The danger mentioned is realistic and should be taken seriously. However, for those who dont live in a hurricane danger zone (I'm in Florida), these doomsday articles are a normal, everyday thing. Every single year since I was 12 and paid attention/tracked hurricanes (that's 21 years ago), "Experts predict ~3 major hurricanes will make landfall this year..." killing everyone, washing away Florida, flattening civilization, ending life as we know it, yadda yadda. This is the Weather Channel as well.
It gets old.
What's sad, the 2 or 3 honest concerned studies are drowned out by the millions of fear mongering, wolf criers. Do I think this article is honest? Other than the unneeded slow burn beginning, yea. But at the same time, hurricane zones have different building codes. This isn't as big of a "surprise" problem as people imagine. No one is really surprised that anything is "vulnerable" on the gulf coast. The American Chernobyl is just clickbait.
> No one is really surprised that anything is "vulnerable" on the gulf coast.
As someone who lived in Miami during Hurricane Andrew, and later watched Katrina and Harvey unfold, I beg to differ. I know that building codes have changed since Andrew. It will take another big hurricane to see if the changes were adequate and if they've been followed.
> Every single year since I was 12 and paid attention/tracked hurricanes
As a non-US resident, I'd like to ask: International news make it appear as if the situation has worsened in the last years (Katrina used to be a once-in-a-lifetime event, now hurricanes of similar size occur every few years)
Is this impression correct or overblown?
Also, going by news coverage, the US seem to be hit by at least four large-scale destabilizing events simultaneously this year (hurricanes, wildfires, COVID, political tensions). Does this influence the general outlook on the hurricane season?
What do you mean by worsened? Frequency? Intensity? Recovery response? As a general sentiment, things have gotten better since Hurricane Andrew in 1993. That was the first, modern major wake up call for Florida. Massive changes to building standards, general infrastructure and environmental management. It's been constantly refined since. I also feel the Florida gov (state and local) takes hurricanes far more seriously compared to other states.
Part 2. I recommend you try watching videos of "local Florida resident decides to ride out hurricane". Floridians are less afraid of death, generally. Every year mother nature threatens to kill us. It takes a lot more to scare us. Also, wildfires aren't a big deal here. Hard to believe, we have some of the best wildfire responses in the country. Our fire crews train throughout the west coast (most wildfires you hear about only happen in about 3 states on the west coast) on a regular basis so when they do spring up in Florida, theres a swift and hardcore response. Politics... eh, Orlando has seen the brunt of it. Most of FL is actually pretty racially diverse other than some really small pockets (where no one cares). I'm constantly told theres racial tension on the news, but in real life, no one here cares. At least in most parts of Florida. If you go to a Florida beach on any day of the week, you'll see every race sun tanning or swimming with or next to each other, having fun.
Hard to believe, we have some of the best wildfire responses in the country. Our fire crews train throughout the west coast (most wildfires you hear about only happen in about 3 states on the west coast) on a regular basis so when they do spring up in Florida, theres a swift and hardcore response.
I had to laugh at that. The scale of wildfires between CA and FL is like the difference between a nuclear bomb and a sparkler. The reason that wildfires aren't a big deal in FL is because (a) the air is humid, damping fire growth and generally creating fire-adverse weather conditions like rain, and (b) the fauna is wet, so it doesn't burn as easily, quickly, or as hot. In CA in the summer, the air is dry and hot. Fauna can get so dry that it can be used as kindling, resulting in fires that spread to thousands of acres in under an hour, that burn so hot they can create their own self-reinforcing weather systems and even ignite fauna from a distance.
You're also going to need to support your claim that FL fire crews train in the West, since based on all reporting from the last 4 years of CA fires, all of the crews were from Western states, as far east as Utah. (The last time FL news sources report a crew being sent to assist CA was in 2015.)
At least in most parts of Florida. If you go to a Florida beach on any day of the week, you'll see every race sun tanning or swimming with or next to each other, having fun.
That described my experiences in FL in Orlando and in beach cities. The interior and northern half of the state...was just as racist as I was led to believe it would be.
There was an article posted here a year or two ago that very clearly defined Florida's approach to wildfires and based on what I remember it isn't as clear cut as you are making it out to be.
I really wish I had the link to it but I have failed to find it when looking recently.
Katrina was 15 years ago. Prior to that crazy sequence of hurricanes, the previous major hurricane was Andrew in 92. Very few cat5 hurricanes make landfall in the US as cat5s (unfortunately that isn't true for the Caribbean islands). These major storms have been par for the course for as long as records have been kept. One of the major reasons the British lost the Revolutionary War was a fleet with reinforcements was wiped out from a major hurricane while en route.
The other large-scale events you mention aren't related to each other at all... COVID, politics, and California wild fires have nothing to do with hurricane formation... So I'm unsure how the presence of COVID and other stuff would increase the likelihood of a major hurricane this year...
> The other large-scale events you mention aren't related to each other at all
They are not directly related by cause, however they are all happening at the same time - so the effects of those events could influence each other.
COVID cannot cause a hurricane, but it could e.g. make evacuation plans more difficult.
Effects of modern industrial society on the planet could be a common cause in an abstract sense: It causes climate change, which could influence the strength and frequency of both hurricanes and wildfires and it seems to be responsible for increased likelihood of zoonotic diseases due to loss if habitat. It's also one (of many) points of contention in the political situation.
COVID is a complicating factor in hurricane and wildfire response, affecting e.g. senior care, shelters, and healthcare capacity. It follows that a hurricane could be considered "worse" this year given the preexisting load on the systems necessary to handle major weather events effectively. I believe that's the sort of influence the parent comment was alluding to.
These two are intimately related, though none of them are related to hurricanes (well, wildfires and unusual hurricane behavior might have a common contributing cause in climate change, but that's pretty weak as a connection between specific individual events.)
> Katrina used to be a once-in-a-lifetime event, now hurricanes of similar size occur every few years
I think this is patently false, although you're correct that judging by news reports one might think otherwise.
For some perspective on the relative damage of hurricanes over many years, this diagram [1] is pretty good. Katrina looks like a big statistical outlier to me.
I think if you could smooth the trend there would be a trend towards worse hurricanes, but there's huge variations from storm to storm and season to season. There is a slight trend towards more storms, and a trend towards more building on the coast or in vulnerable areas that increases damage. There's also a trend towards more news coverage of extreme weather.
