926, a few weeks after the Miami Herald urged its readers not to worry about hurricanes because “there is more risk to life from venturing across a busy street,” a Category 4 storm flattened Miami, killing 400 and abruptly ending the coastal boom.Then in 1928, another Category 4 storm blasted Lake Okeechobee through its flimsy dike, killing 2,500 and abruptly ending the Everglades boom. It was the second-deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history, and afterward Florida’s attorney general testified before Congress that much of the southern half of his state might be unsuited to human habitation: “I’ve heard it advocated that what the people ought to do is build a wall down there and keep the military there to keep people from coming in.”

Needless to say, nobody built a wall. But America finally did get serious about draining the swamp. The Army Corps of Engineers, the shock troops in the nation’s war on Mother Nature, built the most elaborate water management system of its day, 2,000 miles of levees and canals along with pumps so powerful some of the engines would have to be cannibalized from nuclear submarines. The engineers aimed to seize control of just about every drop of water that falls on South Florida, whisking it out to sea to prevent flooding in the flatlands. They made it possible for Americans to farm 400,000 acres of sugar fields in the northern Everglades, to visit Disney World at the headwaters of the Everglades, to drive on the Palmetto and Sawgrass Expressways where palmettos and sawgrass used to be. They made South Florida safe for a long boom that has occasionally paused but has never really stopped, bringing 8 million people to the Everglades watershed, pushing the state’s population from 27th in the nation before World War II to third in the nation today.

But they made South Florida safe only most of the time, not all of the time. Now the Big One might be coming, with millions more people and structures in harm’s way than there were in 1926 or 1928. And Mother Nature looks pissed.

Last year, Florida’s “Treasure Coast,” about 100 miles north of Miami, made national news when its sparkling estuary was shrouded in toxic glop that looked like guacamole and smelled like a sewer. This was an economic as well as environmental disaster, shredding the fishing and tourism industries around the town of Stuart. And it’s not a huge stretch to think of it as the latest damage created by the 1928 hurricane. Water managers don’t want Lake Okeechobee’s dike to fail again now that there’s a civilization behind it, so they routinely blast filthy water from the lake into the fragile estuaries to the east and west. Sometimes, glop happens.

The problem, like most problems in South Florida, is a water problem. Half the Everglades has been drained or paved for agriculture and development, so in the rainy season, water managers have to dump excess water into estuaries and what’s left of the Everglades. Then it’s no longer available in the dry season, which is why South Florida now faces structural droughts that create wildfires in the Everglades and endanger the region’s drinking water, which happens to sit underneath the Everglades. Meanwhile, the Everglades itself—once reviled as a vile backwater, now revered as an ecological treasure—has all kinds of problems of its own, including 69 endangered species. In 2000, Congress approved the largest environmental restoration project in history to try to resuscitate the Everglades, an unprecedented effort to fix South Florida’s water problems for people and farms as well as nature. But 17 years later, virtually no progress has been made. It’s a real mess.

But the fundamental issue is that South Florida is an artificial civilization, engineered and air-conditioned to insulate its residents and tourists from the realities of its natural landscape. We call animal control when alligators wander into our backyards, and it doesn’t occur to us that we’ve wandered into the alligators’ backyard. Most residents of suburban communities carved out of Everglades swampland—Weston, Wellington, Miami Springs, Miami Lakes—are blissfully oblivious to the intricate water diversion strategies that their government officials use to keep them dry every day. Most South Floridians don’t think much about climate change, either, even though it’s creating more intense storms, even though the rising seas around Miami Beach now flood low-lying neighborhoods on sunny days during high tide. People tend not to think too much about existential threats to the places they live. They just live.

And they keep coming. Twenty-five years ago, Hurricane Andrew ripped through Miami’s southern exurbs, but the homes destroyed were quickly replaced, and most of us who live here now weren’t here then. So we weren’t really ready for Irma, even though at some level we knew it was possible. It’s conceivable that Irma will finally shut down our insatiable growth machine, but I wouldn’t bet on that. Our inclination towards collective amnesia is just too strong.

The thing is, it’s really nice here, except when it isn’t. Those Seminole War soldiers would be stunned to see how this worthless hellscape of swarming mosquitoes and sodden marshes has become a high-priced dreamscape of swimming pools and merengue and plastic surgery and Mar-a-Lago. It probably isn’t sustainable. But until it gets wiped out—and maybe even after—there’s still going to be a market for paradise. Most of us came here to escape reality, not to deal with it.

