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Tropical Storm Bertha — Why Now?
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Tropical Storm Bertha

Tropical Storm BerthaPosition: 13.4 N 27.0 W. [10 PM CDT] Updated
Movement: West [280°] near 14 mph.
Maximum sustained winds: 45 mph.
Wind Gusts: 55 mph.
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 70 miles.
Minimum central pressure: 1006 mb.

Bertha is 185 miles West-Southwest of the Cape Verde Islands and moving away.

7 comments

1 Badtux { 07.03.08 at 2:03 pm }

Eeep. It’s that time of year again already?

And the New Orleans levees still are broken ;-(. My suggestion to New Orleanians: Buy a boat, and moor it to your roof.

2 Bryan { 07.03.08 at 2:20 pm }

This looks like an Atlantic fish botherer, but they are talking about something developing later in the week in the Gulf of Campeche in the southern Gulf of Mexico. Those storms pop up and move quickly, so the local stress level just spiked.

3 cookie jill { 07.03.08 at 3:04 pm }

Send it this way. We need the rain.

4 Steve Bates { 07.03.08 at 3:36 pm }

Trust us coast-dwellers, jill: you don’t need rain like that.

Invest 93 certainly bears watching, Bryan, for both of us.

5 Bryan { 07.03.08 at 4:52 pm }

Jeff Masters doesn’t think much of 93L, but he is more concerned with the Bay of Campeche possibility as the conditions are much more favorable.

As Steve says, Jill, you don’t want one of these suckers if you have hills, especially hills recently denuded by fires. That’s why the worst death toll from last year was a tropical storm – it passed over Haiti, which has deforested hills.

6 Steve Bates { 07.03.08 at 7:13 pm }

jill, I didn’t mean to sound flippant; I know what a disaster those fires are proving to be. But a major storm coming ashore can be more devastating than anyone who hasn’t experienced one can imagine.

I don’t even want to think what a wildfire followed by such a storm would be like… even the “controlled” burns the Forest Service used to do near my late parents’ home in rural East Texas scared the fool out of me… but I’ve been through three real hurricanes and Tropical Storm Allison (the worst flood event in Houston in recorded history), and however much you need water on those fires, believe me, a major storm is not a good way to get that water.

7 Bryan { 07.03.08 at 7:30 pm }

California needs a week of light rain, maybe a half-inch per day, not 6 inches in two hours washing the hills into the valleys.

You certain don’t need something like Georges that dumped a foot of rain a day for four days. Even the sand couldn’t soak it up.