Eep. Stay safe. You’re in NC right? How close to the water are you?
We’re a few hours from the coast. My parents live near the beach though, so we’re keeping a close watch. It’s still a long ways away.
Category 5 now.
A lot of models still show it taking a hard turn north but more and more and showing it heading to Florida. A worst case would be it goes around Florida then turns north, staying just offshore while following the coast. That would push an unprecedented storm surge all along the west coast of Florida and a couple models show it doing just that. Florida has already declared a state of emergency which should give people an idea how serious this is with the storm still about a week away.
So Irma is still a cat 5 with 185mph winds.
The disturbance I talked about earlier has developed into a Tropical storm so it’s been named as well. Jose has a similar track as Irma’s initial predictions and is expected to become a hurricane as well so I’m sure we’ll be watching this one close.
@bing @Onyx_Z32 Can you break the Irma stuff out to a separate thread?
If Josh doesn’t get to it I will when I’m back home
St Maarten is fucked. Webcam as the storm hit, before it went offline.
i was in NC for the last couple days and stuck at RDU all last night. Irma was on everyone’s minds. I guess many parts of FL are evacuated or evacuating and i overhead dozens of people trying to get out or calling others trying to get them to get out.
it was quite surreal even a few states up. could not imagine what it’s like to be there.
A close friend of mine lives in Holly Springs, NC. They’re 100 miles from the coast so not a storm surge area or anything. When he saw the spaghetti models shift late last night showing it more and more likely to be a glancing blow to Florida and then slam into SC he decided to stock up. He bought the LAST cases of water at his local Walmart at 10pm last night. I was pretty surprised there was already that much of a run on supplies 100 miles inland in NC.
People being prepared is never a bad thing though. If you stock up on water you can always use it if the storm isn’t as bad or misses entirely. Same with stocking up on food or gasoline.
Small world - I was in RDU yesterday as well. Nearly got stuck in BWI due to lightning.
lol… man, i was looking around RDU and BWI to see if i recognized anyone. We were at RDU for hours but since the BWI-BUF flight was also delayed we actually made it in.
@JayS i was in Holly Springs yesterday too.
damn y’all should have hit me up for a beer haha
I would say that people here aren’t panicking just yet. We’re still around a week out for any impact, regardless of how it goes. Even our local news forecasters have refused to speculate on what might occur.
Hurricanes have hit Raleigh very hard over the years though. Just because we’re not coastal doesn’t mean they can’t devastate us. Hurricane Fran hit Raleigh 20 years ago and caused devastating damage.
Luckily for me, I live only like 1/4 mile from my power substation, so even if we get hit hard, my power will be back on quickly.
The most accurate analysis I’ve seen this season has been from Joe Bastardi: https://www.weatherbell.com/irma-feed
His daily update is quite good. He had Harvey nailed almost a week out when most people were still scratching their nuts. FYI Weatherbell deep analytics you have to pay for, and their predictions are used by oil companies, etc. who need the best weather information they can get.
I’m supposed to be in Miami soon… we’ll see :eek4:
no shit, were you on the 5:10 out of RDU?
I was on the 8:00pm with Southwest after my 7pm with AA was cancelled. We were in the terminal at 5pm having Mexican food though. The quesadillas were bomb.
CNN reporting that 90% of the island of Barbuda is destroyed.
doesnt seem like there was really much there but wow is that not a good sign of things to come.
This gave me chills. Barbuda was completely cut off from the rest of the world.
Barbuda is a poor island nation. Think the really shitty parts of the Caribbean you only see when you take an excursion well off resort. Nothing but poorly built one and two story houses with no building codes what so ever. A category 5 hurricane with 185mph sustained winds and gusts in the 220+ range rolled right over the top of it. That’s as terrible as it can get. Most of the time these places only survive hurricanes because the worst they get hit with is the outer bands. They live basically on the probability that they’re really small and the chances of a hurricane hitting them directly are pretty slim.
^ See that little island right smack in the middle of the eye? That’s Barbuda.
FYI listening to the news people are reporting this as the “strongest hurricane ever” … which is NOT true. Irma is the strongest hurricane in the Atlantic Basin. Not the strongest in the Caribbean or Gulf, or the strongest ever.
It’s a technicality but you know people out there who are less informed are just drinking the media laziness. I won’t say fake news because it’s not a political thread 
This Delta flight. They made it out: http://miami.cbslocal.com/2017/09/06/hurricane-irma-delta-flight-puerto-rico/
Keeping US Virgin Islands property in the corner of my eye… depressed economy, similar to PR. People in over their heads.
Thanks Al Gore!