Hellllloooooo Bret!

Tropical storm Bret arrived yesterday in the Bay of Campeche, which is pronounced "CAHm - pӘch-EH," not "Campeechy" as it is so mangled by our local newcasters.*

Bret began as a cluster of organized thunderstorms organized as Tropical Depression Two or TD #2 as those of us so enviably in the know would call it. At some point between 8 and 11 last night, it strengthened enough to become a tropical storm and hence got its name.

Bret made landfall near Tuxpan, México some time after 8:00 this morning and has now weakened to a rainmaker. It is, thankfully, dying out.

More info on Bret: National Hurricane Center.

Current counts are posted at right.

*Please pardon me for using "eh" in place of the "long a" symbol; I couldn't find a character entity to render it properly.

Arlene Pisses on Florida & Another Waiting in the Wings

Now we've been hit by our first tropical storm of the season. Doesn't it feel better to get that out of the way? Arlene came ashore near the Florida panhandle on Saturday, drenching the peninsula in rain on her way through.

Check out the image archives on the NHC site to see her final path. She's now a non-event. Just an inland rainmaker.

All we saw here was a strong south wind, which was actually quite nice because it gets blistering hot when the storms blow through. Arlene ruined the scheduled Poker Run (by boat) over the weekend, but that was the sum total of the destruction here.

There is another area of disturbance in the Caribbean now. Some disorganized thunderstorms the talking weather heads say we'll have to look out for. I don't know about anyone else, but this is a little early for me.

Birth and Insurance Rates on the Rise

Seems last year's hurricane season created a baby boom in Florida, which is now manifesting itself in maternity wards across the state. Some hospitals report an increase in deliveries of more than 20% for June.

As if it's not hot and sweaty enough without air conditioning, people inexplicably felt the need to get hotter and sweatier...apparently with each other. And without birth control. One woman I saw on the local news said, "We were bored." There's a story to tell the kid: "You were conceived out of boredom." Story...

In other news, insurance companies, fed up with actually having to pay claims after collecting millions of dollars of premiums, are planning to raise rates and/or cancel coverage for Florida homeowners. Feel the love, eh?


Cincinnati Indemnity Co. wants 36.7% higher premiums from Floridians.

You're in Greedy Hands with Allstate. They didn't mind collecting premiums right up until June 1, but now, suddenly, Florida's just too risky for them.

Randy Schultz's opinion piece reveals Allstate's neat "sleight of hand" accounting tricks designed to fleece Florida homeowners.

And if you think Jeb is going to help, think again. He's part of the dynasty that is firmly sewed into the pocket linings of big business in America (and Saudi Arabia, but that's a topic for another blog.) Hold on to your hats, Florida. You're about to get screwed by Mother Nature, insurers and the state legislature. Next year's baby boom will be interesting...new moms interviewed from their new homes in the back seats of their cars.

Tropical Storm Arlene Edges East

Arlene's projected path has shifted a little eastward. Is it just me or does it seem a bit unfair and a bit of a bad omen that the first storm of the season is A) so early B) probably going to smack into Florida. I mean, really, didn't Florida get enough last year?

Courtesy NOAA/NHC

Here's a very pretty picture of Arlene. Pretty, that is, if you aren't still traumatized from last year's radar blob overdose.


Courtesy NOAA/NHC

Arlene is now poised to ruin our weekend with rain and clouds and wind. Don't these storms know that weekdays are the best time to hit? Jeez, you'd think they're working for our employers.

So, hello from HurricaneLand where it's deja vu all over again.

Arlene Projected to Blow by Florida Panhandle

And so it begins. We have our first named storm. It started as TD #1 yesterday. I was just getting ready to blog on it when our power went out due to an everyday summer storm. Rather than sit and sweat inside a dark, quiet house, I went to the Cortez Kitchen with a friend and had a sandwich, leaving my husband and our friend the Captain behind to guard the house (the garage door was up and there was no electricity to power it down.) Seems I forgot about blogging and TD #1 after a couple of beers. Imagine that.

But this moring, there it was: Tropical Storm Arlene.

BULLETIN
TROPICAL STORM ARLENE SPECIAL ADVISORY NUMBER 4
NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL
8 AM EDT THU JUN 09 2005

...SHIP REPORT INDICATES TROPICAL DEPRESSION ONE HAS BECOME TROPICAL STORM ARLENE...THE FIRST TROPICAL STORM OF THE 2005 SEASON...

