3 p.m.: 26.4 N, 82.3 W
Pinellas County was just about ready to fold up its emergency management center and declare everything cool, and it said as much in a news conference about an hour ago. The same guy just came back on and said, "Uh, we might be back at ground zero."
Now, nobody wants to commit to anything. The diagonal move across the peninsula, from Sanibel Island to Flagler Beach via Orlando, proved to be a very short-lived theory. It's brushing the coastline somewhere south of Port Charlotte, but the trend from the last few minutes — and the last few minutes are now the only thing that really matter — shows it going due north.
If it goes due north, we're in trouble here at 27.9/82.2. We'll get the brunt of it. If it moves a little bit more to the east, that's landfall, basically, and all bets are off at that point. We could be looking at a major disaster, or we could have just run a very elaborate drill.
This is how fast things are changing: When I began writing this post, we had still had no rain of any significance. It has since become much darker, and in the time it took me to get to this graf, we now have fairly steady rain. No serious wind yet, however. The tornadic activity is remaining southeast of us, for the moment, although that's the part of the storm that will track north and west in that counter-clockwise fashion.
Which means: All we can do is wait. And wait, and wait, and watch a few more hours of wall-to-wall news, and wonder whether we're "out of the woods yet" (a favorite TV news expression, apparently) or whether we're still "in its crosshairs" (another fave.) Me, I'm wondering now why I wasn't at work all along.
Now, nobody wants to commit to anything. The diagonal move across the peninsula, from Sanibel Island to Flagler Beach via Orlando, proved to be a very short-lived theory. It's brushing the coastline somewhere south of Port Charlotte, but the trend from the last few minutes — and the last few minutes are now the only thing that really matter — shows it going due north.
If it goes due north, we're in trouble here at 27.9/82.2. We'll get the brunt of it. If it moves a little bit more to the east, that's landfall, basically, and all bets are off at that point. We could be looking at a major disaster, or we could have just run a very elaborate drill.
This is how fast things are changing: When I began writing this post, we had still had no rain of any significance. It has since become much darker, and in the time it took me to get to this graf, we now have fairly steady rain. No serious wind yet, however. The tornadic activity is remaining southeast of us, for the moment, although that's the part of the storm that will track north and west in that counter-clockwise fashion.
Which means: All we can do is wait. And wait, and wait, and watch a few more hours of wall-to-wall news, and wonder whether we're "out of the woods yet" (a favorite TV news expression, apparently) or whether we're still "in its crosshairs" (another fave.) Me, I'm wondering now why I wasn't at work all along.
posted by rj at 3:53 PM
1 Comments:
O-town report: Steady rain here, with an occasional quick squall. Funnel clouds reported near Kissimmee; tornado watches and warnings going up and down like a yo-yo. -- Huffy
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