Above North Carolina and below Maine, that is?
If you do, go to the supermarket tonight – or, heck, right now – and make sure that you have plenty of emergency supplies.
If you live on a coastal part of the East Coast, consider taking tomorrow off and getting somewhere inland.
If you live in NYC, you may just want to leave.
Because it ain’t looking good right now.
Moe Lane
PS: I gotta go call my mom.
I’m told that Irene is projected to be a Cat 1 when it gets to NYC. It’s going to down some trees and knock out some power, but I don’t think it’s going to be big enough to create a Krugman/Yglesias effect.
Here’s hoping, Phil. But this is Brendan’s patch, and he’s generally reliable.
I’m sure he’s a smart guy. I just know from (mmmmph) decades of experience that the best advice for a hurricane is “run from the water – hide from the wind”. In other words, if you aren’t in danger of drowning, stay put and shelter from getting hit by flying things. One of the worst outcomes is to get out on the road, get stuck in traffic, and then get caught by the storm. Hell, even if the storm misses you, evacuation traffic is ungodly and oftentimes deadly.
We are in NC but pretty far inland. We keep a close eye out because we HAVE had hurricanes come this far in and be nasty things, but mostly just hoping for it to weaken….
I am such a weather nerd too though…if I had the time to really watch it…
35 or so miles south of DC. We stocked up tonight. Batteries, tarps, etc.
We’re watching it very closely.
Stay safe Moe.
This falls a little in my patch as well, but from a commercial construction side. Walls, doors and windows are part of a system called the building “envelope”. Buildings are designed for wind to go around them. When the envelope is breached, say from flying debris breaking windows, wind goes IN, the interior pressure of the building becomes unsustainable, and the building fails from the inside out.
In cities, most of the construction is of concrete or steel or something of the sort. Even if the windows break, chances are good that the building will stand. On the coasts and on low rise buildings, not so much. That’s why you see people boarding up their homes and businesses. Now, back to the cities. The problem there will be not so much building failure, but extensive rain damage driven by extremely high winds, and as you noted, flooding.
Engineers know that wind speeds are greatly increased at the corners of buildings, and also the higher on a building you go, the higher the wind speed. When there are a lot of high buildings with a lot of corners very close together, combined with debris flying around at an accelerated rate, the effect will be unprecedented. The bottom line is that there will not be a dry piece of electronic equipment or an intact piece of glass for miles.
Interestingly, there is hurricane resistant framing and glass that almost completely eliminates this threat. The glass is laminated, meaning thin layers bonded together, then basically glued into the framing system with Dow 995 caulk. The glass may break from flying debris, but it will stay together and not fall out of the opening. This mitigates rain damage and also keeps the wind out of the interior of the building. No boarding up, no nothing, just lock the doors and leave. This system is now mandatory for new buildings and renovations within one mile of the mean high tide mark at the coasts, and all of the state of Florida, but most have not taken advantage of the technology. Basically, there will be buildings that will come through this unscathed standing next to a pile of debris that used to be their neighbor’s business.