As I write, it's just south of Cuba, projected to come into the Gulf of Mexico tomorrow and screw up our weekend weather. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm thinking that starting the season with a storm in the Gulf is not exactly a sign of good things to come. The water has only recently reached 88 degrees, so maybe there won't be enough energy in the Gulf to feed Arlene.

The forecast track (HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa) takes Arlene just west of the Panhandle. If we learned anything last year we learned this: Don't focus on the line. Focus on the cone.

Image Courtessy NOAA/NHC

So, how's your hurricane kit looking?

Florida Hurricane Survival Guide For Newbies - Introduction

Florida Hurricane Survival Guide For Newbies
By Loretta Cochran

Introduction
How We Got Here from There

It seems everyone in Florida is from somewhere else, so I thought I'd begin by telling you how and why we moved 3200 miles to sit right smack dab in the center of Hurricane Land.

My husband and I moved to lovely Bradenton, Florida from Vancouver, Washington in May of 2002. Also known as “the other Vancouver,” our former haunt is a small suburb of Portland, Oregon, a mid-sized city much like Tampa, which lies just across the Columbia River. The area boasts an average of 32 clear days a year, which the tourist guidebooks will tell you is perfect weather for the Redwood Rainforest. It is also good weather for ducks—not the Ducks, but real ducks, which should not be confused with the University of Oregon’s football team as real ducks are much tougher and have nicer uniforms.

In that climate, water falls on one’s head for an average of 333 days per year, except at those magical times when the Arctic winds shift from northerly to northeasterly and come screaming out of the Columbia Gorge with the force of the Furies themselves. This effectively transforms otherwise miserably cold raindrops to freezing shards of glasslike water propelled at one’s face at a perpendicular angle by 40-mile per hour shrieking winds. Locally, this is called “freezing rain.” You can simply think of it as sleet on steroids; it pierces the skin with the efficiency of a disgruntled acupuncturist and makes you yearn for a gentler climes. Like Alaska.

During one such bout with what Northeasterners would call a “real” winter, the novelty thermometer on our patio read “pretty cold” then “really cold” then “freaking cold” and finally “how can you [expletive deleted] live here?” It was without a doubt the best question ever asked by an inanimate object. Jim and I were certainly stumped.

So, with grand plans to live as paupers in paradise, we left behind highways that resembled skating rinks, skies that never cleared and incomes in the upper tier of the upper middle class. We packed up our most valued possessions, our permafrost toes, perpetually runny noses and ran, seeking sun, sand, palm trees and subsistence wages in Sunny Florida. We were not disappointed on any of the above, particularly the latter. It seemed as if our strategy was playing out beautifully. For the first two summers, life seemed idyllic despite our depression that the going wages in our fields of work were one-third to one-half of what they were out west. The quality of our lives had improved so much that it scarcely mattered. Every weekend seemed like a vacation, so who needed money? Who needed to get away from it all? Get away from what? White sand beaches? Dreamy turquoise water? A close-knit community unlike any we’d ever known and into which we were almost immediately accepted?

We swam in the ocean nearly every day. On our first 4th of July, we encountered a manatee in the warm Gulf waters. I learned to snorkel. Jim caught a black tip shark on his first fishing trip. I fished in saltwater for the first time. My first catch was a toadfish. I don't know if you've ever seen one, but it is one of the absolutely ugliest creatures on the planet and when I pulled it out of the water I screamed like I'd pulled up the devil itself, which by all logic it seemed that I had. But I still loved my new home.

We watched the “Tropical Updates” on the local news station with only casual interest. After all, the Northwest was famous for its erupting volcanoes, sudden and violent earthquakes, mudslides and ice storms that shut down power grids and entire cities for days on end. We’d both breezed through several six-plus magnitude earthquakes. I had personally witnessed the second large eruption of Mt. St. Helens from a distance of less than forty miles and somehow lived through the ash fallout. We were coming from an extremely harsh climate and were no strangers to natural disasters; we were foolishly brave. That is, until 2004 when it seemed every hurricane had its eye on Florida.

