Helene Was Different
Monday, September 30th, 2024 10:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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64F and partly cloudy tonight.
I slept so well, my second night on the new mattress, that I got up 10 minutes earlier than normal, so that I'd have plenty of time to pay the bills.
And I'm happy to report that on the final day of September, I managed to pay everything; rent, car, phone, insurance, and all the credit cards... remembering also to venmo Colleen 30 bucks toward the storage unit.
And as mentioned last month, the parking garage is paid up until the end of the year.
The sock cloud experiment also began to day, with all 24 identical socks in the sock drawer having been worn new, and washed once.
Their pairing has been erased, and this morning I shuffled the bundle, and pulled out two at random to wear today.
That's how it'll go from now on... and we'll see how long it takes for that cloud of 24 sock, to dwindle to 13 sock, due to hole formation and disappearance.
After only two nights in the new bed, I felt remarkably pain free today.
Last week I was limping around, because of a mysterious hip pain, and had other shoulder, back, elbow, and wrist issues.
Today, I felt fine!
And this is just as the new shoes, bought back in August, are finally broken in, so the foot pain was also next to nothing today.
Last night I continued working on the instrumental in FL studio.
It's only drums and a piano so far, to carry the melody, but I did rough out the entire structure of the song from start to finish... with it being just over four minutes.
The bass line needs to go in next, but the, Reavis 309 song is so old, I couldn't remember the bass line.
So tonight after work, I went through my old cassettes and turned one up that has that song on it!
I busted out the USB cassette drive, but couldn't find the cord for it in the audio drawer of my desk... but I found it in the computer cord box in my electrical junk drawer.
So now I'm ready to digitize that old song and transcribe the old bass line, by ear, into the new instrumental.
The packing was so frantic last June, and the move, and the unpacking happened so fast, early in July... that it almost seems like a dream.
So now that by brain has had time to adjust to the fact that I live here... it feels weirdly miraculous to see that even very small items were not lost... and to know exactly where they are!
It sort of feels like faries did it for me, but it was just my higher brain in evacuation mode.
I mean... even the way everythings laid out in here... like, I remember measuring the flat, measuring all the furniture, and working up a layout for the flat before I ever moved... but it still feels weirdly miraculous now... that all this stuff is here, and fits so well.
I'm having a similar feeling now, at Potawatomi... because I know my way around the entire building, and can get anywhere, purely on instict, like I've worked there 10 years.
And, like, I remember the building being a huge, confusing maze that made no sense?.. but that also feels like a dream now.
Because I was in a different mental state for the whole summer... that's finally wearing off.
At any rate, all of this means that October should be, kind of, the first normal, natural month in this new life... without all the dissociation, flashbacks, crying jags, sweating of bullets in the heat, physical aches and pains, and feelings of being lost and not knowing what to do with myself.
But this is why I'm gonna close September, writing about Hurricane Helene, because I really feel for these people, right now!
Back on September 29th of 2022, in this blog, I wrote an entry about Hurricane Ian, which had just hit Florida.
And here's a quote from that entry, to refresh your memory...
"But NOAA, and the weather channels were all saying, back on Monday and Tuesday, that Ian was gonna hit Tampa! It was for sure gonna hit TAMPA!.. as a CAT4, on THURSDAY! 130 MPH winds in TAMPA, on THURSDAY! 10FT storm surge around TAMPA on THURSDAY!
Then on Tuesday night, they updated their predictions and said... it's still for sure gonna hit Tampa... but only as a CAT3, and maybe late Wednesday night instead of Thursday morning.
BUT by that point everybody had evacuated the Tampa area, and now... CAT3 sounded MILD compared to earlier predictions of CAT4, so... everybody else in Florida who hadn't evacuated... breathed a sigh of relief!
See?.. these things are never as bad as they say, huh?
But then, IAN wound up making landfall as a goddam CAT5**... way the hell SOUTH of Tampa... at goddam 3:00 in the afternoon, on Wednesday!... way sooner than anybody expected... way stronger... and way further south!
So everybody in that southern region of Florida's west coast were caught with their pants down!... and buildings were flattened... trees fell left and right... storm surge was up to FIFTEEN feet!... cars were floating away... HOUSES were floating down the streets!... it was total devastation!"
And I wasn't all that sympathetic about it.
I mean, I did lambast NOAA for so confidently misleading everybody.
But I was also pointing out how the state itself has no reasonable means for large populations to evacuate... such as emergency rail lines... and enforces no building codes to bring structures up to... any category of hurricane!
And I said...
"But the fact remains, that if you live in a state for which there is an ANNUAL HURRICANE SEASON... like winter is a season on my planet... then you HAVE TO KNOW... there is NO WAY... you will make it twenty years, without wind ripping your roof off, and a foot of water flooding your living room!"
And in saying that, I was kinda blaming Floridians for... choosing to live in a potential disaster area, and... just crossing their fingers, and hoping for the best.
And while it is true that Ian was insanity, as hurricanes go... thanks to global warming.
And thus, some sympathy should go out, even to NOAA, because nobody'd ever seen a Hurricane pull a stunt like that before... where it crazily intensified, sped up, and changed course under everybody's noses.
But Ian was still, what I'd now call.. a classical hurricane, in the sense that it did still peter out after it made landfall.
Anybody reading this in 2024, still thinks of hurricanes as being sea-based phenomena, characterized by massive rotation around a central eye, that threaten coastal areas.
And no matter how powerful they are... once they're over land, the eye and the rotation quickly disintegrate.
They may continue over land for a distance as low pressure storm systems, bringing wind and rain to inland states... and that can still be bad... but nothing like, hurricane-bad, and even that kind of system disintegrates before too long.
But that's what made Helene very different from any hurricane that's happened in recorded history... and a terrifying wake up call that things have now changed.
