Hurricane Helene / Milton

By all means trapse through that flood water if you want, just pray a gator doesn't fancy a snack.

DeSantis giving a statement currently along with a shed load of support for residents. 3.1 million properties without power and some west coast areas still under evacuation orders due to the storm surge flooding.
 
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Minusorange said:
People have always been stupid

en.wikipedia.org

Spaghetti-tree hoax - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

:cry:
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Sort of makes sense in the 50's that people in the UK wouldn't be very aware of Spaghetti though.

My dad tells of story of when he went to live in Italy in 1970/1971 and when he came back he made a bolognaise for his family, and they all picked out the mince and wouldn't eat the spaghetti.
 
Raymond Lin said:
That is the most accurate and honest estimation; the informed decision is prepare for the worst. Preparing for 10ft surge and get 5ft you are safe. Prepare for 5ft and you get 6ft you are now flooded.

Thats like the basics or preparing for an emergency, you don’t prepare for “just enough” since these things are never like how you predict, if we know exactly to the mm how much rain or wind it’s going to be, we would know exactly which house and street can stay home.
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But it wasn't preparing for 5 feet and getting 6. It was preparing for 15 and receiving 5.

I'm not saying I would not have evacuated or that I would have ignored official advice.

I'm just saying they shouldn't inflate the figures to scare people into taking action, if that was indeed what they did.

Of course it could have been the dedicated weather networks grabbing viewers using pretty women in front of fancy graphics showing the height of the surge..
 
bainbridge said:
But it wasn't preparing for 5 feet and getting 6. It was preparing for 15 and receiving 5.

I'm not saying I would not have evacuated or that I would have ignored official advice.

I'm just saying they shouldn't inflate the figures to scare people into taking action, if that was indeed what they did.

Of course it could have been the dedicated weather networks grabbing viewers using pretty women in front of fancy graphics showing the height of the surge..
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Damned if they do, damned if they don't.

If they had said "we are only expecting 5ft of flooding and it was actually 15ft" the backlash would have been extreme. Better to over prepare than to under estimate imho.
 
Raymond Lin said:
That is the most accurate and honest estimation; the informed decision is prepare for the worst. Preparing for 10ft surge and get 5ft you are safe. Prepare for 5ft and you get 6ft you are now flooded.

Thats like the basics or preparing for an emergency, you don’t prepare for “just enough” since these things are never like how you predict, if we know exactly to the mm how much rain or wind it’s going to be, we would know exactly which house and street can stay home.
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Yup
One of the most basic things with safety is that you take the worst probable scenario and work for that.

So if the forecast says there is a reasonable chance of a 15 foot surge in places, you prepare for that, as you say if it turns out to be 10 foot then all is good. If you don't then things get much more expensive, and people are far more likely to die.
As someone who has lived with the threat of flooding on our property for decades it amazes me how many people don't take it into account - we laid out our garage on the basis that it could get some water into it, despite the fact that it's only happened once in 30 years when we did it, a couple of weeks back we had the worst flooding in 50+ years year, and it didn't damage much/anything of value in our garage because all that was low enough for the water to affect was basically junk waiting for the tip.

In engineering IIRC the basic standard is for anything affecting human safety you aim for a safety margin of at least twice what is expected.
 
bainbridge said:
But it wasn't preparing for 5 feet and getting 6. It was preparing for 15 and receiving 5.

I'm not saying I would not have evacuated or that I would have ignored official advice.

I'm just saying they shouldn't inflate the figures to scare people into taking action, if that was indeed what they did.

Of course it could have been the dedicated weather networks grabbing viewers using pretty women in front of fancy graphics showing the height of the surge..
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Weather reporting, especially for hurricanes etc is always "within a range", and that's even more so for something like this one which at points was one of the 4 or 5 strongest recorded in human history and as I understand it pushing the boundaries of what is theoretically possible for one.
That means that the models they're using won't be as accurate as say for a lower power storm as they've got a lot more data on storms within the "normal" range.

You prepare for the worst possible part of that range, because if you prepare for a 5 foot surge and get 15 foot you end up with tens of thousands of dead in what were likely considered "safe" areas, including people who'd evacuated to "refuges centres" that were fine for 5 foot but not for 10, let alone 15.

So the cost of getting it wrong one way is purely monetary, the cost of getting it wrong the other is not only much more expensive, but also a lot of deaths.
 
Twinz said:
The most straightforward warning I read went some thing like: "We won't know for sure, until it's too late to leave, so just get out NOW."
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Yup

In the UK it's why the Flood Alert Service IIRC goes something like "possible", "expected" and "imminent" and they tell you to "prepare", "get ready" and "leave".
Over the years I've got used to getting woken up at 3am in the morning by the "possible" and "likely" calls only to not have any sign of it, or to look out and go "yup, a little late" as the garden already has water in it*.
A couple of weeks back we had the worst flooding ever in our area (my father has lived here for 50+ years), by the time the "imminent" warning came through some of the lower lying neighbours and driveways were already under about 10cm of water, and our back garden had close to 60cm in it, and the next street over had 50cm of so in parts of it.
There was no way to get things like cars out of some of the drives by the time the "imminent" warning came through.
It's the reason we built our shed on a brick * breezeblock base that was level with our patio rather than the grass as that raised it around 75cm, and why our garage is arranged with nothing that can be easily damaged by water directly on the floor - our shed was safe by about one layer of bricks, the garage got about 1cm of water into it which basically got the junk waiting for the tip on the floor, some scrap wood and the metal/plastic legs of the tables and benches.
 
@Werewolf

The loss of credibility will also cost lives though in the future though.

I don't think some officials considered this.

Just tell us what the possibilities are, rather than pretending to be certain of things you can't possibly know ahead of time.
 
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Twinz said:
@Werewolf

The loss of credibility will also cost lives though in the future though.

I don't think some officials considered this.

Just tell us what the possibilities are, rather than pretending to be certain of things you can't possibly know ahead of time.
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The loss of credibility is always possible, but largely unavoidable. You don't give a stern enough warning and the storm is at the worse end of the scale and you get screams of "why didn't you warn us early enough", you issue the warnings early enough to give people a chance to reach safety and it turns out the storm isn't as bad as it looked 48 hours earlier (which is a fairly long time in accurate forecasting) and you get "see they were making a fuss about nothing".

You can't get 100% accuracy with forecasting, as was shown by the fact the storm as IIRC getting better and worse and it was moving up and down the scale, which means that any predictions would be getting changes repeatedly.
It's the reason why they give things like the possible height range of the flooding, and show the potential areas it'll affect, usually with the "most likely" route etc

Unfortunately with storms like this one especially, where it was at times one of the worst in recorded history the models break down a bit because there is not enough data for more accuracy, chances are the next similar storm in the same area will get a slightly more accurate set of predictions because they refine the models constantly based on what they've learned.

Basically the forecasters and government are screwed if they give the warning, and screwed if they don't, but they'll tend to err on the side of not needing the body bags and DNA/dental identification as their primary objective is to prevent avoidable deaths.
 
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