There are so many random factors though. Katrina was terrible because it hit New Orleans rather directly, which is an incredibly vulnerable (and high population) city, and the levees broke in conditions they should have been able to withstand. If that same storm hit Brownsville, TX, or Panama City, FL, people would have paid way less attention. If it hit Veracruz, MX, nobody in the US would remember it.
Category-at-landfall is not a good indicator either. Winds get all the hype, but water does most of the damage - as it did in Katrina. While storm surge as driven by those winds is a factor, it really matters which ways the winds are blowing and how the waters pile up based on local geography. Rain is a huge factor too, so situations where a storm drifts inland and then parks are much worse than a storm that promptly races off. (Such conditions caused bad flooding in Houston recently).
So exact landfall conditions matter, how fast a storm moves, etc. Storms may be a little stronger than they used to be but that says very little. People remember when we get unlucky and a major city gets hit in a very unlucky way, and that's always going to be mostly a random occurrence.
Houston exists as a city because a hurricane destroyed Galveston. It still gets severe flooding from tropical storms, and has in recent memory. Like New Orleans, it's in a bad place (clearing out a swamp to build a city will always have this problem; the water wants to go where it did before). It will almost surely happen again.
It's easy to play fearmonger, and imagine "worst case scenarios", but many of them have played out - Katrina, Sandy, Houston, etc. Even if the odds of those scenarios have increased from 1/100 to 1/50, there's no telling when the next one will happen; we could go 50 years without another one, or Miami could hit by a cat 5 in a month.
It's still a stupid idea to invest in cities built in wetlands in areas vulnerable to hurricanes, but people keep doing it. Sea level rise makes this even stupider (more so than the storms getting stronger), but again, people keep doing it. A lot of people justify it because it hasn't happened in X years where they happen to live, but it is a numbers game, and sooner or later their number will come up.
This graph is great. It does make it seem like there is starting to be a trend of increased damage in terms of dollars. If we have another one causing 30+ billion dollars of damage this year, it looks to me like there will be a clear trend.
That's a true statement. In the wider context of this conversation, I think it is important to emphasize that a big factor for continued development along the coasts despite an increasing trend in damage appears to be climate change denial
From the article you posted:
"But rather than adjust the state's plans for coastal development, the Republican-controlled legislature passed a law in 2012 that banned state and local agencies from using sea-level estimates that "include scenarios of accelerated rates of sea-level rise." The law required predictions to stick to historical trends, despite scientific evidence that sea levels are rising at an accelerated rate due to climate change."
Hurricane season is getting worse with rising average temperaturs, in the sense that storm frequency is increasing, but its also getting "worse" because so many more people and more infrastructure has moved to the gulf of Mexico area in the last 30 years. For example, Greater Houston has more than doubled in size in that time period, while the US has only grown by a third.
Also, as others have noted, COVID is the only really abnormal thing going on- wildfires and hurricanes are annual occurrences. This year is worse than normal it looks like, but largely just part of life for the areas affected. The protests, associated riots and violence are more out of norm.
Significant hurricanes are not rare. Significant hurricanes landing in places that expose massive vulnerabilities in American infrastructure (the levees: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_levee_failures_in_Great...) are more rare and lead to catastrophes like Katrina.
It depends where the hurricanes hit as well. Here in New York we just got hit with a little tropical storm (Isaias) and that caused a lot of damage and pain because the electric infrastructure is barely equipped to dea with a stiff breeze, much less a storm. Its like how Atlanta descends into anarchy when there's a little bit of snow. On the other hand if a cat 2 hit anywhere in the gulf I get the impression they'd know how to deal with it. Also helps that a lot of the trees down there are nice aerodynamic palms, while the trees here are just begging to be blown over
> Katrina used to be a once-in-a-lifetime event, now hurricanes of similar size occur every few years
Factually that's simply not accurate at all. The post 2005 era of hurricanes was docile by historical standards until 2017-2018. From 2005 to 2017 zero category 3 (or worse) hurricanes made landfall in the US. Most of those that did, were weak category 1 hurricanes. There was no increase in frequency either.
Texas got hit by four category 3 hurricanes and one category 4 hurricane, in the span of just 22 years, from 1961 to 1983. Nothing like that stretch has been seen by Texas since. Texas also got hit by five category 4 hurricanes in just the span of six years from 1944 to 1950.
Florida went 11 years between hurricanes, from 2005 to 2016, something that is exceptionally rare. They were hit / impacted by four in 2004 and 2005 by comparison.
Katrina also wasn't a once-in-a-lifetime hurricane. It was a category 3, those have never been that rare. The disaster in New Orleans was overwhelmingly caused by people and their neglect of infrastructure.
It's pretty much on the money. Infrastructure and preparedness are the real factors of surviving a hurricane. A majority of new houses and buildings in FL are now cement or steel construction in response to Andrew and then the 2004 hurricanes. Wood construction is not popular anymore. This doesn't include the massive waterworks projects all across Florida to mitigate flooding.
Per [1], the comment appears to be partially correct. The data prior to 1950 does not agree with [1], but hurricanes were not tracked in the same way prior to 1950. The author may just using a different source for those estimates.
Down dramatically from what reference period? Over what region & time period? According to what source?
(I grew up in Houston. I'm skeptical of those with short memories, new to the concern, who impressionistically consider every report of a hurricane as "so much bigger & more frequent than before", without actual analysis. But I'd want to see numbers, and a theory of causality, for any claim that they're "down dramatically".)
> International news make it appear as if the situation has worsened in the last years (Katrina used to be a once-in-a-lifetime event, now hurricanes of similar size occur every few years) Is this impression correct or overblown?
Covid is the only destabilizing event, and it looks as though the US system of decentralization resulted in a variety of outcomes, but overall non-destabilization.
Wildfires make the news bc they are inconvenient, but largely impact rural areas.
Hurricanes are local events that cause damage, but US building codes largely prevent loss of life. Katrina is still a once in a lifetime event due to the flooding caused by failed levees.
Political tension is nothing more than the rise of news entertainment. The two political parties are extremely similar. In 4 months or 4 years, Trump will be out of office and the news entertainment business will manufacture other controversies.
The 3 big ‘problems’/destabilizing factors in the US are, student loans, massive prison pop, a great, but vastly overpriced health care system.
I'm mostly going to split hairs here. I mostly agree with you. But I'd say the real destabilizing problem in the USA has been the partisan attitudes in politics. You could almost claim that America is 2 countries, Democratia and Republica. That's how ridiculous our politics have become and why some of our problems, especially the ones you mentioned, have gotten so bad. I think they would always be "problems", but no where near as bad if all of our Congress would remember, "Oh wait, we are all Americas. We should be working together, not against each other."
