A matter of time...?
Recently here in my home wing of SC, we started our Wing Hurricane exercise...a Hurrex if you will. Training has been stepped up in lieu of recent events like Katrina, and frankly I'm glad to see the bit of extra motivation.
The most recent evolution of the exercise is as follows:
"Hurricane Cole has now strengthened to a Category Four storm with maximum sustained winds of 150 mph. This is an extremely dangerous storm and is now almost certainly on course for a South Carolina landfall. The storm has begun to move a little more rapidly to the northwest, and therefore a Sunday evening landfall now appears more likely than a Monday strike. The center of the strike cone is now has the storm making landfall closer to Georgetown, but there are still an awful lot of minor course changes that could happen and change the landfall dramatically. Additionally, Cole is a very large and powerful storm, so no matter where the strike is there are going to be adverse effects all along the coast and possibly well inland."
Currently we have aircrews tasked to flying evac routes while the ground team is simulating going door to door and informing residents of a mandatory evacuation as well as assisting in the evacuation of special needs people.
We've been lucky in the past few years here in SC in regards to hurricanes. It seems that the majority have either veered north to NC at the last moment, or plowed through Florida to the south.
NOAA NHC lists Hurricane direct hits on the mainland U.S. coastline and for individual states 1851-2004 on their site. South Carolina comes in as follows:
19 Cat 1's, 6 Cat 2's, 4 Cat 3's, 2 Cat 4's and 0 Cat 5's. That totals 31 storms with only 6 being major (between Cat 3-5). Hugo, which hit in 1989 as a Cat 4 did an estimated $7,000,000,000 in damage, but since then not much has really come our way. These recent exercises at wing lead me to wonder, how long can our luck last?
The most recent evolution of the exercise is as follows:
"Hurricane Cole has now strengthened to a Category Four storm with maximum sustained winds of 150 mph. This is an extremely dangerous storm and is now almost certainly on course for a South Carolina landfall. The storm has begun to move a little more rapidly to the northwest, and therefore a Sunday evening landfall now appears more likely than a Monday strike. The center of the strike cone is now has the storm making landfall closer to Georgetown, but there are still an awful lot of minor course changes that could happen and change the landfall dramatically. Additionally, Cole is a very large and powerful storm, so no matter where the strike is there are going to be adverse effects all along the coast and possibly well inland."
Currently we have aircrews tasked to flying evac routes while the ground team is simulating going door to door and informing residents of a mandatory evacuation as well as assisting in the evacuation of special needs people.
We've been lucky in the past few years here in SC in regards to hurricanes. It seems that the majority have either veered north to NC at the last moment, or plowed through Florida to the south.
NOAA NHC lists Hurricane direct hits on the mainland U.S. coastline and for individual states 1851-2004 on their site. South Carolina comes in as follows:
19 Cat 1's, 6 Cat 2's, 4 Cat 3's, 2 Cat 4's and 0 Cat 5's. That totals 31 storms with only 6 being major (between Cat 3-5). Hugo, which hit in 1989 as a Cat 4 did an estimated $7,000,000,000 in damage, but since then not much has really come our way. These recent exercises at wing lead me to wonder, how long can our luck last?
posted by Becks at 12:20
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