--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained this week comes from TransferWise. It's a different, reimagined, cheaper, faster way to send money internationally. TransferWise's borderless account lets you hold over 40 currencies at once and convert between them whenever you like. You can try it for free at TransferWise.com slash today or download the app.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Angela Fritz, meteorologist, deputy weather editor at The Washington Post. Hurricane Florence is headed for the East Coast. How's it looking?
--:-- Angela Fritz: Really catastrophic. Usually these hurricanes that develop way out in the Atlantic, they end up recurving out to sea. This one, completely different. And unfortunately, it looks like it's really narrowing in on the Carolinas.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So we're talking Wednesday morning. I know this situation is constantly shifting, but where is it expected to make landfall as of right now?
--:-- Angela Fritz: Here's what I like to say. I don't want to focus on landfall. Play along with me here. Sure. The range of impacts on this thing are going to be so broad that landfall is going to be pretty arbitrary. And landfall is really specific. It's where the eye comes ashore.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There isn't going to be some like, oh, I can see landfall is happening. This thing happened, this like switch flipped and landfall is occurring. The storm surge is going to start ramping up on Thursday. The rain is going to become torrential on Thursday. Winds are going to start bringing down trees. Power outages are going to start Thursday.
--:-- Angela Fritz: And I'd rather just talk about impacts and duration of impacts. But everyone wants to know about landfall. So in the Carolinas, on that border, sometime on Friday, probably Friday morning.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Listen, you're the meteorologist. I'll talk about whatever you want to talk about. So let's talk about impacts and duration of impacts.
--:-- Angela Fritz: All right. There are a couple of things that we've been trying to focus on. First is that, you know, the storm surge could be catastrophic, especially north of the center. So where the winds are coming onshore, that's where the winds are pushing the ocean onto land. And that's what the storm surge is.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's different than like flash flooding or river flooding. It could be higher than nine feet in some places. So taller than the tallest man, you know, above ground. Yao Ming.
--:-- Angela Fritz: It's hard to imagine, you know, so you have to kind of think about it that way. On top of that, you've got the winds, which are going to bring down trees. They are going to damage houses. And we're going to be dealing with power outages, too. And they will be for days, possibly weeks, depending on when people can get back in there and get power restored.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And this is chiefly in the Carolinas. Yes, because that's where most of the impacts are going to be focused. This is really looking like the southeast Hurricane Harvey.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Good evening and thanks for joining us. Once mighty Hurricane Harvey is weakening and drifting slowly but dangerously over land. Last year Harvey came ashore in Texas and just kind of lingered there for days. Forecasters warn the storm is still capable of generating catastrophic flooding as far as 100 miles inland.
--:-- Angela Fritz: In a similar way, Florence is going to make landfall and right as it's coming ashore, it's just going to slow down to a crawl. And that doesn't mean that the winds are going to slow down and the rain is going to stop. All of those things are going to keep going, but the forward speed is going to be really slow.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it's just going to kind of hover. It looks like rainfall totals could be over 20 inches, over 30 inches maybe, especially in a band along the coast and maybe two or three counties inland. That's going to drain out through the rivers and the streams. So you'll have inland flooding and flash flooding.
--:-- Angela Fritz: So we're looking at kind of like a multi-day disaster. And that's kind of what we've got to get people prepared for. The president says the country's well prepared. And he also said yesterday that I think that Puerto Rico was an incredible unsung success.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: With, of course, the knowledge that 3,000 people died. So is the country prepared by like pre-Trump standards where 3,000 people dying was an abject tragedy? I don't know what standards in post-Trump world we're working on, but I've covered a lot of hurricanes and Maria was a nightmare.
--:-- Angela Fritz: We're trying to avoid that nightmare scenario again. And I think that we can avoid that nightmare scenario if at least because we had so much warning in this. A bunch of states of emergency have been declared.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Who has declared a state of emergency thus far?
--:-- Angela Fritz: So the actual governors of the states have to declare a state of emergency. And what that means is it triggers paperwork basically that lands on the president's desk. It's a request for money. It's a request for aid from the federal government.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. And then it's up to the president to sign or decline that request. So it's not so much like a declaration to the people of a state. It's more of a communication with the president.
--:-- Angela Fritz: Yeah. And I think that's something that kind of is maybe not translated right in the news because you say, oh, you know, a state of emergency. What do I do? But that's more of just a flag to D.C. to say, hey, we might need help.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The forecast places North Carolina in the bullseye of Hurricane Florence. And the storm is rapidly getting stronger.
--:-- Angela Fritz: Okay, so who's who's declared one? North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Georgia, pretty much if you're a governor, and you're looking at this thing coming and you see any potential for it to affect your state, you're going to be thinking, I might want to write a letter to the White House.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So that aside, you've got actual warnings, actual evacuation warnings happening in at least the Carolinas, if not elsewhere. What does that mean? Where do you go? What do you do? What do you do with your house, your apartment, whatever?