It wasn’t as if we were unaware of the danger of hurricanes when we chose Florida. Who could forget the widely reported devastation of Andrew? We didn’t live in a cave, contrary to some East Coast perceptions of Pacific Northwesterners, a perception that envisions us as raised-by-wolves, animal skin-clad hunters and gatherers with highly developed canine teeth perfect for ripping flesh from the bones of our kill. Though it is at times helpful to perpetuate this stereotype, for example, when arriving in the checkout line at the Winn-Dixie, it’s not even remotely accurate. We had cable TV and indoor plumbing and everything. We were as versed as any American in national and world events. (Okay, that’s not saying much. I’ll give you that.)

The horrific things we didn’t know about when we moved to Florida include astonishingly prolific lightning storms, palmetto bugs (roaches, just bigger and crunchier when you step on them), the voracious appetites of unseen noseeums, mosquitoes the size of SUVs, poisonous snakes, fire ants, red tide, filthy Florida politics and the fact that no-name storms can be as lethal as quaintly monikered hurricanes. But those surprises are topics for my next books: Florida Outdoor Survival Guide for Newbies: Fun With Deet and Florida Political Survival Guide for Newbies: Come On…You Didn’t Really Think Your Vote Would Be Counted.

But I digress.

We moved here with the intent to live and work here, and to become as much a part of our community as we were in Vancouver, which is to say we expected to carry with us the tradition of a morning nod in the direction of our neighbors whose names we didn’t know and at whose noisy children we routinely directed mumbled curses. Little did we know that we’d settle in a community just outside Florida’s last remaining fishing village and form profound bonds with people we’d known for mere months—even before the dastardly hurricane season of 2004 when it seemed at times that we all needed each other more than we needed oxygen.

A hurricane bearing down on your neighborhood schools you in both the value of and your responsibility to your community in an instant. And that’s what the first hurricane of the season, Charley, did for us when we turned on the Tropical Update and saw that line up the center of the "cone of probability" (kind of like the cone of silence, but less effective.) That line was overlaid right on top of our precious newfound community. That scary black line in the center of the cone passed right through our neighborhood. Right through our house. Right through everything that had made us so very happy for the previous two years. And we had no idea what we were supposed to do.

Next up: Chapter One: Two Rules

First Day of Hurricane Season

Today is the first day of hurricane season and for the occasion, the venerable Dr. William M. Gray et al. at the Tropical Meteorology Project have revised the forecast upward. If you listen closely you can hear the sound of an entire state letting out a heavy sigh of resignation...tinged with worry...tinged with terror.

If you are warmed by numbers, you will be happy to learn that statistically speaking, it is highly unlikely that Florida will be hammered by 170 hurricanes again this year. But before you become too complacent, remember this: after every hurricane last year, someone invariably said "statistically speaking, it's highly unlikely we'll get hit again." And yet a major hurricane made landfall in Florida roughly every ten days between mid-July and the end of August. I feel fully justified for hating my college statistics class.

Dr. Gray's new forecast:

2005 Forecast
Forecast Activity as of:	04/01/05	05/31/05
Named Storms (NS)	13	15
Named Storm Days (NSD)	65	75
Hurricanes (H)	7	8
Hurricane Days (HD)	35	45
Intense Hurricanes (IH)	3	4
Intense Hurricane Days (IHD)	7	11
Net Tropical Cyclone Activity (NTC)	135	170
Check the right sidebar for a 2004 comparison and link to last year's scoreboard.

Dr. Gray and his team do not expect El Nino conditions to develop this summer. They also predict an above-average probability of US landfalls this season. Oh joy.

Regional Probability Forecast:
Probabilities For At Least One Major (Category 3-4-5) Hurricane Landfall On Each Of The Following Coastal Areas:
1) Entire U.S. coastline - 77% (average for last century is 52%)
2) U.S. East Coast Including the Florida Peninsula - 59% (average for last century is 31%)
3) Gulf Coast from the Florida Panhandle westward to Brownsville - 44% (average for last century is 30%)
4) Expected above-average major hurricane landfall risk in the Caribbean and in the Bahamas

In my last post, I promised you excerpts from my new book, Florida Hurricane Survival Guide for Newbies. I have not forgotten. I decided to wait until the beginning of season, which is now (sigh) here. I'll post the introductory chapter within 24 hours.