Follow up on Typhoon Haiyan

Several days out now from Typhoon Haiyan striking the Philippines, the images and video beginning to flow from there are devastating.  I’ve been involved in weather and storm chasing for over 20 years and have only seen this type of devastation a handful of times coming from EF4 & 5 tornadoes.  Even then those areas are only blocks wide.  The Storm that struck was miles wide, with tornado like winds.  Inside the winds you also have swirling vortices of wind that would definitely been EF5 in strength.  Not only do you have that, but then you also had massive storm surge.  What did not blow away, washed away. The only thing I can compare this to in my memory was Hurricane Andrew that struck Florida in 1992.

 


The images we are seeing are pretty much from one city, Tacloban.  There are still many places where no one has gotten to yet because what little infrastructure there was has been completely destroyed, and the same for lines of communication as well.  These were impoverished rural areas with many weak structures. I’ve already heard reports of bodies lining the roadways just getting out of the city.


Relief has been slow to come, but at least there is a little trickling in as organizations and leaders coordinate the massive effort.  Survivors have been left to their own resources in many cases and looting has been reported.   Many of these people had a difficult time making it through a day anyway and had no preparations.  Even if you did have preparations, they might have blown or washed away, then got looted from amongst the rubble.  You do what you have to do to make it through another day.




Help is needed for the people of the Philippines.   Please give if you can.  The preferred way to assist is through cash donations (or bank card, etc).  Aid organizations know what is needed immediately and can put your donated money to good immediate use.  Donations of goods get messy and cluttered, often overwhelming.  On top of this, many people use this type of donating as an excuse to unload their unwanted junk.  There are often nefarious groups that try to take advantage by soliciting for donations, but will keep the money instead, so it is best to go through a known and trusted source.  Red Cross comes to mind, for example.

 

http://www.redcross.org

This is also a good time to try and remind people that they themselves need to have preparations made in case of a devastating disaster strikes your area.  No one anywhere in the world is immune from some sort of disaster.  Surviving a disaster is only part of it.  Surviving the aftermath is another task.  Take both seriously.

http://www.ready.gov/build-a-kit

(links are cut and paste, not hyperlinks)

Super Typhoon Haiyan

November 7^th, 2013 will go down in history as having the largest tropical storm to ever make landfall hit the Philippines.  This is a storm of astronomical proportions that are rarely seen.  The sustained winds in the storm were estimated at 190 to 195 miles per hour.  The pressure has been estimated to be near the record low of 870mb.  Tropical storm force winds extended out almost 120 miles and the storm itself is nearly 300 miles wide.  Those wind estimates were also only the sustained winds.  Gusts could be as high as 250 miles per hours

The area was already in devastation after being hit with a 7.1 earthquake only one month ago.  Many structures were already weakened or destroyed from that event.  Now, here comes a 100 mile wide F4/F5 tornado to finish off anything the earthquake had left behind.

Not only the winds, but storm surges will be devastating as many of the larger cities are only 10 feet or so above sea level.  Storm surges were estimated to be as high as 17 feet.  Then on top of that there are waves that were measured at 55 feet in some buoys at sea.  So there you have a 7 story high wall of water crashing in during an F5 tornado like winds. 

Right now we can only hope that the proper precautions were taken to evacuate to as safe a location as possible for the tens of thousands in this storms path.  Communication with the landfall area and surrounding places has gone completely silent.  We’ve seen what storms like Andrew and Camille can do, and this storm even eclipses those.  Our prayers are with those in the Philippines, and subsequent places as this storm moves on to Vietnam and Laos with massive rains and still a cat 2 storm and rainfall measured in feet.




Update:  short video of typhoon Haiyan winds
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=1429784490569228

Update 11/8...  New picture in of damage.  Looks devastating.

 

This video only shows a small bit of what the storm was giving, and much of it likely more on the outer fringes.  You would not be standing around filming in 195mph winds.  There is nothing coming out of the landfall area at the moment.

Update 11/9:  Reports of storm damage in the Philippines is just beginning to come out.  Red Cross is reporting that as many as 1200 people are dead, and that count should rise as many areas are completely cut off with no communications and the path to them is littered with debris.  The only saving grace was that the forward speed of the storm, 35mph, which was much faster than most storms. 



11/9 update...  Now that officials are beginning to sift through the disaster, they are estimating that more than 10,000 people may have been killed, and that is just in the one provincial capital where storm surges were 2 stories high.

http://news.yahoo.com/philippine-typhoon-death-toll-could-reach-10-000-011657978.html

Update 11/10

Super typhoon Haiyan destroyed about 70 to 80 percent of the area in its path as it tore through Leyte province on Friday, said police chief superintendent Elmer Soria. As rescue workers struggled to reach ravaged villages along the coast, where the death toll is as yet unknown, survivors foraged for food as supplies dwindled or searched for lost loved ones. “People are walking like zombies looking for food,” said Jenny Chu, a medical student in Leyte.

To Help: http://www.redcross.org/weather