Saturday, October 24, 2015

The Astonishingly Light Damage Caused By Hurricane Patricia

No deaths and few injuries.
Here's Manzanillo's port director quoted by Reuters as published in Business Insurance:
"We didn't have any major damage," he said. "Sure, gates, doors, some windows, volatile or light roofs, that sort of thing, but nothing that was a risk to our operations."
The combination of the landfall being between major cities-rather than directly on one-and the mountains immediately inland contributed greatly to the low volume of damage.

And the main story, from FiveThirtyEight:

A Hugely Powerful Hurricane Did Surprisingly Little Damage
Hurricane Patricia was a monster. Thanks to very warm ocean waters aided by a strong El Niño, Hurricane Patricia had unprecedented maximum sustained winds of 200 mph and low pressure of 879 mb1 at its peak Friday. Then Patricia one-upped itself and did something that record hurricanes rarely do: it held on to Category 5 winds (greater than 157 mph) when it made landfall Friday night.

Most hurricane records occur when a storm is way out in the ocean. For all the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, which was a Category 5 storm at its peak, it had slowed to a Category 3 by the time it made landfall on the Gulf Coast, with sustained winds of 125 mph.

Patricia hit near Cuixmala, Mexico, as a Category 5, with winds estimated to be 165 mph and a low pressure of 920 mb. Fortunately, the landfall area, on the Pacific coast, was sparsely populated, and the storm quickly began losing power. Within three hours, it was down to 130 mph, and though it caused property destruction, there were no reports of deaths as of Saturday morning.

Patricia became only the eighth hurricane in recorded history to make landfall in the United States or Mexico at Category 5 status. It was only the second to do so as a hurricane that formed in the Pacific Ocean. It also now holds the record for having the highest wind speeds of any hurricane to hit the United States/Mexico coast from the Pacific Ocean.

Here’s a look at those other seven hurricanes that reached landfall in the United States or Mexico as a Category 5....MUCH MORE
Yesterday's Patricia posts:
"Stunning, historic, mind-blogging, and catastrophic: Hurricane Patrica Hits 200 mph"

National Hurricane Center: "...POTENTIALLY CATASTROPHIC HURRICANE PATRICIA MOVING NORTHWARD TOWARD LANDFALL IN SOUTHWESTERN MEXICO..."

The National Hurricane Center Calls Patricia "THE STRONGEST EASTERN NORTH PACIFIC HURRICANE ON RECORD."