And this. . .

Beau, my toothless wonder cat

with Will (in background)

Detroit Couple Offers $100,000 for Missing Cats

Cygnus and Arcturus are two Detroit-area cats with some very big claims to fame. Arcturus, a spotted Savannah who measures 19.05 inches high, this fall won the Guinness World Record for tallest domestic cat. At the same time, his housemate Cygnus, a fluffy Maine coon with a 17.5-inch feather-duster hanging from his rear, snagged the world record for longest tail.

Now they’re missing following a fire that destroyed their home, and their owners are offering a very big reward to whoever finds them and two other cats: $25,000 each — or $100,000 for all four — to be paid in bitcoin.

No one tracks missing pet reward offers, but this one surely ranks among the heftiest ever. In March, a Californian made headlines after posting signs offering $20,000 for the return of a missing cat. Four years ago, when a woman in England remortgaged her home to be able to offer 10,000 British pounds — more than $13,000 today — for her stolen show dog, the Telegraph deemed it the biggest known reward for a pet. (Bitcoin and physical currencies are not apples and apples, of course, but some merchants, including Overstock.com, do accept the virtual currency.)

The sum is a reflection of just how important Arcturus and Cygnus, as well as their brother Sirius and a temporary feline houseguest named Yuki, are to Will and Lauren Powers, according to Will Powers’s sister, Brittney Powers. When he woke Sunday morning to find their Farmington Hills home ablaze, Will Powers, 32, frantically searched for the cats but could not locate them before firefighters pulled him out, she said. He left several doors open in hopes the cats would escape, but search parties and live traps placed in the nearby woods have turned up no sign of them, she said.

“They treated their cats like children. They were members of their family. And them having notoriety for their sizes has nothing to do with how they feel about them,” said Brittney Powers, who spoke on behalf of the couple because, she said, they were too distraught to be interviewed. “They’re really devastated.”

Lauren and Will Powers met while pursuing degrees in osteopathic medicine, and they bonded over the two cats Will had then, one of whom was Sirius. They married last summer, Brittney Powers said, and they “love to come home and have their cats be there and snuggle up to them.”

The couple didn’t aim to land their pets in the record books, Will Powers said earlier this month on the television talk show “Pickler and Ben.” They got the cats about two years ago, and he concocted what he deemed to be a nutritionally superior feline diet that involved slow-cooked chicken, he said. When he noticed a year later that Cygnus’s tail seemed unusually long, Will Powers posted a photo of it on a Reddit veterinary forum. The epic tail went viral — and soon Guinness got in touch “and said hey, we saw that tail,” he said.

A Guinness team came out to Farmington Hills to measure, he said, and when they noticed Arcturus — who’s a hybrid between a serval, a kind of African wildcat, and a domestic cat — they decided to measure his height. He, too, was a record-breaker, Will Powers told the show hosts, before launching into a demonstration of the cat’s surprising affection.

“Give Daddy a kiss,” he said, cradling the cat. Arcturus complied, licking his owner’s nose. But Cygnus is typically the cuddlier one, said Lauren Powers, 30, while adding that he “definitely uses [his tail] to knock things over, especially when he’s hungry.”

Will Powers was treated for smoke inhalation and minor injuries after the fire, and a friend who was staying there with her corgi managed to jump out a second-floor window, Brittney Powers said. Lauren Powers was not home at the time.

Some pet trackers and organizations eschew rewards, arguing that they encourage searchers who might chase and frighten off missing animals. But Brittney Powers said her brother, who’s expressed his enthusiasm for bitcoin on Facebook, did not hesitate to offer his cache for the return of his cats.

“I’ve been saving it for years and would gladly give it all up for one of my boys back,” Will Powers wrote this week on Facebook.

Cygnus and Arcturus had helped raise money for the local Ferndale Cat Shelter, posing for photos with donors. Though they have lost all their possessions, Brittney Powers said, the couple is now asking that anyone offering financial help instead donate to the shelter or the American Red Cross.

“If you want to do anything to help us, do that,” Will Powers wrote on Facebook. “If the death of Cygnus, Arcturus, and Sirius isn’t meaningless and can help another family love their cats like we loved ours then this tragedy can have something good come from it.”