--:-- Angela Fritz: Yeah. And evacuation started Monday. Plus, we don't know where the heaviest rainfall is and people are really confused. I don't know where to go.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In the old days of hurricanes, you would just go inland to get away from the storm surge and to get away from the worst winds and you would be okay.
--:-- Angela Fritz: Right. Now, Florence is going to potentially rain multiple feet. If you need to evacuate inland into the Carolinas, make sure that you're not in a flood zone. We're going to see rivers and streams flooding. We could see reservoirs overflowing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The whole region has seen a ton of rain in the past couple of months. And so we're already kind of really saturated. So it's not going to take much for the reservoirs to start filling.
--:-- Angela Fritz: The worst situation to be in is to evacuate into another disaster.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Coming up, hurricanes are cataclysmic, but we'd be in even bigger trouble without them. This is Today Explained.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hello? Cousin Kevin. Hey, hello, Sean. How are you?
--:-- Kevin: I'm good, I'm good. Are you at home? Are you in Austria?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm in Vienna. I'm in my apartment in Vienna.
--:-- Kevin: I mean, the one I share with friends. It's great to hear your voice, cousin, Kevin. Are you under the weather?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I'm a bit sick. Yeah, I got sick yesterday.
--:-- Kevin: Yeah, I'm sick too. Yeah, I got sick yesterday.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I've got some great news to cheer you up. You're also sick.
--:-- Kevin: No, I'm not sick, but our podcast is being supported by TransferWise this week. It's a app that you can download on your phone, and it makes it really easy to send money internationally.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, okay. So you know just feel free to download TransferWise at TransferWise.com slash today where you can get a free trial and send me money anytime you want isn't that great?
--:-- Kevin: That sounds amazing. It will be when you send me that money.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Another thing before I go did you know Vox has a TV show on Netflix, uh, Explained right?
--:-- Kevin: Oh, you did know. Yeah, I've heard it but I didn't watch it. How did you know I saw it on Netflix?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I didn't, yeah. Oh, so it's like it's on your list somewhere, but you haven't done it yet.
--:-- Kevin: Yeah, exactly. Oh, I got great news for you. Oh, yeah, please drop it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This week's episode that comes out today, it's about music, and people at home don't know this about you, but you're a rapper out there in Vienna, yeah?
--:-- Kevin: Yeah, I did some rapping. Could you give us like a verse real quick?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, all right. Guess the video to be Ben and Jerry's in the Rotten Telephone cellar, Katy Perry, Feuerwerke flogen. Wir versteckten uns vor den verurteilenden Augen des Publikums. Leider hatte ich nur einen Löffel. Den teilten wir uns bis zur bitteren Erschöpfung der Eiskrim verräte. Leberpastete und Play-Doh-Knete wurde verteilt auf der Fete.
--:-- Kevin: Oh, all right. There you go.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Angela, you mentioned a lot of sort of uncertainty with how this hurricane is going to play out. Like scale of one to 10, how good are we at predicting hurricanes at this point? I mean, my phone can like tell me what song is playing at a noisy Taco Bell. We just launched a rocket at the sun. But are we still bad at predicting hurricanes?
--:-- Angela Fritz: Right. In a lot of ways we really good at it. The fact that we even know that it exists is kind of magic. In advance a week in advance. Right. The fact that we have you know satellites out in space that can show us exactly where it is and what it looks like and that we know how strong it is. I mean, it's like voodoo.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But at the same time, I can't tell you exactly how strong it's going to be, and I can't tell you exactly where it's going to make landfall, even though it's less than 48 hours away. So in terms of, you know, scale of 1 to 10, maybe a 6 or a 7, that's not a great grade.
--:-- Angela Fritz: And why is it that there's this sort of gap in hurricane comprehension? We did a lot of research on hurricanes in the 80s and the 90s, and then it just kind of trailed off. And one of the big gaps that we left hanging is things like eye wall replacement cycles.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Eye wall replacement cycles. The eye of the hurricane isn't a static thing. It actually, it forms, and then it dissipates, and then a new one generates. And then it also kind of dissipates and then a new one generates. So it's actually a cycle over and over.
--:-- Angela Fritz: So if there was a planet Earth with no continents and it was just very warm ocean and a hurricane was out there just spinning and spinning, this hurricane would just have constant eye wall replacement cycles. It would generate new eyes over and over and over again. And as that happens it strengthens and then it weakens and then it strengthens and it weakens kind of like a figure skater pulling in his arms really tight when the eye is forming and then stretching them out when it's dissipating.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Why and how this happens is not totally understood and so because of that we can't predict it and because of that we also can't write that into computer weather models.
