Tropical Storm Isaac – Day 9

by Bryan

10 comments

1 Badtux { 08.29.12 at 12:44 am }

Bloody storm is just hanging around like it can’t make up its mind. I hope it doesn’t do like Juan did back in 1985 and just loop-de-loop around… I got caught out in Juan ’cause I was trying to study for a midterm that day and when Juan headed back out to sea the first time, we thought it was all gone and so I headed to school. Then of course it looped back *again*, eventually pouring 15 inches of rain on us before looping back out to sea *again* and finally heading ashore at Gulf Shores…

2 Bryan { 08.29.12 at 2:25 pm }

Steering patterns can be weird, bloody Opal did a figure-8 over the Yucatan before deciding to slam in here, but that was 1995 and we didn’t have the models and computer power we have now.

It isn’t so much the track, as the internal behavior of the storm that we can see on the radar loops that is driving everyone up the wall. Instead of the eyewall contracting until it collapsed and being replaced by an outer eyewall, this sucker was attempting to create an inner eyewall, reversing the process. I would still like to know where all of the dry air was coming from that was inhibiting the intensification. It has been ‘moistening the atmosphere’ so long the mold has mildew, but it kept sucking dry air into its core.

It’s moving but not quickly, and it will definitely be dropping enough rain in the Mississippi Valley to flush the couple of hundred miles of salt water that got pushed up the river by the storm surge.

3 Badtux { 08.29.12 at 11:25 pm }

And now the remnants of the storm are hanging around Baton Rouge. The upside is that my brother’s been spared most of the rain, since he’s well to the west in Lafayette. The downside is that it’s still blowing like the bejeezus over there, and his power and Internet are both out. Well, other than his generator power, and the cell phone is still working strangely enough…

4 Bryan { 08.29.12 at 11:57 pm }

I saw some video of Plaquemines Parish over dinner, and their first responders are crazier than I am running around in jon boats inside the levee to pull people out. A wind gust catches the bow and you’ll be treading water.

It looks set to parallel the Mississippi then head out on the Ohio River.

If that moron Barbour was right about the soybeans ready for harvest in Mississippi, they have been drowned.

I see where PBJ wants Zero to give him 100% reimbursement for everything. Piyush needs to talk to the Repubs in the House, because I don’t see that getting by Cantor and the crazies, after Louisiana pulled attention away from the coronation of Rmoney by having a hurricane. This is a second offense, as they did the same thing in 2008 with Gustav and the coronation of McCain. You have to wonder why Louisiana keeps having hurricanes during the Repub convention. It’s very suspicious 😉

We’ve had a constant South wind all day long, but it has been mostly sunny. We’ve had more sunshine during Isaac than the rest of the month combined. Just two short squalls.

They must have actually properly installed the cell towers after the rash of hurricanes that has beset Southern Louisiana. Ours got fixed after Ivan, and should be good up to Cat 4 at least. A lot of solar panels around these days for billboards, cell towers, and some traffic signals.

5 Badtux { 08.30.12 at 2:32 am }

The people who stayed in Plaquemines Parish were all crazy to begin with, because everybody there knew that the 10 foot storm surge was going to come over the top of their 6 foot back levee. Their back levee was designed to have over 50 miles of marshland between it and the Gulf to spread out and lessen any storm surge, but now the Gulf is lapping right at their back levee because Katrina took that 50 miles of marshland and sucked it right out into the Gulf when its storm surge subsided. As for Plaquemines first responders, yah, they clang when they walk, heh. But they grew up hunting and fishing in jon boats, so it’s like the jon boats are just extensions of their arms and legs by this point.

6 Bryan { 08.30.12 at 11:16 am }

They keep complaining about the cost of beach replenishment after storms over here, but it’s the same deal – if the sand isn’t there to slow and reduce the surge, it will come on through. The million-dollar condos on the the barrier island are a sea wall for those of us inland.

Between FEMA and the BP settlement maybe they’ll do something about their levees, but I’m not holding my breath. Real fixes for real problems never seem to get funded when a chunk of money lands in the laps of local pols. Their first concern is to get it in the pockets of their relatives and friends [speaking of Haley Barbour].

