A Writerâs Guide To Hurricanes, I Guess
I realized with a bit of chagrin that, while Iâve spent years bitching about how it drives me up the wall that nobody (in fandom or, in fact, mainstream media) has a goddamn clue how hurricanes work and yet insists on portraying them anywayâŠIâve never actually tried to help by explaining what theyâre actually like.
So, hereâs a genuine, non-sarcastic, good-faith attempt by a Floridian to help you guys who might want to write this stuff at some point understand it, just a little.
So here we go, chronologically in terms of the stormâs progress.
The storm itself is the least of it.
This is the thing non-hurricane places donâtâŠ.get.
You can see a hurricane coming. You can watch it. You have, in fact, no choice. I need to reiterate this.
You have no choice but to sit there and watch a hurricane coming.
Iâve actually talked a lot in another post about what that feels like, and why hurricane parties are a thing. But try to imagine what that feels. JustâŠtry. You have to sit there, for about a week, watching the wrath of God bear down on you.
You watch it come and you hope the path changes. You hope it veers off back into the Atlantic, of course, but you alsoâyou hope it hits somewhere else. You know wherever it goes people will die and you hope it goes somewhere else. And you feel kinda bad about it; but you also donât because these are just facts, this is a fact of hurricanes, they will go somewhere and people will die in that place and all of us hope it goes Somewhere Else and if it does, we know that the people Somewhere Else are praying frantically that it gets back on course and hits us instead and we understand.
(And when it does change course, when it doesnât hit you, you almost feelâŠ.cheated? Because you spent so much time and energy preparing and fearing and coming to terms and accepting and bracing and then itâdoesnât happen.
And the guilt of praying it would go Somewhere Else is nothing compared to being disgusted with yourself for actually feeling disappointed that you were spared the apocalypse this time.)
If you listen to weather reports on hurricanes youâve absolutely heard the phrasing âsustained winds of X miles per hour with gusts up to Yâ without really thinking about what that means.
Now, of course everyoneâs been in windy conditions. Itâs hard to put a finger on exactly how the hurricane isâŠ.different, so Iâm just going to describe what itâs like.
The wind always comes from one direction. Thereâs no being âknocked this way and thatâ or whatever; the wind comes from the direction the wind is coming from. Always.
(If youâre near where the center of the storm passes, this direction will slowly change as your position relative to the eye changes. But it changes over a matter of hoursâlike the angle of the sun.)
The wind is a constant, unrelenting force. Thereâs noâŠ.thereâs no dips in the wind. It never lessens, it only spikes and then returns to baseline. In a normal windstorm, no, itâs not that the wind ever stops blowing, butâŠthereâs an ebb and a flow. A hurricane is a wind tunnel in which every so often someone revs the engine and thereâs a few seconds of higher wind, but it never drops below where itâs set.
(The wind will snake under plywood and storm shutters; it will rip them clean off, if you havenât screwed them in properly. Screws, not nails. The wind makes deadly projectiles of anything not fastened down. Plywood and storm shutters can be broken, by anything travelling fast enough. It is standard procedure, if you have lawn furniture or anything else not secured that doesnât float, to carefully lower that furniture into a poolâif you have one. It will stay untouched, and wonât be flung through your neighborsâ plywood.)
This is why hurricanes take down so many trees, why they do so much structural damage. Buildings in hurricane zones are built to withstand high wind, and most trees in these areas can survive high wind too or they wouldnât have survived so long. But thereâs only so much that nature and engineering can do about sustained high winds, without a momentâs rest, for hours, unending, no respiteâŠ
In landfall footageâie, the stuff you see on the newsâyou likely see this effect in the palm trees-watch how instead of tossing, theyâre just bent. It never lets up. In the instances where a bent tree violent bounces back before bending again, trust meâthatâs not a letup in the wind speed. Thatâs the tree having been bent too far, and springing back from the sheer pressure on its internal structure. Thatâs the tree being stronger than the windâfor now
Itâs mostly not like the TV reports.
Thereâs a reason I referred to âlandfall footageâ above. News broadcasts, for a lot of reasons, focus on the storm at its worst. The highest storm surge, the highest winds, the most brutal damage, occurs where the eye wall first crosses from being over water to being over land.
(Rememberâby the time a storm âmakes landfall,â everything for miles around has been experiencing the storm for hours already. âLandfallâ is when the EYE of the storm first hits land, not when the storm âarrivesâ.)
But hurricanes areâŠvast. Look up satellite footage of hurricanes. Really look at it. Look at how much sheer area they cover.
Most places do not experience landfall-level disaster. Thatâs why, when people evacuateâwell, when residents evacuate, the tourists and recent transplants tend to panic harderâyouâre basically always evacuating to someplace that will still have vanished under that mass of swirling clouds. Evacuation sites are still inside the hurricane, but wind speed, storm surge, etcâeverything drops dramatically even a few miles from the eye.
On a related note, the eye itself rapidly starts shedding power the moment itâs no longer over open water. Generally, the simple act of making landfall instantly drops a hurricane at least one category in severity. Hurricanes are eldritch gods; they rise from the sea and from the sea they take their power. Cut off from it, they starve.
Do not think for a moment that just because youâre âonlyâ experiencing Cat 1 winds that this storm canât kill your ass dead. Do not underestimate what the death throes of a dying god can do.
Storm surge isnât high waves, and it isnât rain.
Storm surge is the actual sea level rising. The entire ocean being dragged onto land by the power of the storm.
