0118blog

Weather Or Not

For a light diversion from the non-stop dystopian news, let’s talk about my favorite topic: Tornadoes and hurricanes, blizzards and earthquakes.

One thing you can’t do is control the weather and that is a shame because weather can do really, really terrible things, maybe even worse then things that Trump has done, although I must admit I have been lucky to live in an area where extreme weather isn’t nearly as extreme as in some other places.

Take Kansas. Why anyone would choose to live in Kansas is beyond me except if your name is Dorothy and you have a dog named Toto and you want to get to a place they call Oz or if you were drafted by the Kansas City Chiefs or the Kansas City Royals? Otherwise, I don’t think Kansas would ever be on my bucket list of places to live, maybe right ahead of Mississippi or a gulag in Siberia.

We in New Jersey fret if there’s a lot of rain, maybe it floods our basement and we have to turn on the sump pump and it makes a rug stink from mildew or maybe a strong wind knocks over the willow tree. In Kansas, also known as “tornado alley,” a tornado can mean from the moment you can say “holy shit,” your house will suddenly disappear in a pile of sticks while your car ends up two blocks away. The granddaddy of the Kansas tornadoes was the so-called Udall Tornado which struck Udall, Kansas, on May 25, 1955. It was 30 miles long, three quarters of a mile wide, killed 80, injured 270 and caused $2.225 million in damages. Let that sink in and the tell me about your sump pump and stay out of Udall.

Tornadoes are not as rare in New Jersey as one might think. The first one recorded was the New Brunswick County tornado which touched down on June 29, 1835. Since 1973, there have been around 38 reported tornadoes, most recently on Aug. 19, 2020, when a tornado touched was recorded in an athletic field on the campus of Brookdale Community College in the Lincroft section of Middletown.

Let’s get down with hurricanes, so named for the strong storms in the Atlantic and known as typhoons in the Pacific.

I do recall Sandy, it was so nasty that they called it a Superstorm, not just your run of the mill, every other year, hurricane. I remember the weather forecasters talking about these two incredibly, almost unimaginably huge weather systems would collide causing a storm that would be beyond imagination, unless you live in Kansas. They showed satellite photos of Sandy that looked like it spread across most of the universe on that fateful Oct. 29, 2012. All told, Sandy left 186 dead and economic losses of $65 billion. My memory is of a large tree on the front yard and watching it fall in slow motion as it collapsed and took down the power lines. Other than that, I lost my cable for a few days.

But Sandy was just a rain shower compared with the Great Hurricane of 1780, which made landfall on Oct. 10 and barreled along while devastating Barbados, Martinique, St. Lucia and the rest of the Caribbean, killing 22,000 to 27,000 people but I always wonder how their estimates can be so broad, I mean I can understand estimates off by maybe 100 but we’re talking about a difference of 5,000 people. Go figure.

Blizzards were particularly memorable when I was a kid because that wonderful sound of the fire siren blasting in the morning meant school was canceled. I recall on year playing in snow that must have been at least seven feet deep although that might be an exaggeration fueled by small stature at the time.

The worst to ever hit New Jersey came on Jan. 22–24, 2016, and it was affectionately known as “Winter Storm Jonas” which dumped 28.1 inches of snow and I assume was named after the Hebrew prophet who was ordered by God to travel to Nineveh and warn residents of the impending divine wrath and I believe Nineveh is in Warren County. It wasn’t until 2012 when the National Weather Service began naming winter storms in the same way it has traditionally named hurricanes.

So Winter Storm Jonas was a pipsqueak compared with the Great Blizzard of 1888 which dumped 40 to 50 inches of snow throughout the northeast and killed more than 400 people. The blizzard, which would be known as a Snowmageddon today, buried houses, cars and trains and caused 200 ships to sink.

Now for the good news,relatively speaking. One weather event you probably don’t have to fear is a tsunami, which is a very large ocean wave caused by an underwater earthquake or volcanic eruption. The tsunami can have heights of up to 98 feet and can travel at speeds of 589 miles per hour, the stuff of nightmares and Steven King novels. To be safe, I would stay away from Hawaii, Alaska and the west coast. There have been 72 tidal waves classified as a tsunami since 1737 in those area and a total of 548 people have died.

And I will round out this altogether frightful discussion with the subject of earthquakes. The worst ever experienced in New Jersey struck on Nov. 29, 1783, with a magnitude estimated at 5.3. And that is hardly a ripple compared with the 9.2 magnitude quake that rocked Prince William Sound, Alaska, on March 28, 1964, resulting in 139 deaths. That was nearly the strength of the 9.5 quake, the most powerful quake on earth, that hit Chile on May 22, 1960, and killed more than 2,000.

Now, don’t you feel better.