Everyone fixates on the wind speed, and it is the always the water that causes the damage. People are spending thousands a year on wind damage insurance, and don’t buy flood insurance, which is what they really need.

At least they haven’t blocked the roads to keep help out like they did during Katrina.

7 Badtux { 08.30.12 at 4:58 pm }

The Plaquemines back levee was built by farmers to pump water out of their fields into the marsh (and keep said water from coming back), it was never intended to protect against hurricanes. Turning it into a hurricane protection levee is never going to happen, because the Corps of Engineers has already told Plaquemines Parish, “there is nothing we can do that will keep you from going underwater.” It would require too many hundreds of miles of levees to protect just a handful of people (less than 10,000 people on that side of the Mississippi).

You can’t buy flood insurance in Plaquemines Parish. It’s already been written off by the Feds as underwater.

8 Bryan { 08.30.12 at 5:54 pm }

There’s reality raising its ugly head. Like you said, they are crazy to live there.

Actually I was thinking about my area where flood insurance is available, but people buy the wind insurance and don’t bother with the flood insurance. The insurance companies blame everything on the water and actually don’t lose much money on the coast, despite what they claim to justify their outrageous rates.

If they allow the marshes to rebuilt with some help from man, things would get better, but I don’t really expect that to happen.

9 Badtux { 08.30.12 at 9:46 pm }

It really can’t happen, Bryan. The Mississippi River is so dammed and channelized that only a quarter of the sediments that once came down the river still come down the river, the rest build up behind the dams and are dredged from time to time to clear the channels but the dredged sediments are just dumped on the levees, so even if they created a new channel through Plaquemines Parish to eject every bit of sediment still in the river out onto those marshes, there still isn’t enough to outweigh the fact that the land is sinking (for two reasons — sedimentary compression, and the fact that all the oil was taken out from under it and the reservoirs are collapsing) and the oceans are rising. The reality is that the natural coastline of Louisiana is somewhere between New Orleans and Baton Rouge — basically draw a line straight from the Florida panhandle coastline through Louisana — and everything south of that is doomed, with the possible exception of New Orleans, which is small enough to dike and dam away from the rising waters.

You want to know what sad is, find Golden Meadow, LA on Google Maps and switch to satellite view. See those dikes around Golden Meadow? Those are new. They weren’t needed even 20 years ago. In 20 years, those dikes are going to be the new southern border of Louisiana. Follow LA 1 south from Golden Meadow. Note that they had to build a new LA 1 Causeway where LA1 hits the Houma Indian reservation (of which little remains other than the docks), this is all post-Katrina because LA 1 washed out and the places it isn’t washed out are only a few inches above water at high tide now. There were towns down there, even 20 years ago, all along LA 1, there were many towns south of Golden Meadow, and there was no open water anywhere, it was all marsh with just the one canal that ran along LA 1, and solid land on the other side of LA 1. Now there’s nothing down there until you get down near Port Fouchon, and Port Fouchon washed away with Katrina so there’s not much down there even. Grand Isle still exists only because they dredged it back out of the Gulf of Mexico after Ivan and Katrina, and continue doing so every year, but I don’t know how long they’re going to manage doing that…

Louisiana is fsked. Period.

– Badtux the Sad Penguin

10 Bryan { 08.30.12 at 10:31 pm }

Actually, you might want to use the northern border of Florida, rather than the present coastline, because much of the current coast will be under water in 50 to 100 years unless there is a dramatic breakthrough on climate change. Florida doesn’t have a future unless something is done. People keep changing the land without understanding how things work.

We didn’t get much of anything from Isaac, but US-98 on our barrier island was nearly undercut again from the mild surge. They just finished all of the repairs from several hurricanes that were quick ‘patch’ jobs to get the road open. They need a five mile causeway if they want to keep the road, because another half foot of surge would have cut it again. It is being cut on the bay side of the island, not the Gulf side. The Gulf side has dunes that protect it, but there is nothing on the bay side.

We will have memories and little else because wealthy corporations own the government.