Edit: Why the hell are you getting downvoted so much?
Yep. Just yesterday I encountered a pocket of “radical” anarchists that literally want to “utterly destroy the other side before rebuilding a good society”. Since when is that normal?
And why would anyone think that the kind of people who want to utterly destroy the other side are the kind of people who have the moral bearings to be able to rebuild a good society?
Of course there are some who fit the description you imply. But there’s a huge range of political ideologies which have been influenced by Karl Marx and his intellectual successors - aka Marxism.
Lol I think there was a Marxist hiding under my bed to get me the other night ;).
> In American capitalism's latest crisis, the combination of growing unemployment and worsening inflation has confounded all the usual experts. The most powerful nation in history cannot erase poverty, provide full employment, guarantee decent housing or an adequate diet or good health care to its people. Meanwhile, the rich get richer. Only Marxism, as an account ofthe rational unfolding of a basically irrational capitalist system, makes sense of our current chaos. In class struggle, it also points the way out. The rest is up to us.
I'm calling baloney on the "fact-based information". That's not an objective source; that's a true believer being a cheerleader.
Ahhh, I see your point. Fair. I read about the first third and assumed the rest was just as neutral.
TBH I should have looked at the author more carefully - I thought the page was like the NYU equivalent of Stanford’s online encyclopedia of Philosophy, sort of an anodyne online primer.
Thanks for pointing that out.
However based on my understanding I will say that most is the article seems pretty on point as being a description of the basics of Marx / Marxist thought.
I’ll also throw in that I think this is the thought that should demand our attention:
> The most powerful nation in history cannot erase poverty, provide full employment, guarantee decent housing or an adequate diet or good health care to its people. Meanwhile, the rich get richer.
>>> The most powerful nation in history cannot erase poverty, provide full employment, guarantee decent housing or an adequate diet or good health care to its people. Meanwhile, the rich get richer.
> Don’t have to be Marxist to see that.
No. And you can see the consequences that are plastered all over the evening news.
Whether Marx has the right solution is a different question. But the problem is real. (Myself, I'd be inclined to say that Germany has a better solution than either the US or Marx. But I've never lived and worked in that system, so I don't really know.)
I agree : ). Don't think I'd call myself a Marxist but I think the school of intellectual thought he spawned (as opposed to the totalitarian governments mis-using his name) makes valuable contributions to understanding our politics and economy.
And yeah I like the German social-democrat model too.
Also, big-ups to us for having a fairly civil conversation : ).
I expected downvotes with my comment because it is counter to what most people believe and the exact opposite message that the news gives. People heavily invested in politics will write off what I said immediately without really considering it.
IMHO while both political parties are deeply flawed and both corrupted by the power of big money in our system, this whole “partisan divide” thing that makes it sound like there’s no difference between the parties is silly, and inaccurate.
The Democratic Party and the left has its problems.
But “left wing extremism” isn’t on the top of the FBIs of list domestic terrorism threats.
Of course ideally we all should be working together.
But just like saying “all lives matter”, “working together” is often a way of denying historical truth and the flaws and struggles of our nation.
Hacker News is supposed to be fact-based, right?
IMHO folks should go do some googling about what political scientists - experts who work with reason, facts, are deep subject-matter experts and rational debate - have to say about the current functioning of the US political system.
I do agree about the tribalism issue and the fact if both sides would stfu, they'd realize how similar they are instead of desiring to split hairs.
But yes, there have been plenty of left wing terrorists. Ilich Ramírez Sánchez I think is the most famous one (Carlos the Jackal). Plenty of other ones, but he'd be the... Timothy McVeigh mixed with Bin Laden of left wing terrorism.
That and citing Vox is like citing Fox News. No. They're different sides of the same coin.
That and political science isn't a real science. Even the stuff I might agree with, it's all so warped in bias, I want to vomit.
Vox and Fox are not alike. Fox News is notorious. Simply look at the racist or race-baiting things Tucker Carlson says - or what he doesn’t say.
There’s no equivalent behavior at Vox of which I’m aware.
Fox News is literally a right wing propaganda machine. Vox may have a bias and you may disagree with it but it’s not regularly engaging in fear-mongering, untethered from any sense of journalistic ethics or responsibility.
Folks may not like hearing this but we all know this is true.
Plus the particular article I linked to has interviews with reputable folks (Harvard profs, etc) so if nothing else it’s a source of reasoned opinion.
Lastly, political science is obviously not a hard science but it’s filled with people who have spent their careers reading about history and politics and studying it so, there might be some signal in that noise there :).
Watching what's been happening in Portland every night for ~90 days now, or even what's just happened in Kenosha, I would be surprised if it wasn't the top of the FBI's list.
I agree. The FBI should be investigating those masked men in camouflage without any insignia or identification and with guns and rifles who were attacking protestors and hauling people off in unmarked vans in Portland.
All we need to do is look at the numbers of deaths which occurred in the incidents we are talking about.
“In the deadliest attack on Latinos in American history, a 21-year-old white supremacist last August killed 22 people and injured 24 others at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas. In April, another white extremist went on a shooting rampage at a synagogue in Poway, California, killing one worshipper and injuring three others.”
Dylan Roof in 2015 murdering nine people who were at church, because they were black.
The right-wing crazy guy who murdered Heather Hayer by driving into a crowd at a protest against neo-nazis in Charlottesville in 2017
And so on.
To compare terrible attacks like that to the riots (separate from the peaceful protests) which have occurred, and destroyed property, but not killed people, is ludicrous.
And let’s not forget that people didn’t go into the streets for the fun of it - no one was doing anything until the police killed a man in cold blood, because he was black, exemplifying the racist violence (and domestic terrorism - look at the 1921 Tulsa race massacre - a mob killed at least 36, sent at least 800 to the hospital, and burnt a part of the city to the ground, leaving ten thousand black people homeless - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre) which black folks have sadly faced for a long, long time now.
And which people are sick and tired of tolerating.
Certainly any ideology can produce violent extremists. But conservatism and the right in the US currently has a white-supremacist/far-right extremist problem which the left does not have right now.
Currently, its the far right and white supremacist ideologies which are producing domestic terrorists that attempt (or sadly, succeed) to kill people.
Currently, there’s not a US equivalent of the Baader-Meinhoff gang (german left wing domestic terrorists from the 60s/70s) of which I’m aware.
