REAWAKENING
Matthew’s romp refreshed old fears and raised new worries for a state that was becoming unfamiliar with major storms.
As Florida buckles down for the upcoming hurricane season, it will do so knowing from last year that forecasting remains uncertain, Residents are less tolerant of discomfort and social media can slip from vital to detrimental.
Florida had not experienced a hurricane strike for more than a decade until Hermine crossed the Panhandle in early September.
The Atlantic hurricane season in 2016 had 15 named storms and 7 hurricanes, including Matthew, which peaked as a Category 5, grazing the east coast in October, shredding beaches and flooding St. Augustine.
“Learning to become a more compassionate government was one of the big takeaways from Matthew,” said St. Augustine fire chief Carlos Aviles. “We still have a lot of residents who are displaced. There are lot of people living in travel trailers in their driveways.”
James Franklin, chief of the National Hurricane Center’s hurricane-specialist unit, said a top lesson from Matthew was about inland flooding.
He said that while warnings of wind strength and storm surge are focused on by forecasters and media, “one hazard that doesn’t get a lot of attention is inland rainfall.”
Many of more than two dozen deaths in North Carolina attributed to Matthew, he said, were from inland flooding.
“You have a lot of people lose their lives and largely because they went into areas that were unsafe,” Franklin said.
Florida’s experience with Matthew centered on days of fear when the storm grew in ferocity as its direction remained unclear.
Blogging soon after the storm, meteorology director Jeff Masters at the online Weather Underground weather service said: “Forecasters and computer models have made some real headway in the devilishly difficult challenge of predicting rapid hurricane intensification.”
He noted, however, that Matthew “rocketed in strength” from Category 1 to Category 5 in a day, defying forecasts it would take three days to reach Category 3.
Masters said recently that Matthew showed “we still have a long way to go before we can reliably predict rapid intensification.”
Franklin agreed that Floridians should be aware of difficulties in predicting rapid storm growth.
“They are potentially very, very deadly if that kind of strengthening occurs in the last 24 to 36 hours before a landfall,” he said.
Franklin said better forecasts for intensification will require more detailed analysis of factors influencing a storm, such as the interplay of thunderstorms.
Better observation tools would include specialized satellites, airborne radars and more: “I’m not sure all of the instruments have been invented,” Franklin said.
Even the more reliable forecasting of a storm’s path is something Floridians should be cautious about, said Bryan Norcross, senior hurricane specialist with the Weather Channel.
As Matthew showed, he said, a slight turn of a storm churning
parallel with a coast can shift the worst effects hundreds of miles.
Early forecasts for the northbound Matthew showed it striking Florida, but it veered east slightly and missed the state by dozens of miles.
“The worst of wind stayed offshore,” said Norcross, who recently published “My Hurricane Andrew Story,” a book about the 1992 storm that ravaged South Florida. “Yet the forecast by any measure was still an excellent forecast.”
He said Matthew underscored the price of living in a vulnerable state.
“You are just going to have to accept the fact that you are going to have do uncomfortable and perhaps expensive things now and then to stay safe,” Norcross said.
“Modern technology is never going to absolutely be able to tell us absolutely where the worst of the storm is going to affect the coastline.”
Also revealed by Hermine and Matthew was less patience among Floridians for recovery, said Bryan Koon, Florida Division of Emergency Management director.
“What we’ve noticed was that peoples’ patience with power restoration is not what is was during the ’04 and ’05 hurricane seasons,” Koon said, referring to the years of Charley, Ivan, Katrina and Wilma.
“As society has changed and you can instantly know where your package from Amazon is or your Uber is, it’s no longer acceptable to be told ‘power is coming back on in a week or so.’ ”
However, utilities have stepped up in the past decade with tougher, smarter grids that communicate where outages occur, Koon said.
“The outages from Matthew were less than what they would have been 10 years ago and were recovered more quickly,” he said.
Florida responders are getting better at communicating, he said, through television, newspapers and social media.
That’s essential, for example, for a resident or business considering whether to buy a generator or relocate — or whether to wait for restored power because they have been told when that will happen,” Koon said.
Aviles, the St. Augustine fire chief, said that while his city had a hurricane plan, which included the difficult choice of abandoning fire stations potentially struck by storm surge, that plan didn’t cover everything.
“Learning to use social media was a big one,” Aviles said.
It’s important to have accurate messages and photos ready in advance because “you can’t get information out fast enough for people,” Aviles said.
People want “information instantly,” he said, and false or dramatic reports provided by others on social media can fill the void quickly.
“The next thing you know it all spirals out of control,” Aviles said.