Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Hurricane Fay

Florida ia beginning to batten down our hatches as Fay is going to hit us by Tuesday.

Add to this most of the state is beginning school on Monday. Should be an interesting week.

Good luck! I hope it doesn't cause too much devastation.
I'll have my fingers crossed for you.
Do they tell people to stay home from work/school if they think the hurricane is going to be of a certain intensity?


When a typhoon (asian term for a hurricane/tropical cyclone) heads for Hong Kong they close schools and send people home from work (becomes like a ghost town) before it hits to try and ensure everyone is off the streets. In fact, the last one we had only passed within 100 km and we got the peripheral winds and rain and they put an alert out.. it's quite well organised.

Please let us know how it goes.

I'm in Jacksonville, and we've spent most of the day getting all our ducks in a row. I hope it goes smoothly for you! (as smoothly as a hurricane can, anyway)

Yeah, we usually shut down the city for tropical storms and above, where I grew up (AL, Gulf Coast). How far in advance do you guys prepare for typhoons? It's usually the day before a hit that the weather guys have finally made up their minds where a storm is going to land, and even then I usually wait to move my patio furniture till Jim Cantorri from the Weather Channel to shows up in town. :p

Funniest thing to me is the Chinese restaurants in town stay open till the last possible second, so after I board up my place, we all go eat Chinese in the ghost town.
JD

Typhoons here work on a warning system.
Once the typhoon is 800 km away from Hong Kong (regardless of direction from what I can tell) a 'level 3' warning is transmitted (all tv stations have the symbols in the top corner of the screen).
The 'level 3' for the last typhoon was given for 48 hours, after which time the typhoon was around 200 km from Hong Kong, and a 'level 8' warning was issued (which is when everything shuts down and people 'batten down the hatches'). As I said before... we only got the peripheral of it and they still issued an 8 because apparently these storms can change direction rapidly as the intensify. From what I understand, they try to issue a 'level 8' warning at least 3 hours before a typhoon is intended to hit (but with as much warning as possible prior if available) to ensure ships and boats can get in behind typhoon barriers, and allow people to get home before ferries and public transport services grind to a holt and strand people. If a typhoon is actually going to cross directly onto Hong Kong, after a 'level 8', 'level 9' is issued... I haven't experienced one of those yet...

How is the hurricane going? We get very little information about the weather systems over the USA down here... I hope all is well for those in the path.

Well, no disrespect to my Florida friends... but I'm kind of hoping the thing makes it up to North Carolina. We've been in a drought for a few years, and there's nothing like a tropical storm for fixing that...

Still, it reminds me of Hurricane Fran, which hit in 1996. It came onshore at Wilmington and followed the highway directly up to Raleigh, and it hit us hard. All the people who'd evacuated Wilmington had already fled to Raleigh, poor guys... all the hotels in town were packed. My house was without electricity for 5 days, but we were lucky -- we didn't get anything crashing onto (through) our roof or our cars. The thing I remember most is all of the *huge* trees that were knocked over. I can still see the signs of it, here and there.

Anyway, I'm hoping this one doesn't do that kind of damage anywhere.

PJ

I'm in Houston, TX and all of us locals kind of have an ongoing joke that our local weathermen are clueless. Every time something 'big' is going to hit, they talk, talk, talk about it for days and days and then it never ends up hitting us (Ex: Eduard, Rita).

Eduard was only a tropical storm but they were so 100% sure the night before it was headed right for us. Most businesses around here play it by ear, cause frankly, you can't trust the weathermen.

So the morning Eduard was supposed to slam into us, I looked outside, saw it wasn't even raining, and ended up going to work. I think people still take precautions (Walmart was wiped out) but no one really boards up their windows and waits inside all day for the storm to hit.

But to the weathermen's credit, I do think there was some flooding in North Houston...

Good luck with Fay everyone! Hope your weathermen are more accurate than ours!

Steph I agree with you
eduad was so boring. I was at work (home depot by the way) and it was boring. we as running around the store playing in the breakroom my whole shift. And still just rain rain rain :rolleyes:

Well today was a very smooth first day of school and now we are off tomorrow and most likely Wednesday.

Pam, I am not sure that Fay will make it to you but there is always another one on the horizon.

This one looks like it is not as bad as many we have had but it is large and moving slowly.

This storm is crazy. It went through here (southwest Florida) pretty uneventfully. I actually slept through most of it. Now we are feeling it again from the other side of the state. It's been raining all day. I think we may be getting more now than we did when it actually came through here on Tuesday morning. Who knows where it's going now? It can't seem to make up it's mind...either that or it has made up it's mind but is keeping it a secret from the weather forecasters. That is probably the more likely scenario.

LOL, I love that theory. Weather.com tells me I'm next since i'm on vaca in AL...but it doesn't seem to want to move...I'm tempted to hire private eyes to sleuth out the mystery...

JD

Nuri is almost upon us now. My second typhoon in 2 weeks, and they think this one will be a direct hit *yeehaw*... it's about 60 km off Hong Kong as I type...
I find these kinds of things fascinating..

We have over 53,000 people in Central Florida without power and Fay has finally after 5 days exited our part of the world.

This has been a nightmare for thousand of people, they have lost everything in the flooding.