So I hope the FBI is spending the bulk of their domestic terrorism resources combating the groups which at this time pose the greatest threat to the lives of American citizens.
If body count of individual actions was the only metric, I would totally agree with you.
I think current events have the potential to spiral into something much more destabilizing and ultimately destructive on a cumulative basis, even if there are not headline grabbing individual mass shootings.
FWIW, I gave your post an upvote, but I will nitpick this ever so slightly:
Wildfires make the news bc they are inconvenient, but largely impact rural areas.
The idea that wildifires are just "woods burning out in the middle of nowhere" is, if not inaccurate, at least incomplete. There is, in the United States, a substantial amount of what is called "Wildland / Urban Interface" zones where urban areas impinge on adjacent wildland areas. And homes and other structures being built in those interface zones are a huge problem when large scale wildfires break out. And while large-scale loss of life due to wildfires isn't commonplace, massive property damage is at times.
That said, I wouldn't classify wildfires as a "destabilizing" level problem. But the impact of wildfires should not be trivialized either.
> Political tension is nothing more than the rise of news entertainment.
I would agree with that but still think the effects of it can't simply be ignored.
A significant part of people worldwide get their basic understanding of what's going on in the world from news media - and then go on making all kinds of day-to-day descisions with that knowledge - and in the case of US citizens may go on to vote.
News media show a cropped and distorted version of reality, but they can also pull the actual reality closer to their distorted version.
I'm in New Jersey, not Texas, but I can attest that the storms have gotten worse. We're also getting more tornadoes here when that was unheard of 20-30 years ago.
You sound like all the people whom grew up in New Orleans that I spoke with when I lived there; I moved when Katrina hit. They heard the same thing. Turns out it was true, and the fact that it hadn't happened was in fact: just luck.
You have not addressed the significant difference between the two regions. In Florida, the danger is a hurricane knocks things down. In this specific part of Texas, the danger is toxins being thrown everywhere and causing long term harm.
Um... because there are no chemical plants of any sort in Florida...?
I dont know what fantasy image of Florida you have, but we have refineries and nuclear plants here too sweetheart. It's not just shacks and gator swamp here. I live nearby NASA too. As much as I love them, we aren't exactly talking about an organization known for working with 100% organic, safe for the environment compounds. Dorian freaked out most of the county when it was originally bee lining for the launch pad.
In truth, if you live in a somewhat civilized and populated area, you are in a severe danger zone if a natural disaster strikes. The amount of "toxins" that make the modern work are vulnerable to those types of shocks. No one is actually safe from that, ever.
A big difference is the size of the population that lives in the danger area because of Houston zoning. It's the 4 largest city in the US by population with a massive greater city area
Well is there a similarly situated concentrated zone of toxins in florida which isn’t sufficiently secured against damage?
You still haven’t addressed the central point! Every disaster has some potential to cause wider damage. But the linked article is making a a specific claim that the Galveston area is far beyond normal levels.
My central point was the fact that articles and studies like these are a dime a dozen. I even mentioned that this one does seem like an honest article, but there's technically no surprise among those who can actually do anything. The limiting factor to any hurricane protection is funding and resources, not knowledge. FL does seem to take things more seriously, but I won't blame the other gulf states when they may have bigger fish to fry. We (Florida) may just have more open resources than let's say Texas. I dont know and it's not right for anyone to judge otherwise unless you're actually apart of the process that does any good.
It's super easy to cry out that the sky is falling and a disaster is coming. Which, again, all gulf states are told, "A hurricane will kill you all this year" every single year. It's a whole different story to pony up the cash and time to do something about it.
[EDIT: Sorry if the tone of this in harsh. I see in your original comment that you do say that people should take this seriously, and though there's a lot of noise, there's also signal when it comes to this stuff.]
> I dont know and it's not right for anyone to judge otherwise unless you're actually apart of the process that does any good.
Respectfully, I disagree. IMHO the whole point of a democracy and an open society is for citizens to make judgements of processes which they’re not a part of. Hopefully those judgements are informed and humble, but our job - our duty - as citizens in a democracy is to judge nonetheless.
> It's a whole different story to pony up the cash and time to do something about it.
It sounds like the prof in question has been trying to get people to do that. I’d assume the newspaper published the story in the hope it would raise awareness. What else other than publish a story is a newspaper going to do?
Florida isn't perfect, but the structures that you mentioned are designed to survive hurricanes. Those structures in Houston are not as well designed. The city is also not as well planned in general compared to most parts of FL. I know this because I'm also from Houston and not just Florida
I thought this article was going to be about Houston's hilariously bad drainage infrastructure for a coastal city on a coast prone to hurricanes. IIRC, Houston's drainage system maxes out at a 1/2 inch an hour for an event that lasts a day. Rainfall totals that wouldn't phase New Orleans' drainage system are life threatening in Houston. Covering everything in asphalt and concrete leaves you with a ground that is unable to absorb some rainwater. Green spaces are more useful than just allowing cities to look pretty. They are a necessary part of a flood mitigation strategy.
The biggest issue with the Greater Houston Area isn’t just the lack of green spaces for natural absorption but the compaction of the ground from over pumping ground water decades ago.
Many of the municipalities that are not Houston proper run their own MUD(Municipal Utility District)and continue to make the same mistakes that COH did decades prior.
The other big issue is lack of zoning and coordination of development. Many people buy homes with information about the flood plains in mind, but later on are in the path of another developers flood plan.
Not the commentor, but I think they're referring to those flood zones that were recently built on that were the worst hit by flooding. To be fair, those parts were disasters waiting to happen because the flood surveys weren't taken seriously when they decided to build on them.
Most of the Houston MSA is a flood zone. The areas that were worst hit were not "recently" built on. The areas recently built on will have much better drainage because the codes have changed.
I suggest doing more reading of primary sources and perhaps studying the hydrology and history before speaking further on this subject.
Also from Florida. While I remember some doomsday weather predictions like the Cat 6 hurricane, I don't remember a doomsday article or white paper every year. I also remember that while not every year is a huge disaster, there typically is one every decade. That said, people need to understand that weather prediction is about probability and not inevitability.
“... in 2016, the Texas Tribune and ProPublica published “Hell or High Water,” a data-rich project unpacking how a hurricane directly hitting the Ship Channel would kill thousands and devastate the economy. The project relies heavily on data from Hurricane Ike, the 2008 category 2 storm that narrowly missed the channel but still managed to kill 74 and cause $30 billion in damage. A direct hit, the project concluded, would shutter at least ten major refineries, spiking gasoline and consumer goods prices while crippling the U.S. economy.”