Particularly wet and slow hurricanes mightârarelyâdrop enough rain to cause flooding. However, thatâs unusual; most places here can handle heavy rain. The rain isnât the problem.
(Slow hurricanes are killers on another level. Itâs everything Iâve already said about the unrelenting brutality of the wind, coupled with the fact thatâas, again, the vast majority of the storm has been raging for hours by the time it âmakes landfallâ, and hurricanes draw power from the Eye being over the waterâit now has hours upon hours of fully-fuelled destruction before it begins to weaken by being cut off from warm water. It doesnât weaken, it justâŠ.keeps going. And the storm surge is present that entire time.)
Iâm just gonna direct you to this NOAA diagram on how storm surge works.
The northeast quadrant is the strongest.
This isnât a proper subheading itâs just something I rarely see people not from Florida acknowledge.Â
No matter where the storm is coming from or what angle it hits atâthe northeast quadrant is the killer. You do everything in your power to avoid being caught northeast of the storm.
In hurricane-prone areas, the threat is felt year-round.
All the major intersections? Our stoplights arenât hung on wires from wooden polesâthose blow down too easily. Theyâre bolted to thick metal pipes, âhurricane-proofâ. Major roadways that are above floodlines are labelled as evacuation routes.
Hurricanes make their presence known long before the disaster begins.
You start to get âhurricane weatherâ daysâdaysâbefore it hits. The sun is out, the weather is fine except for aâŠ
Well, a constant, low-level breeze, with much less variation in angle and direction than usual, fewer gusts, but still primarily a natural breeze. And then you go outside and you look up at that cheerful blue sky and itâs already there.
Theyâre called cloud bands. You look up and the entire sky is just fluffy white clouds, racing at speed in one directionâŠ
(The breeze, in those early few days, is light. Present, but light. The clouds are always, always racing as if before a gale. Thereâs a pervasive, eerie wrongness about this, looking upâthe clouds moving much, much faster than the wind that should be driving them.)
A hurricane is not a thunderstorm.
This is the cardinal sin and the clearest, most common misconception. Hurricanes are not thunderstorms. In fact itâs actually very rare to have lightning or hear any thunder at all during a hurricane, compared to an average summer storm in hurricane-prone areas.
People often portray hurricanes as basicallyâŠ.the worst storm they can remember, but bigger, and badder, and worse. Hurricanes arenât just big and intense, theyâreâŠ.different. Theyâre something different.
Except that theyâre not.
You know when people talk about the wind howling? Think of the most intense storm youâve ever sat through. Think about the sound of the wind.The way it whistles through leaves. Hold that experience in your head.
Now forget it. This is different.
Hurricanes donât sound like that. Hurricanes areâŠ.
The sound a hurricane makes is a howl, yes. It makes palm fronds and grass steps and leaves whistle like a rapier scraped against a sheathe, yes. But you barely notice those shallow details, because the sound a hurricane makes is below that, stronger, more powerful.
Hurricanes are the entire world around you slowly and steadily fraying at the seams, and it moans, low and deep, agonized and hungry, and it never stops. Never. Not until itâs over.
Hurricanes are a world ending.
The storm passes, and the hurricane has only begun.
Do you think people stock up as heavily as they do, with generators and nonperishables and such, forâwhat, for a few hours of wind and rain, however alive?
Because once the tempest is past, now you have toâŠexist.
You will not have power. If you were in a very, very lightly-affected area, you might have cell service. Most of your neighbors have evacuated. Many roads canât be used because theyâre washed out, or there are trees or power lines down across them.
Itâs very common to lose water pressure. Common practice in hurricane-prone areas is to fill your bathtub with water before the stormâso that, when you lose water pressure, you can use a bucket to flush your toilet. Because those conditions, assuming youâre in an area that can be repaired and not rebuilt, can take weeks.
Weeks without running water, a flushable toilet. That gets grim fast. You brace for the storm. You prepare for what follows.
A hurricane is an eldritch abomination.
Sitting through a hurricane is not like sitting through a bad storm or like sitting through a tornado, which is fast and unstoppable but then itâs over like it never existed save for the destruction left behind.
In order to get a clearer understanding of just how much the universe is vast, how much it does not, cannot, even notice you enough to want you dead because you are so small it would not comprehend you as possessing an existence if it triedâyou would have to go to space.
And while the world moans around you and something out there, alive, growls at a frequency you canât hear but you feelâyou donât cuddle for warmth during a hurricane. You just donât.
You keep the generator running outside in the lee of the house where it wonât kill you all with gas fumes, connected via wires that snake around through a cracked door somewhere it wonât get blown open. You make sure it doesnât run out of fuel, that it doesnât get water blown into anything important. You use it to power a TV firstâto keep the weather report on. You power lights second, if itâs a decent one. You canât afford one powerful enough to run your refrigerator; you ate the ice cream before this started.
You play games. Weâre human; itâs what we do. We play games in the face of our own helplessness. But while you play, you listen. You canât not.
Itâs always there. The world creaks on its hinges. You feel the edges threatening to dissolve. If you sit for a moment and are quiet, that ever-present moan is there, something ancient and powerful on a scale outside your comprehension. There is no cozy comfort of being bunkered down safe against the storm, not here.
There is no âsafeâ against this. You sit still and quiet and bear witness.
And when the sun rises in the aftermath, youâre surprised to find the worldâeven a wrecked and altered worldâstill exists. It shouldnât. You were there when it ended.
Andâand I cannot emphasize this enoughâthereâs no fucking thunder.