After making her way into the gulf, Helene was headed for the inner bend of Florida, where it dovetails into the continent, and was thought maybe to threaten a bit of southern Georgia.
But she kind of pulled an Ian, hyper-intensifying at the last minute, to I believe at CAT4.
But the CAT scale is just a wind scale.
In terms of diameter, she was MASSIVE!
And while she did stay on course toward the bend... Helene did something no other hurricane's done before.
She just kept right on going!.. in a north-easterly direction... as a fully rotational hurricane with a solid eye... WAAAAY into the continental interior!
She just said, Fuck you, I'm still a hurricane! and plowed right on through Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennesee, Kentucky, and the Virginias...
The inland portions of all these states, mind you, not the coastal parts!..
And goddam did not peter out and stop being a hurricane until she was into OHIO, and touching LAKE ERIE!
Nothing like that has ever happened before! and the result was absolutely, apocolyptically devastating... especially to the Carolinian corners of Appalachia!
And that's WHERE YOU GO, if you live in Florida, and you're evacuating!
That's WHERE YOU GO, if you're in any hurricane prone place on the southeastern coasts, of the Atlantic, or the gulf... to escape danger!
Not only is that part of Appalachia WELL inland, but it's high ground!.. because it's all mountains!
So, I want to be very clear here, when I say that the people of the Carolinas, who ended up suffering Helene's worst devastation... had NO REASON to expect something like that to EVER happen there!
It is NOT a case of, Well, you chose to live in Appalachia, so this is what you get!
I mean, for starters, people don't move to Appalachia, the way they do to Florida.
For the most part, if you live there, it's because you were born there, because your ancestors have been there for generations.
And they do get a lot of rain, and are set up to deal with flooding... because that whole region is considered a temperate rainforest!
And these are some of the oldest mountains on the planet... meaning they're very worn down, which makes for this terrain of hills and vales, made livable by a whole system of dams, bridges, and winding roadways.
But what happened to them over the weekend was... Helene just DUMPED, insane amounts of rain onto all those mountains... creating mudslides and flash floods that totally overwhelmed that system.
And it brought high enough winds to also tear their buildings apart.
Dams broke.
Bridges were washed away.
Roads were covered in mudslide, and fallen trees... coming down off the mountainsides.
Whole towns were obliterated!
And let's be very clear here as well... nobody had any warning, and there were no evactuaion orders!
In Florida, and Georgia, sure!
But NOT in the Carolinas, or Tennessee, Virginias, etc.
Helene was able to pull off this impossible stunt... of bringing genuine hurricane devastation... deep into the continental interior... because of one thing, and one thing alone.
Heat!
Specifically, heat from the waters of the Gulf!
And those waters were SOO warm, that as Helene sucked them up into her vortex... she became dyna-max, untra powerful like no hurricane we've ever seen!
The Oceans, including the Gulf, are extremely good heat sinks, that do a great job of keeping our overland AIR temperatures reasonable, even now.
But hurricanes are perfectly designed to extract that heat, up into themselves, and use it as fuel!
And, as it turns out, the only thing keeping hurricanes from devastating the entire continental interior until now... was just a lack of fuel!
There was no universal law forbidding them from existing, at full strength, thousands of miles inland... other than the law of thermodynamics.
Even way up here in Aurora Illinois... we had full cloud cover, and strong gusty winds, from Friday night, all through Saturday.
I had to turn off my little exhaust fan in the window Friday night, because the gusts outside were making it speed up an bog down so violently, that I was worried it's little motor would burn out.
And I had to keep it off all through Saturday.
I mean, I know that's not much of a big deal, but that was Helene!
In this ghostly way, she managed to affect even me!... way up in northern Illinois.
And in REAL TIME!.. not a couple days later!
While my little window exhaust fan was struggling here in the tower... Appalachia was simultaneously being devastated... with towns being flattened, and people washed away in the flood waters!
And I know this, because I started seeing firsthand video accounts of it on Friday night, and all through Saturday!
So, as someobdy who recently lost a home... lost his pets... and had to relocate... who likened the experience to survivng a natural disaster...
My heart REALLY goes out to the victims of Helene!
Because what I went through was NOTHING compared to what they're dealing with!
I lost ownership of a home!.. but the house is fine, and it's being renovated as we speak.
I lost ownership of my pets, but the dog is safe in a new home, and I get photos and updates about her... and the cats are also probably fine.
Like, my mind has been blown by what happened to me this year, and my heart was broken, and I'm still reeling from it, and working to recover some sense of normalcy.
And it's NOTHING compared to what these people in Appalachia are now dealing with!
So my own prayers are very much with them right now, because I do have some dim idea of the truama they're dealing with... and all the psycholocical, emotional, and physical hardship the survivors are in for... over the next few YEARS, as they work to recover from this moment!
With all of that said...
We need to recognize that with Helene... we crossed a threshold.
I mean, the world's been on fire for years... and storms like this have been getting crazier for years.... but this past weekend we DID cross a threshold!
Sea level rise is not this slow, gradual loss of a couple inches or feet of beach per century... as glaciers melt.
Sea level rise is... the sea... actively reaching up violently attacking, HUGE parts of the land, from all sides... in these relentless campaigns that render them impossible to hold... long before they're actually underwater for good!
We can't just sit back and let this keep happening... only to try and rebuild in the aftermath.
We have to address the root causes of global warming, head on... with all we've got, for another few whole generations!
And while we're doing that, we have to fortify ALL infratstructure, everywhere, to withstand the worst case scenario.
Will we do that?
I mean... yeah!.. eventually we will!
We can do it now...
Or we can wait around for all the old farts, and idiots who oppose it, to die... and let another generation of innocent people, globally, die in that process.
But, yes... we will do it, eventually.
°¦}
