Tidbits of Ventura County

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TIDBITS® SURVIVES 

HURRICANES!!! BY JANET SPENCER

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BECAUSE SEPTEMBER IS NATIONAL DISASTER PREPAREDNESS MONTH, COME ALONG WITH TIDBITS AS WE WEATHER AHURRICANE! SMALL FACTS, BIG STORMS • Hurricanes are born where the ocean is warmest, when it is warmest. The Caribbean Sea gets warmer as the sun passes over it on its way north in June and July; it warms up again when the sun travels south in September and October. Therefore the hurricane season lasts from June through October. Not surprisingly, Florida gets hit by more hurricanes than any other state. • The practice of naming hurricanes seems to have begun in a fictional book called “Storm” published in 1941. In this book, a meteorologist amuses himself by naming tropical storms after girls. The idea caught on. It became standard practice in 1950 when there were three different hurricanes going on at the same time in the Caribbean. Meteorologists began choosing names in alphabetical order. In 1978 they started naming hurricanes after men. • The word 'hurricane' may have originated from the Carib god Huracan, a malicious spirit who ruled over fire, wind, and stormy weather and craved human life, haunting the coastlines and delivering destruction, chaos, and death indiscriminately. BLOW THE MAN DOWN • There are many perils attendant with hurricanes: strong winds, high waves, heavy rains causing flooding and landslides, and storm surges. A storm surge is a gigantic dome of water that swells under the low barometric pressure of the hurricane, flooding the coastline. The sea rises a foot for every inch drop in barometric pressure. In the eye of a hurricane where the barometric pressure reaches record lows, this can cause a devastating storm surge. • Three-quarters of all hurricane deaths occur due to drownings in the storm surge. Surges 40 feet tall (12 m) are not uncommon. • The farther the wind blows across the top of the sea unobstructed, the higher it pushes the waves. The taller the waves get, the more they absorb the energy of the wind. The rule of thumb is that the maximum height of the waves equals half the speed of the wind. So a hurricane wind of 150 mph (241 km/hr) can produce waves up to 75 feet (23 m) tall. • Hurricanes usually track forward at between 5 and 15 mph (8 to 18 km/hr). At 15 mph, a hurricane can cover 3,600 miles (5,800 km) in 10 days. They can be up to 600 miles Continued Next Page...

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Vol. I Issue No. 36 VCTidbits.com


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