--:-- Angela Fritz: One of the most fascinating things the reason I wanted to study hurricanes is they actually act as energy transfers so they take heat and energy from the tropics and they transfer them to the poles. So they balance the energy of the earth. Otherwise, the tropics would get really, really, really hot. And like the Arctic would be really, really, really cold. And our planet would be uninhabitable. Total shitshow.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We would not recognize it at all. So hurricanes are like a balancing force in nature. Yes, we need them very, very much, actually.
--:-- Angela Fritz: I had no idea. Yes. Here, I thought they were just bad. They are bad, and we need them. We need hurricanes. Necessary evil.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But people still try to fight them. Yes. Tell me a bit about that.
--:-- Angela Fritz: Ugh. We first figured out that hurricanes were going to be a problem in 1900 when the Galveston hurricane made landfall in Texas and killed about 10,000 people. And this was, like, early in America's history, and people were like, oh, God.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But in the 1940s, guys at GE, General Electric, decided they had the answer. For the first time in all history, there is now open to man the possibility of exerting some control over the weather. Probably the most remarkable achievement of the year.
--:-- Angela Fritz: They were going to fly some B-17 bombers over a hurricane and drop a bunch of shaved ice into it. Yeah, that's the correct reaction to this. Sounds delicious. Yum.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that was going to weaken the hurricane. That was the hypothesis.
--:-- Angela Fritz: Hypothesis. What's even more comical about this is the amount that they dropped 180 pounds. That's a lot of shaved ice. That's not a lot of shaved ice. It's a large man. It's not even a large man. It's an average man worth of shaved ice. That's not a lot of shaved ice. No, it's not.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I take it back. And not only did it do nothing. Probably the most remarkable achievement of the year. We know now, of course, that it was never going to do anything.
--:-- Angela Fritz: Yeah. But instead of curving out to sea, which was what they thought this particular storm was going to do, it turned toward the southeast, made landfall in Savannah, and actually ended up killing one person.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So back then they looked at it and thought that they were to blame. They thought that they made this storm strengthen turn into the southeast coast and kill a person. With their 180 pounds of shaved ice. With their 180 pounds of shaved ice.
--:-- Angela Fritz: The reality. The reality, of course, is that they did nothing and this was a fool's errand. But on the other hand, it's like this is science, right? This is throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's just funny to look back at these things and roll your eyes. Okay, well, fast forwarding, you know, 80 years. Now that we know that hurricanes are a necessary evil, are people still trying to fight them? Are people still trying to slow them down?
--:-- Angela Fritz: I don't know if trying is the right word. There are still people who are coming up with ideas. There's people who think that we should be putting more effort into figuring out how to, you know, either weaken them or stop them from forming or to push them away from the coast.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But if we're going to spend money on something, we should spend money on making sure that when it does make landfall that we can survive it. And we can do that. And I actually think that it would take less money and it would have much less environmental impact than trying to modify the weather and the climate, which obviously we've not been successful at so far.
--:-- Angela Fritz: So what tools do we have to that end to make the coast safer? Yeah, that's a good question. And a lot of people are looking into it, but, you know, anything that allows a 12-foot storm surge to occur along the coast without inundating homes and businesses would be a good thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, Louisiana, for example, has this really wonderful natural marshland that naturally takes care of a storm surge before it gets to populated areas. And if we can maintain that, then it actually provides a good barrier when storms make landfall.
--:-- Angela Fritz: So if you can preserve nature and preserve the natural barriers that we already have, it would be very helpful. I think the U.S. can do this very well. I think we need to be smarter and think about these things before they hit. Then we can nail it every time. And save for things like the levees breaking in Hurricane Katrina. There are going to be times when it is unavoidable. But for the most part, I think we can avoid the worst.
--:-- Angela Fritz: Angela Fritz is a member of the Washington Post's Capital Weather Game. I'm Sean Rameswaram. This is Today Explained. And Today Explained would like to hear from you, especially if you're a Catholic. We want to hear how the recent grand jury report out of Pennsylvania has affected your attitude towards the church or even your faith. Please send a short voice memo to todayexplained at vox.com. All one word, todayexplained at vox.com. And include your name, location, and how you feel. You can also remain totally anonymous if you want. Just let us know.
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--:-- Angela Fritz: Hi, my name is Angela Fritz, and I'm a meteorologist at the Washington Post. We're getting word that there are animal shelters in the Carolinas, especially on the coast, that have animals in need of your help. They are not being adopted. And if they aren't adopted before this hurricane hits, there is a possibility that they will need to be euthanized. So if you can get in there to these shelters and pick up these adorable dogs, cats, grab them. They are lovely. They need your help. Go get these animals so we can save their lives. Thank you.
