hurricane

It is time to discuss, once again, the falsehood known as "Hurricane Landfall." A hurricane is a whopping big thing. A hurricane can be bigger than some states. The physical region across which a hurricane is potentially deadly and damaging is very large, many tens of miles across, sometimes a couple of hundred miles across. The danger zones are often organized like this: The central storm surge. A central region may have a strong storm surge caused by the low pressure of the storm. This may be dozens of miles wide, but the area of effect is determined as much by the shape of the coastline…
Pictures of Hurricane Irene's destruction are circulating and making many of us realize we're lucky to still have our homes and power lines intact. There's also one Irene-related problem that's invisible to the naked eye: raw sewage in waterways. Here's the Washington Post's Darryl Fears on local contamination: DC Water officials estimate that 200 million gallons of rain mixed with raw sewage overwhelmed pumping stations and poured into waterways around the city during the downpour from Hurricane Irene. The sewer overflow contributed to a flood of wastewater into rivers and streams over the…
Hurricane Irene wasn't nearly as bad as it could've been. The consensus here in DC seems to be "nowhere near as bad as Isabel" (which hit the Mid-Atlantic in 2003), and many of the New Yorkers who ignored Mayor Bloomberg's orders to evacuate are probably feeling smug. Nonetheless, millions of people have lost power, and damage from flooding is widespread. And, according to the Associate Press, Irene's death toll has risen to 37. (Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight has compiled US death tolls of past hurricanes, and Irene is steadily becoming one of the more deadly ones.) Although Irene had been…