My dream life.

[Thinx]

Well we do tend to march to a different drummer, is that even a saying or have I muddled it? Anyhew, what I mean is, I feel like I stayed what may be seen as young in attitudes in some ways, all my life. And also untypical. Still different, after all these years... it's not a crime.

There are always things that are not what I would wish, I don't think it's possible to be hassle free exactly, but in many ways I feel lucky, tho not rich!

It's probably more difficult if you are sociable though.

 

[Outdated]

Share more about the eye please! It's also something I've always wanted to see.

I was living at Dundee. No phone, no TV, no radio, so I had very little warning. I did have a satellite dish for internet though. At about 10:00 in the morning I thought the weather felt a little bit weird, it was windy and you hardly ever get any wind in the tropics. I jumped on the net and had a look at the local rain radar, it looked like a big starfish pattern and headed my way. Oh dear.

I was living in a small shed with a few tarps strung out around the place for shade, I raced around like mad and pulled all the tarps down and strapped everything down as well as I could in the short time that I had. Then sat and waited it out.

The wind howling down the road out the front sounded like a jet engine, but unlike most cyclones there was very little rain with this one, thankfully. On big trees rain can add several tons to the weight that branches are holding up, that's usually what causes them to let go.

It got pretty intense for a while there, and then all of a sudden it just stopped. Like someone had flipped a switch. Tentatively I went outside and had a bit of a look around. The sky was still heavily overcast but it was incredibly still and peaceful and quiet. I was surprised at how little damage there was.

I went for a bit of a walk around the yard but didn't get very far. We have Green Tree Ants here, I think you call them weaver ants in the US. They make football sized nests by using silk to stick leaves together in the tree branches. They're incredibly territorial and can be very aggressive although the bites aren't all that painful. Millions of ants had been blown out of the trees and in to each other's territories and they were all as mad as cut snakes. They swarmed all over me, attacking each other as much as attacking me. I had to rip my shorts off before I got back to my shed, they got everywhere.

That stillness of the eye of the storm lasted about 20 minutes, then all of a sudden the wind was back at full force, but in exactly the opposite direction. This was too much for many of the trees, they were snapping in half all over the place. When the cyclone first came over the winds built up gradually, but after the eye passed over us that wind came back with a slap.

Everyone in the region turned out to be incredibly lucky in the end. A few sheds got destroyed by falling trees but no one lost their house or their car. I thought my own story was amazing in that a huge forked tree fell over my car but my car was exactly in the middle of the fork and was untouched, although it took a few days before I could get it out. When I started going to other people's places and seeing the damage it turned out that that sort of luck was incredibly common. So many people had so many near misses, but overall very little damage.

 

[Mary Terry]

Share more about the eye please! It's also something I've always wanted to see.

I've been through dozens of hurricanes over the years, including Hurricanes Betsy, Katrina and Rita along the Gulf of Mexico coast. The winds and torrential rainfall come in cloud bands that spawn tornados and straight-line winds. If you're located directly under the eye, then suddenly, for about half an hour or so, everything stops. It is dead still, no wind, no rain. The eye passes over you and the winds and rains start picking up again, but this time they're coming from the opposite direction.

 

[Outdated]

I've been through dozens of hurricanes over the years, including Hurricanes Betsy, Katrina and Rita along the Gulf of Mexico coast.

We get the same sort of effect here, Australia has a huge continental shelf surrounding it and shallow seas heat up quickly, that gives more power to the big storms. On the plus side that continental shelf means we can't get tsunamis.

 

[jsilver256]

Wow, thanks for sharing the stories @Outdated and @Mary Terry . My house took a direct hit by Hurricane Ian and missed being flooded because it was an inch higher than other houses in the neighborhood. I wasn't there though. Because the west coast of FL is an awkward place for a hurricane to strike, the storm surge ended up being blown away as soon as the eye passed and there were no standing waters.

 

[Mary Terry]

We get the same sort of effect here, Australia has a huge continental shelf surrounding it and shallow seas heat up quickly, that gives more power to the big storms. On the plus side that continental shelf means we can't get tsunamis.

View attachment 129036

The Gulf of Mexico is shallow, especially along the coastline, so we get storm surges. Not the same as tsunamis but similar. The storm surge from Hurricane Katrina was approximately 35 feet high. The surge comes in rather gradually like a very high tide that keeps rising and rising. I understand that tsunamis come in suddenly like a freight train slamming into the land. Either way, you better be on high ground!

 

[Metalhead]

I want a storm of male groupies reading my film reviews and pouring champagne all over themselves to celebrate my celebrity status.

 

[Jonn]

I want a storm of male groupies reading my film reviews and pouring champagne all over themselves to celebrate my celebrity status.

Let me be your first fanboy.

 

[Outdated]

The Gulf of Mexico is shallow, especially along the coastline, so we get storm surges. Not the same as tsunamis but similar. The storm surge from Hurricane Katrina was approximately 35 feet high. The surge comes in rather gradually like a very high tide that keeps rising and rising. I understand that tsunamis come in suddenly like a freight train slamming into the land. Either way, you better be on high ground!

Is it something to do with the shape of the gulf? Here it's rare to see a storm surge of more than a metre or so, although we do get them. With that tsunami that wiped out so many people in Indonesia what arrived at our shores was only a metre high. Many people didn't even notice it, just a big wave and a bit of a surge.

[Edit] Just an added thought to go with that - how big are the tides there? It's a little bit weird and very dependent on the shape of the sea floor and currents. Broome in Western Australia gets 13 metre tides, (40 feet) but further north and east Darwin only gets 7 metre tides. I think some parts of Queensland also get 13 metre tides but I'm not sure about that. For much of the rest of the country 1.5 metres is a big tide.

 

[AuAL]

@Outdated, even our typical storm surges on top of tides can still be damaging, and sometimes dangerous. Large areas can be flooded, roads cut (causing problems for evacuations) and infrastructure damaged. I was peripherally involved in a project trying to build early warning systems from computational modelling of predicted storms surges on Queensland’s east coast, derived from projections of probable cyclone tracks.