A few final thoughts on Hurricane Irma.

Satellite image of Irma. NOAA.

Hurricane Irma, now a tropical storm, dominated the news for a week. It was hyped up as the storm of the century and it did cause a huge amount of damage. But only 9 people died in the continental United States as of this post. Hurricane Harvey did more than that and it was a much weaker storm. So why did Irma end up killing so few people?

1. Irma hit Cuba pretty hard. This weakened the storm considerably. Hitting the island of Cuba cut off Irma's source of fuel, the warm ocean waters. Tellingly, the storm weakened all the way down from a category 5 storm to a category 3. After leaving Cuba the storm increased in power to a category 4 but if it had stayed a category 5, more people would have died. 

2. Irma didn't turn north as soon as expected. Instead of hitting Miami and going up the center of the state, it hit in the Florida Keys. It devastated the Keys but that weakened the storm a bit and by the time the storm made it to the more populated areas in central Florida. Hitting the Everglades, which are mostly unpopulated, sapped the storm of much of its strength. 

3. People actually listened to the evacuation orders. This was one of the biggest evacuations in human history and millions of people fled the state, especially those who would have been most effected by the storm. If more people had stayed more people would have died. This was a critical factor and kudos to the people of Florida who decided to leave. 

4. Unlike Hurricane Harvey, this storm moved rather quickly. It didn't just sit over the same region for days at a time, it moved and moved quickly. This greatly reduced the threat of flooding. Storm surge and flooding, not high winds, are the main killers in these kinds of storms. With the storm moving quickly, the flooding was not much of a threat. 

5. The government was fairly competent. Unlike other storms, like Harvey and Katrina, a full evacuation was ordered. Governor Rick Scott deserves a lot of credit for that. As far as I can tell the federal response seems to have been effective as well. I also want to give credit for President Donald Trump as he stayed very focused on the storms and was very good at publicizing the threat. 

All and all we probably dodged a bullet here. We avoided the worst case scenario where the eye of the storm went right up the gut of the state. Instead it went to the west and spent most of its energy on the Keys and the Everglades. 

And it's great that people actually evacuated. That more than anything else saved lives. I do fear that people will see the low death totals and think during the next storm they can simply wait out the storm. That would not be the correct lesson to take from this storm at all. 

All that being said, Irma was still a hugely devastating storm and right now the focus has to be the people still in it's path and the people that have had their homes damaged and destroyed. A hurricane doesn't end when the storm does as their is a time where civil services and power aren't available and people have to depend on themselves and their neighbors. Help is on the way but until then things will be rough...