Pro Publica does great work. Here’s the link mentioned:
Chernobyl is like terrorism - pretty much everything is more damaging if a risk adjusted data-driven comparison is done.
It is hard to describe a major disaster that is less damaging then Chernobyl. There are train wrecks that are comparable to Chernobyl by deaths [0]. On that note; wow, what a horrific rain wreck that must have been.
The number of deaths due to Chernobyl is grossly underreported. And deaths don't cover the full "cost" of Chernobyl. Displacing thousands of people lead to poverty, depression and suicide. The economic and social damage was huge. The Soviet Union doesn't have statistics on this because they didn't want those numbers to exist.
I'd be willing to argue that the Chernobyl accident caused (or at least precipitated) the fall of the Soviet union. This case was also made by the Netflix "Chernobyl" series.
If you look at it from that perspective: No, I don't think that a hurricane hitting Houston would be as damaging as Chernobyl and cause the United States to collapse.
>I'd be willing to argue that the Chernobyl accident caused (or at least precipitated) the fall of the Soviet union. This case was also made by the Netflix "Chernobyl" series.
You're not helping your argument when you make it sound like a bold new theory and use (good) TV fiction to bolster it up. I propose a quote from a certain Mikhail Gorbachev instead:
> He states flatly that the Chernobyl explosion was “perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union.” According to Gorbachev, the Chernobyl explosion was a “turning point” that “opened the possibility of much greater freedom of expression, to the point that the system as we knew it could no longer continue.”
But note that here it's more about how Chernobyl exposed deep dysfunctions within the Soviet system and how it might have contributed to precipitate its collapse. I don't really know if that counts as "damage".
The claim as I drew it from “Midnight in Chernobyl” by Adam Higginbotham (I don’t know if a popular non-fiction book meets your evidentiary standard, I just happen to have finished reading it) is that the public damage and cost from Chernobyl was so unprecedented and spectacular in scope that it was impossible for the Soviet government to cover it up. And that what makes this remarkable is how this incident compared to other past incidents (not to mention purposeful engineering efforts) that the Soviet government had successfully managed to cover up and keep from the population. In other words, “exposed the dysfunction of the system” is accurate, but also incomplete. It omits the reason why this particular disaster, and not other disasters, was the trigger that caused this reckoning.
And the book makes a compelling case for why Chernobyl was so important and so different. I will leave it to experts to tell me whether it’s wrong.
It's not that surprising that the cause of the Soviet Union's collapse tries to pass the blame elsewhere.
Without Chernobyl, but with Gorbachev's reforms, the Soviet Union would still have collapsed.
Without Gorbachev's reforms, but with Chernobyl, the Soviet Union would still exist, just as PRC did not collapse from Tiananmen Square and DPRK did not collapse from 1990s famine.
> The number of deaths due to Chernobyl is grossly underreported.
Maybe, if you only take the 31 number, that one is indeed grossly underreported. But any other estimate (like the common 4000 number) is really a wild guess. The reason is not Soviet Union keeping secrets, but more fundamental, it's really really hard to give any meaningful estimate in a situation like this even with 100% transparency.
> I'd be willing to argue that the Chernobyl accident caused (or at least precipitated) the fall of the Soviet union.
That 4,000 is estimated based on just radiation to a small area and was never intended as any kind of a total.
long-term death estimates range from up to 4,000 (per the 2005 and 2006 conclusions of a joint consortium of the United Nations) for the most exposed people of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, to 16,000 in total for all those exposed on the entire continent of Europe, with figures as high as 60,000 when including the relatively minor effects around the globe.[5]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...
What’s more concerning is limiting things to deaths as if that was the only form of harm. People can survive cancer, but not without economic, emotional, etc harm. Further, giant exclusion zones and ongoing mitigation efforts are extremely expensive.
The UNSCEAR is a UN group of scientists who study radiation, similar to the IPCC group studying climate. The fringe studies from Greenpeace and friends claiming more than 4000 deaths do not carry more weight than the UNSCEAR numbers.
Oversimplifying, if you distribute the radiation that was released evenly in a group of 8000 persons, each one has a 50% chance of dying, so you expect to see 4000 deaths.
If you distribute the same radiation evenly in a group of 80000 persons, each one has a 5% chance of dying, so you expect to see 4000 deaths.
If you distribute the same radiation evenly in a group of 8000000 persons, each one has a 0.05% chance of dying, so you expect to see 4000 death.
But in the 8000000 group the radiation level is too low and there is also normal background radiation, and other normal risk, so the real number is probably less than 4000 deaths.
In a realistic scenario, some people get more radiation and some less radiation, but the nice part of the simplified model is that it always predict 4000 deaths. But this number is like an upper bound, the real number of deaths is probably less.
There is evidence that the linear no threshold model both over estimates and under estimates the increase in cancer deaths among humans.
The disagreement stems in part from the extremely high rate of cancers and thus precancerous tissue among people which means than some tissue is unusually vulnerable. This is supported by skin cancer rates. The opposite conclusion is based on cellular responses to low level radiation exposure, which may provide protection from future exposure.
If it was actually clear LNT was a bad model we would be using something else, but it’s not obvious which direction it should be updated. Presumably, the reality is some non linear effect relating to lifetime exposure for radiation and other cancer risks, but collecting accurate data is difficult.
It’s important to understand the context for what’s being said. “given the low doses received by the majority of exposed individuals, any increase in cancer incidence or mortality will be difficult to detect in epidemiological studies.”
Detecting an increase in cancer deaths from a specific source when cancers represent 1 in 6 deaths worldwide is extremely difficult. If cancer killed 100 people per year then detecting an increase of ~X00 extra deaths per year would be much simpler. On the other hand try to isolate ~1 extra cancer death per 10,000 deaths is a pipe dream.
>This case was also made by the Netflix "Chernobyl" series.
You're talking about a TV show meant to entertain and generate buzz and word of mouth. It's not meant to be taken as an actual explanation. The theories of a TV show, no matter how grounded in reality, shouldn't be trotted out as examples when we have the actual reality and facts the TV show is based on.
In a time when facts are freely available to everyone, people are pointing to entertainment as data points into how we should make policy. It's embarrassing to see.
>The Soviet Union doesn't have statistics on this because they didn't want those numbers to exist.
The soviet union didn't have stats on this because they knew those stats would make them look bad long before (and regardless of whether or not) the reactor went pop.
