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Notes -
For scale:
1,400 people died in Katrina. 300 some died in Sandy.
As of now the death toll from Helene sits around 100. Is anyone familiar with the rhythm of these, what multiple should we apply to it?
ETA: She's already top 10 since 1950 and probably ends up Top 5, or even with the silver medal.
I'm kinda lost on all these social media comments about where is the news, where is the response. It's front page in all three newspapers I read since it happened, including reporting on federal level responses. The idea that the government isn't doing enough seems based in a combination of there being no news in reporting things that are done every time this happens post-Katrina, and an expectation that somehow Mommy Government will clean everything up so fast you'll never even notice anything went wrong.
Don't get me wrong, I highly doubt that Biden is contributing much of anything to this process, but I also don't think that any president should be interfering in the disaster relief process for what is ultimately fairly routine levels of disruption. If we're counting on some superhero president to be needed to get things going every time we get hit with a hurricane, well, George Washington ain't walkin' through that door. We should be focusing on building institutions that respond to routine disasters on a routine basis. Like FEMA, when it isn't putting everyone in camps or whatever.
Is there an estimate for how many of die within the first few hours of the hurricane ?
If most people die on impact, then there isn't much point to organizing an extraordinary response 2 days later. It'll make lives less miserable, but those who were going to die have already died.
There's a lot of controversy about even measuring how many people die from a hurricane at all. Hurricane Maria very famously had a long serious of upscaled estimates for almost a full year, because studies pioneered the use of excess death methologies to measure the total impact of a hurricane, and this lead to a 20x difference in estimates.
((Which stopped happened not long after))
But the lower-end estimates of immediate or near-immediate deaths in recent days reflect, to a large extent, American society's ability to bring very high levels of assistance fairly quickly. And a lot of these tools have optimized for coastal areas, and/or are difficult to apply in this particularly mountainous area.
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I mean there's definitely not an estimate for how many would die without ordinary emergency response efforts. We're talking about basic food-clean water-medicine issues for a very large group of people, there will be many deaths if responses are too delayed among the elderly or otherwise frail.
At the risk of sounding insensitive, it seems easy to avoid death from hurricanes. If the broad path of the hurricane is known, then the city should be able to evacuate within a couple of days.
Dunno if this one is an exception, but I believe hurricanes are routine occurrences in this region. Neighboring cities should be able to preemptively provide shelter to the fleeing populace. 5-10 stadiums can hold ~200-500k people. The west coast deals with wildfires, and routinely evacuates entire cities with no reported deaths.
The economic damage is another story. But loss of human life should be avoidable.
NHC had predicted the Karina would make landfall near New Orleans, about three days in advance of its actual landfall on August 29. Sandy's exact landfall (in New Jersey on October 29) and the storm surge threat were solidly predicted about four to five days in advance.
In either case, broad predictions were made a full week in advance and precise impact zones were predicted with 3 days to go.
What am I missing here? Surely the death toll should have been a lot lower ?
In the case of Helene, it got all the way into parts of western North Carolina that haven't had flooding of this magnitude since 1916 and absolutely do not routinely experience this type of disaster. I believe they have a lot more experience with snowstorms.
If we were talking about the eastern half of the state this would be very different.
That's rare!
I can see why the locals might not have evacuated in time.
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At the risk of sounding insensitive, do you know anything about this hurricane? Evacuating the entire "broad path" of the hurricane would mean evacuating an area about 600 miles long and 200 miles wide that includes several major cities such as Tallahassee, Charlotte, and Atlanta. Evacuating at least 10 million people potentially hundreds of miles on short notice isn't exactly easy, or even desirable.
No, they aren't. Asheville is in the western part of North Carolina, at least 250 miles from the nearest coastline.
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