My dear friend, whose family resides in Orocovis, Puerto Rico, recently received photos of his hometown that were taken by a town resident via drone. The photos really show the extent of landslide damage around his small town in the mountains. Residents are currently cut off from the rest of the island.
This video taken at Yabucoa, Puerto Rico, near Hurricane Maria’s landfall point shows an extraordinary reversal of Maria’s eyewall winds multiple times. The first huge gust happens around 0:50, throwing cars around. The reversal of the winds multiple times could be due to tornado-scale mesovortices embedded in the eyewall, in combination with the funneling effect of the high rise building across the street. Interestingly, a video shot by storm chaser Josh Morgerman of iCyclone just a few miles away shows a flow that is smoother and steadier, without wild directional shifts. He writes: “This makes sense, because I was right at the coast, where the wind was coming off the open ocean with very little friction.” (The weird reversing wind video was shot a couple of miles inland, where there was lots of friction.) Maria made landfall in Yabucoa, Puerto Rico as a strong category 4 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 155 mph.
Can Caribbean Islands Really Adapt to Extreme Hurricanes?
Efforts to reduce or transfer risks should be based on projections of future climate and societal trends and impacts. These projections are uncertain, posing a challenge for policymakers and the private sector: how do we formulate anticipatory adaptation planning under such uncertainties?
But it is folly to assume we need science to be perfect before we act. According to the IPCC:
- Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.
- Many observed changes (warming of the atmosphere and ocean, sea level rise and melting ice) are “unprecedented over decades to millennia.”
- We can expect more severe extreme weather events.
Hurricanes have always been a part of life here in the Caribbean, and there is no known way to prevent them. But they are getting more severe. Can we really adapt to a Category 5 hurricane with 185 mile per hour winds and torrential rain? We must try, or like officials in Antigua and Barbuda in the face of Irma, be left to say “May God protect us all.”
These mega-boulders weighing 1000 tons each were tossed by waves from a super storm onto the Bahamas and Bermuda, and not by a tsunami as previously thought. This fascinating video was produced by Yale Climate Connections.