That is assuming you trust Soviet stats on Chernobyl deaths.
I’m acquainted with one of Russia’s chief oncologists, who was one of the primary physicians that dealt with the consequences of Chernobyl. She’s been quite clear that the number of people affected is both large and well-suppressed.
Of course, the very nature of “the state makes sure not to collect damaging statistics” means I can’t actually quantify the real harm done. For all I know, maybe it’s just equal to ‘two’ bad train wrecks.
Under Stalin, statisticians who collected the "wrong" values were likely to come to a very nasty end - I imagine something like that leaves a lingering fear in any society/profession:
Naive way of looking at it, Chernobyl caused huge changes to the way of life for many people, not only in the vicinity, I live in Sweden and I remember that day when it rained and how we decades afterwards sent meat, berries and other food stuff for testing ....
I still remember standing under an arch in the Grassmarket Edinburgh on my way back from University classes on the day that the Chernobyl cloud passed over the UK and looking at the heavy rain and wondering whether it was a wise thing to walk home in it.
Edit: Of course I knew there was a tiny tiny risk - but still something I remember thinking about.
I think you're still advised not to eat boar meat in Austria because of the radiations. This is an article from 2011 [1] documenting the fact, and this is a study from 2019 [2] which found that:
> The caesium levels of 8 wild boar and 11 roe deer samples exceeded the limit out of the 490 specimens
Now, 19 out of 490 specimens exceeding the Cs-137 concentration level limits is too high a percentage for me, but maybe other people are willing to take more risks in this area compared to me.
It was pretty bad, high values of mostly cesium-137 in local food. Now some 35:ish years afterwards, its mostly reindeer that goes over the recommended thresholds.
They found that keeping testing going this century serves the valuable function of keeping the public at ease and the cost isn't that high (testing is pretty small scale now) so why not keep it.
The primary source of radiation was airborne dust (and therefore precipitation as well). Crops and farm raised animals have been clean for a long time. The primary risk is shooting a buck that ate a berry that had something nasty on it back in 1995 but between the half lives of the radioactive compounds in question and the pattern of events required to get those components to one's dinner plate the risk is beyond minimal at this point.
There has been about a 1000 deaths attributed to it in Sweden.
And you could argue that its "low", but its in the very sense "Russian roulette", you never know if it is you, maybe you where unlucky and ate a side of that wild boar that contained 39706 becquerel per kilo...
You're saying there have been 1000 deaths from Chernobyl in Sweden? That goes strongly against the UN-sanctioned scientific consensus of the radiation effects of the accident [1].
The "Russian roulette" hypothesis is unsupported at dose rates near natural background radiation. For example, the natural background dose varies widely around the world, and we have not found a statistically link between high background areas (like Denver) and low background areas.
Radiation at low levels has been around for billions of years. Life evolved with it and can handle it to a degree. So the idea that a tiny bit more radiation is dangerous is wrong because of our repair mechanisms.
Most of those estimates haven't held up, after this many years those deaths should be noticeable. The only cancer they can observe Chernobyl having an effect is thyroid cancer, which kills very few people.
It is not an exclusive focus on deaths, it is on all cancers and they did not spike as claimed by more pessimistic models. There were a few slight increases (mostly in thyroid cancer) but also a lot more testing being done that makes it a bit harder to normalize the statistics -- this may also have dropped the death rate slightly, as cancers caught early due to increased testing are more likely to be treatable.
No, I am suggesting that part of the reason the death rate is much lower than predicted is that the testing rate has gone way up (and stayed up as testing became better and cheaper) and treatments have improved significantly, so incidences of cancer that might have been discovered late with few treatment options in the 90s are now detected early and treated as a chronic condition. More deaths overall, but a lot less than what was expected.
If you live in the fallout region then you are going to be placed in a high-risk category and are going to be watched more closely for cancer than the general population. By observing something we change it.
Most of the cancer treatments that make your life hell aren't commonly used on thyroid cancer. Generally you have part of the thyroid removed, and quite often it can safely be ignored with no harm done to the patient.
I don't think the UN team was able to attribute any child birth defects to increased radiation. The horror books with pictures of them are shock collections of deformed children. It's possible that the rampant alcoholism of the latter Soviet era was the likely cause.
A simple google search will bring up hundreds of articles linking alcohol consumption during pregnancy to birth defects. It is a well established relationship.
In the US we even have warnings on all alcoholic beverages that say pregnant women should not drink alcohol.
I looked at the CDC's page (https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/fasd/alcohol-use.html). It contains a number of very negative effects from drinking alcohol while pregnant. But because the context was birth defects caused by radiation, I was thinking more in terms of visible deformities - which can be caused by radiation, but which are much less significant from alcohol.
Perhaps I was being too limited in my concept of "birth defects" - including for radiation. If the radiation while pregnant (or before) gives the child cancer at five, is that a "birth defect"? Maybe not, in the way I was thinking, but I can see how it might be thought of that way.
I'd rather have 50,000 displaced than 5,000 dead. Being dead is pretty bad vs displaced. I move around a lot; although I can see the argument it is bad it is not a fate worse than death.
If Oroville Dam had given way back in 2017 that could easily have been America's Chernobyl. It made for exciting news.
I found your comment quite cynical and hand wavy. The nuclear fallout affected a huge area and still impacted parts of central Europe. This goes hand in hand with increased cancer rates. Yes, better than dying immediately, but still not a fate you would wish upon anybody.
This is like saying than Kalashnikovs clubbing people to death are rare events, so they are very safe.
Having cancer death after ten years, because radiation was released, is a direct death. Direct origin, direct cause, Wouldn't be happening without the event. This child would had born normal. This woman would not die in an hospital at 52 years old.
We have registered increases in thyroid cankers, we have plenty of healthcare centers data showing that something abnormal is still happening with this population. Is embarrassing to see nuclear related people claiming after all this years that, if you can't trace it, is not their problem, specially when half of Europe was about to be seriously poisoned forever.
How is viewing Chernobyl from that angle useful in this context?
The Houston Ship Channel has the potential to become an environmental disaster similar to Chernobyl, but affecting the fourth-largest population and economic center in the US.
It's not hyperbole -- if you drive down 225 and 146 from Houston to Galveston, it feels like you're in the Sonic the Hedgehog Chemical Plant Zone... it just goes on and on at an unbelievable scale. It self-perpetuates partially because expanding existing petrochemical complexes seems to meet less opposition than building new ones.
