Dave Kaplow
EF4
Well, after having a look around the area I don’t believe there will many problems about weathermen and/or media “crying wolf“ over Irene, at least not here in CT. There are some three quarters of a million people without power, many of whom will not see it restored for weeks. There is quite a bit of damage, mostly trees and branches but some very serious flooding and beach erosion as well. In East Haven houses were completely swept away, and I’m sure that’s not the only place.
That said, I can’t say that this was as bad as Gloria, not here in the New Haven area. After Gloria I saw many places, New Haven’s Long Wharf drive area among them, where essentially every single tree had been blown over, you could see rows of them lying along the roadside. I saw nothing like that today from Irene. There was a big difference in the way the highest winds occurred with each storm... During Gloria, it was like somebody had switched on a huge fan, with continuous hurricane force winds that never let up until the eye passed, at which point it felt like the fan had simply been switched off again. With Irene there were some pretty high gusts on occasions, but nothing like the unrelenting onslaught of Gloria’s winds. Incidentally, the very strong gusts I experienced right on my own street appear to have indeed been something of a fluke. I saw nowhere else in New Haven where winds had torn metal from roofs, for instance.
Because of the timing with astronomical high tides, Irene’s worst shoreline flooding might be a match for Gloria‘s, although the flooding with Gloria may have been more extensive in area, and Gloria’s storm surge probably happened much quicker. During Gloria I remember walking up the road from the hotel to a bridge with a good vantage point looking out over the harbor, and when I turned around I saw the area where I had just been walking was now under several feet of water, it rose that fast. From the looks of things Irene’s surge came up slower, but backed by unusually high tides it may have delivered the same kind of punch in places.
I find it interesting that many if not most of the highest winds reported so far for Irene seem to have occurred well away from the center of the storm, both in distance and in time. Looking at the map of power outages, it’s the eastern half of the state that got hit the worst, despite Irene ultimately taking a path that virtually hugged the western edge of the state. And most of those high wind reports were for around 5:00 to 6:00 am, which would coincide with the last big convective feeder band that went through and not the passage of the central core. This pattern is very atypical for a tropical cyclone, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Irene ultimately declared extratropical, or at least in transition, upon landfall in CT.
That said, I can’t say that this was as bad as Gloria, not here in the New Haven area. After Gloria I saw many places, New Haven’s Long Wharf drive area among them, where essentially every single tree had been blown over, you could see rows of them lying along the roadside. I saw nothing like that today from Irene. There was a big difference in the way the highest winds occurred with each storm... During Gloria, it was like somebody had switched on a huge fan, with continuous hurricane force winds that never let up until the eye passed, at which point it felt like the fan had simply been switched off again. With Irene there were some pretty high gusts on occasions, but nothing like the unrelenting onslaught of Gloria’s winds. Incidentally, the very strong gusts I experienced right on my own street appear to have indeed been something of a fluke. I saw nowhere else in New Haven where winds had torn metal from roofs, for instance.
Because of the timing with astronomical high tides, Irene’s worst shoreline flooding might be a match for Gloria‘s, although the flooding with Gloria may have been more extensive in area, and Gloria’s storm surge probably happened much quicker. During Gloria I remember walking up the road from the hotel to a bridge with a good vantage point looking out over the harbor, and when I turned around I saw the area where I had just been walking was now under several feet of water, it rose that fast. From the looks of things Irene’s surge came up slower, but backed by unusually high tides it may have delivered the same kind of punch in places.
I find it interesting that many if not most of the highest winds reported so far for Irene seem to have occurred well away from the center of the storm, both in distance and in time. Looking at the map of power outages, it’s the eastern half of the state that got hit the worst, despite Irene ultimately taking a path that virtually hugged the western edge of the state. And most of those high wind reports were for around 5:00 to 6:00 am, which would coincide with the last big convective feeder band that went through and not the passage of the central core. This pattern is very atypical for a tropical cyclone, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Irene ultimately declared extratropical, or at least in transition, upon landfall in CT.
