HURRICANE MICHAEL MAKES LANDFALL OVER PANHANDLE at 155 MPH

Day 160, and all is quiet in Lower Puna.

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Conversely, Hurricane Michael, at 155 MPH, made landfall, with the middle of his eye just east of Panama City.  Category 5, a super hurricane, starts at 157 MPH.  This is a bit confusing, but a Super Typhoon is one that reaches 150 MPH.  However, a Super Hurricane in the Atlantic begins at 157 MPH.

Tropical storm damage will occur over a swath just south of Atlanta and over Raleigh, with entrance into the Atlantic Ocean on Friday.  Michael hit a low of 919 mb pressure, below Hurricane Katrina's 920 mb.  Twenty million people will somehow be affected.  If there is any plus to Michael, he continues to travel at a relative quick speed of 14 MPH.

This might well be the strongest hurricane to strike this region since Hurricane Camille in August of 1969, which reached 175 MPH on land at a pressure of 900 mb.  The lower the more devastating.

Pearl and I had this close encounter with Camille nearly half a century ago.  Earlier that summer, we had accompanied Marie and John Laing on a road trip from Baton Rouge to Florida taking the coastal road past Biloxi.  Three years later, Pearl's mom and dad were with us when we noticed that the road by Biloxi had disappeared.  Here are before and after photos of Hotel Richelieu.

If you had clicked on that above link, you would have learned that:

• There is something called the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, which is still in use, but ready to now be modified.  In 1969 Bob Simpson (Herbert Saffir to the right) was director of the U.S. National Hurricane Center.  Simpson had quite a life, first surviving that devastating Corpus Christi hurricane at the age of six, then teaching music during the Great Depression, working as a meteorology researcher in Hawaii, leading to a PhD in meteorology form the University Chicago...passing away in 2014 at the age of 102.

• Simpson was personally involved in the creation of NOAA's Project Stormfury, which was the seeding of hurricanes to diminish storms.  There is circumstantial evidence of Camille strengthening instead of weakening.  The controversy is that till today, NOAA insists that they did not tamper with Camille.  They officially said they worked on Hurricane Debbie, which had formed just after Camille, and this effort, indeed, did weaken Debbie.  This concept was abandoned in 1983 after Cuba and China complained that the U.S. was weaponizing hurricanes.  Why would they complain if silver idodide is supposed to weaken these cyclonic storms?   Someday the truth will come out. 

• Camille was named after Simpson's daughter.
• Interestingly enough, Joanne Simpson, whose third marriage was to Bob Simpson, was also for a while director of Project Storm Fury.  She was the first female to gain a PhD in meteorology, at the University of Chicago.  (Simpsons to the left in photo)

We spent two nights in Panama City because we had plans to board a party boat for red snapper.  The day before we dropped by the pier to investigate the location.  Incredibly enough, someone on the boat we were supposed to catch caught a sunfish, which got mad, ran into the craft and sank it!  We were placed on a similar ship the next day and caught a lot of red snapper, which we had as sashimi in our motel.  That is a sunfish in this photo.

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