Chernobyl is a lesson not because what it was, but what it could have been. Only miracle (Legasov ans Sherbina being honest and persistent people) saved the damn thing from polluting whole Europe. Train wreck is a train wreck, it is limited in terms of destruction it can produce.
Not really. In hindsight, many of the efforts like digging under the reactor and dropping lead from air were of questionable usefulness at best. In their defense, they acted according to the information and resources they had, but all in all the mitigation efforts gave unnecessary radiation exposure to many people and many of them were completely useless. If the reactor were left alone for a while, it wouldn't have changed much.
Yes exactly. The next accident might be different. You will never know if it will have contaminated the ground water or not, what are the necessary steps to prevent spread of the radiation. So yeah, it is not what it was, but what it might have been.
My mother was a child in Poland during the Chernobyl disaster. In her family nobody has a history of cancer but she had breast cancer. And a lot of other health issues. Coincidence? Maybe.
I'm sorry for your family's health problems. I'm also sorry if this comes off a bit crass considering, but this mysterious thought process of radiation is exactly why we need to focus harder on epidemiological studies of radiation effects. By your exact same argument it could easily have been the successful reactor safety test in Idaho that happened 2 weeks before Chernobyl that caused your mother's health issues. It's far to easy for any of us to magically attribute something with another without looking at the big picture. The scientific method offers us a way to tease out which hunches like this are real and which are fantasy.
Fact is, we use epidemiology to understand these things, and the jury is in [1].
Anecdotally, my college girlfriend was a child in Gomel Belarus during Chernobyl. Her father had a Geiger counter and took readings around here. There was lots of elevated dose rates. She is perfectly healthy to this day though!
I remember Scientific American had an article about what would happen to New Orleans if a hurricane hit several years before Katrina [1]. I recall having a bit of a hard time believing it could really be as bad as they said: surely people would have planned for something like this given its inevitability? Obviously I was wrong.
Also, Katerina wasn't even the direct hit that they had modeled so it could have been much, much worse. I still wonder, even in the wake of Katrina, if New Orleans is truly prepared for the storm that is inevitably going to come.
Isn't being a coastal city below sea level in a hurricane-prone region just a recipe for disaster? It seems like it would take an absurd about of infrastructure to protect the city.
Yes but some are "foreseen" by lunatics and some by empirical science.
This is the old "there is no truth, everything is subjective, so according to my alternative facts, I was in the right and everyone else was wrong" spiel again.
How do you split the lunatics from the evidence based? All over the world people are taking off shoes and belts to get on an airplane. If we’re only looking at the numbers, that’s a pantomime show.
In reality though, pantomime shows have a habit of putting a certain percentage of the population’s mind at rest so they are valuable for that outcome which can’t easily be quantified.
> How do you split the lunatics from the evidence based? All over the world people are taking off shoes and belts to get on an airplane.
Experts have widely decried airport security procedures as nonsense, including the penetration testers who are charged with proving whether or not these measures are effective. An evidence-based examination has therefore proven these measures are, if not lunacy, at least not practical.
Intelligence officers, on the other hand, wrote up detailed explanations of how airplanes could be hijacked and turned into missiles. These people were experts in their field, and their hypotheticals were all reasonable. They were ignored, essentially, because people didn't want to deal with it.
When it comes to the dangers posed by hurricanes, it's fairly easy to determine if someone is coming from an evidence-based perspective, or a lunacy-based perspective. Are they engineers? Do they understand weather patterns and hydrology? Are they talking about how likely the events they're talking about are likely to occur over the next five, ten, one-hundred years? Or are they screaming about how God is going to level the city because he doesn't like it when two men kiss?
> In reality though, pantomime shows have a habit of putting a certain percentage of the population’s mind at rest so they are valuable for that outcome which can’t easily be quantified
But that's blurring the picture by mixing two orthogonal concerns. Assuming your studies are correct, the pantomime shows are still not effective in preventing terrorism, no matter how much false sense of security they provide.
That the false sense of security may have its own positive effect is a different aspect that doesn't have to do anything with the original purpose of the measures or the soundness of the studies.
As an analogy, if a startup sucessfully executed a pivot, this doesn't magically redeem their original business case.
If someone before the pivot predicted that the startup would fail because of their unconvincing business case then yes, at a high level, their prediction is wrong (the startup did not fail) but the reasons behind their prediction (the original business model was unsustainable) are still valid.
Ultimately you are right, but this is basically Popper vs Kuhn. I can confidently say that the sun will indeed rise tomorrow from the East and set on the West, to pretend otherwise is sheer folly.
Yeah you can always dumb it down to prove whatever point you want to prove but decisions like "do we spend a billion bucks building the levy one foot higher to prevent the flood or do we assume the flood will happen and spend a billion bucks on flood mitigation in our building code and emergency preparedness plans" are full of ambiguity and nobody knows the right answer ahead of time.
I was dumbing it down to prove that consensus is possible, the same can be achieved on your scenario though the consensus could well be less unanimous, I don't know enough about this area to have an opinion, though I suspect that people would prefer the former to the latter.
It’s more like spend one hundred million to make the levy higher _and_ on flood mitigation, versus spend a billion (plus maybe lose tons of money due to economic damage) dealing with the effects of the disaster.
Prevention is usually cheaper (and TFA in this case says it is).
As an older person, I remember similar articles written about the dangers of such a hurricane hitting New Orleans and the disaster that would result due to the vulnerable levy system. Like this piece, those articles were lightly regarded and ignored. Unfortunately its not a matter of if, but when.
Yup, and Galveston was literally scrubbed off the face of the earth by a hurricane in 1900.
There's something weird in politics/organizations that everybody feels compelled to be a yes-man and put a positive spin on what is certain to happen. Often I'll hear, "Didn't somebody handle that?" when they already know that nobody was assigned for that.
An illustration is provided by corona, where everybody tried to draw conclusions when there was literally no useful data for months, and even in Aug. 2020 there's precious little that one can say conclusively.
Just looking at the numbers, the damage from Harvey (which they call small/lucky) was something like 6x the cost of the cheaper "artificial island" option proposed.
The arguments for UBI have the implication that we have too many people with not enough to do, but that's not the case. We could employ the globe 1000x over in activities for the betterment of humanity, but the system for allocating non-profit-driven work is reliably corrupted by profit-driven enterprises.
Texas tea is a mainstay of the economy so it’s not terribly surprising that a member of the southern ivies has some groups and alumni decrying oil refinery waste as a big issue. While reading the article try not to judge the people or political structures involved since a huge chunk of the population is tied to the price of oil. It’s a fool’s errand to try to convince everyday people of the dangers involved with an industry which pays their bills.
I wouldn't say it's a fools errand. I normally have a laugh sending my fools to get things that don't even exist like a dozen mouse eggs, or some quartz oil.
Less of a pollution issue, but a major earthquake hitting St. Louis would be absolutely devastating. I’ve seen estimates saying it would be the biggest natural disaster in US history.
There is a widespread belief that hurricanes and tropical cyclonic storms in general have increased in frequency and strength. This is a justified concern due to the existence of global warming and the potential loss of life and property damage generated by these immense storms.
I'm not a climate scientist, but I have read about climate change and hurricanes (and cyclones):
* In 1886 there were 7 major hurricanes that year, four hit Texas and three that hit florida. (See the hurricane tracking map for that year[1].) This was the most active year on record for hurricanes in the US, see[8].
* Barack Obama had the best record for hurricanes, only four hurricanes over eight years. Taft (1909-1913) had 13 in just four years over five times the rate that Obama had. Bush had 18, and Trump has had 7. The numbers are all over the place.[2]
* Claims that increasing ocean surface temperature will clearly generate more intense hurricane activity need to be tempered by an understanding of the energy source that drives hurricanes. It is not temperature; it is the temperature delta between the surface temperature and the overlying air that provides the energy for hurricanes, see [3], and the troposhere is warming faster than the surface according to climate scientists [4]. Wouldn't this mean that there should be less powerful and or less frequent hurricanes.
* Global climate-related deaths have dropped dramatically over the last century according to data from Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters [5] and cited with a figure on p. 74 of [6].
* The IPCC 5 Summary Volume Final report technical summary (TFE.9, Table 1 on page 110) has this to say concerning the statement: "Increases in intense tropical cyclone activity". "Low confidence" that changes occured (since 1950), "Low confidence" of a human contribution to observed changes, and "Low confidence" of further changes in early 21st century. See p. 110 [7].
The IPCC, in general, has low confidence that climate change is currently responsible for changes in hurricane intensity.
* We can't rely on our own personal experience for understanding hurricane frequency, obviously.
I see that in the face of overwhelming evidence the narrative is changing from "climate change does not exist" to "climate change is not that bad", so that the conclusion remains that "we don't need to do anything about it".
The earthquake and tsunami killed almost 20,000 people. Your point might be about the nuclear power station incident, but you might be forgetting what caused it.
Chernobyl is already a tiny disaster compared to the covid19 handling.
Hell, Puerto Rico's being devastated by Hurricane Maria already qualifies as an event that has caused more preventable destruction than Chernobyl did. You don't have to use your imagination.
Are you accounting for all the kids born in Easter Europe in the early 90s that either have developed cancer in the last 10 years or are dealing with it now? Or at least all the 90's kid from Belarus that are still dying to this day because of cancer?
Are you counting every kid that dies of cancer in Eastern Europe as caused by Chernobyl?
The reality is that only one kind of cancer rose noticeably because of Chernobyl, this is thyroid cancer. And note that the base rate is one per million per year, so even a "statistically significant increase" doesn't mean a lot of cases.
Do you have any offers for that estimate? I've seen numbers that peg estimated fatalities on the order of thousands of people. I am very confident what I said will hold up. I grant that radioactive contamination has widespread non-fatal effects that are detrimental to longevity but that's true of natural disasters, as well.
> Chernobyl is already a tiny disaster compared to the covid19 handling
(I would love to be able to burn 1500 million of dollars in a concrete sarcophagous, and still have the galls to call it a "tiny" disaster in front of the investors without laughing. That would made a memorable day, for sure...)
>Instead of deaths, we should use number of years of life lost.
The public health professionals generally do but neither activists nor journalists, let alone internet commenters ever does because you can't claim big eye grabbing numbers.
> A detailed inventory of hazardous chemicals around the Ship Channel remains difficult to come by, thanks to a Texas law that restricts public disclosure of information that could be utilized by terrorists.
Am I the only one who has to immediately think of the Beirut explosion disaster when reading this?!
> At an estimated cost of $5 billion to $7 billion, the project would be far cheaper than either the Ike Dike or the cost of recovering from an epic natural disaster.
And here we have the classic game of political incentives: whoever sponsors it now will be out a couple billion dollars even if the specified event never hits, so as there is no incentive for preventative work, why should it be done?
And thanks to the inaccurate and sensationalized depiction of radiation poisoning/exposure by TV shows like HBOs Chernobyl people will be in additional panic causing more harm.
Texas politics aside, plenty of innocent people from all walks of life could be displaced from their homes, left destitute, and spill over into other states. The richer folks would be just fine, so I don't think shrugging is an appropriate response.
This is not the type of forum you think it is--comments like this aren't welcome here. They do not add to the conversation and they reek of hate and personal issues.
You missed the high-risk experimental South Texas Nuclear powerstation near Houston, which almost went off after the last hurricane. If the river levels swap over into the coolant ponds, the pumps get dirty and stop working. Last time it was something like 30 cm left.
This wouldn't be a simple radiation leak, more like a Fukushima meltdown. Just with double sized 1600MW vessels, not simple 800MW. The safety measures were always substandard. Palo Verde, which is an even bigger risk reactor, is much better protected and managed. Even if they have not enough cooling water.
This article is major clickbait hand-wavey garbage. There’s so many exaggerations and half truths I don’t know where to start. Peter Holly has been in Houston long enough to know he could have called the guys who designed those storage vessels and other refinery equipment (they’re likely neighbors) and get a quote about the tolerances they were designed for. He could have included a map showing the placement of the various container ports (there’s more than one, this isn’t Long Beach) and refineries or storage. This information is all easily obtained in Houston.
Every time something happens here with a hurricane people here and across the country see fit to write inflammatory articles that are pure bullshit.
Is there some risk of a LOPC (loss of primary containment) somewhere near the coast? Yes. How big? Which facilities? What category storm? What storm track? Would it be like Chernobyl? No.
It gets old.
What's sad, the 2 or 3 honest concerned studies are drowned out by the millions of fear mongering, wolf criers. Do I think this article is honest? Other than the unneeded slow burn beginning, yea. But at the same time, hurricane zones have different building codes. This isn't as big of a "surprise" problem as people imagine. No one is really surprised that anything is "vulnerable" on the gulf coast. The American Chernobyl is just clickbait.