Incoming!

[camwyn]

His name is Tropical Storm Isidore, and as of 3:30 PM Eastern Standard Time he was 110 miles west-southwest of Kingston, Jamaica. His current track indicates a northwestern line of likely movement, and he's looking like he'll make hurricane strength sometime Friday morning. Red Cross chapters in the Southeastern United States are advised to get themselves ready, in case he makes landfall.

Get out your waders, folks.

(Yeah, yeah, not everyone reading this is necessarily from anywhere geographically near the places this is relevant. Sorry, guys. I'm hoping for a drought-ender here, with as little harm and destruction as possible.)

Comments

[sdelmonte]

Not to make fun of storms that are possibly the most destructive that nature can foist upon the world but...

These names. Who chooses them? I have been waiting years for a Hurricane Alex - you'd think there would be one. We get Alessandro and Alejandro and Allan and Albert and Alfred and Alistair but never Alex.

And then we get Isidore. I hear that name and think of old Jewish men whose immigrant mothers wanted something Amercian to replace Isaac. It's a name that is as old-fashioned as any I know. But the weather gurus chose it. Weird.

[camwyn]

There's a committee at the UN that chooses them, I believe. The original custom of naming hurricanes came from weather reporters who weren't doing too well with 'the storm at X longitude Y latitude' during particularly active seasons in the '40's and '50's. Somewhere along the way they standardized them, and they have the lists laid out several years in advance.

Be grateful. They choose names from lists of ethnicities vaguely appropriate to the region - Pacific hurricanes get Asiatic/Polynesian/generally more exotic names, like Iniki, whereas Atlantic ones get mostly Hispanic and French names. They had originally planned to use 'Israel' as the I-hurricane for this year, since it was used as a Hispanic male name, but the prospect of headlines like ISRAEL DESTROYS JAMAICA and ISRAEL FLOODS SOUTHERN UNITED STATES didn't go over too well. So - hey, look, Spanish saint named Isidore... sure, that works.

(I still wish they'd use the name pronounced 'hey-SOOS' for a storm. "Jesus Comes To Florida - Thousands Evacuated" - now there's a headline, but far as I know, they never even considered that.)

[alemya.livejournal.com]

Gnarf gnarowl yowl hiss spit bitch.

Probably looking at it hitting South Carolina and North Carolina coasts, with a bit of Georgia and VA thrown in? Florida, too, of course.

Well, we need the rain. Growl.

[pelogrande.livejournal.com]

Hurricanes don't perturb me bit. I've lived in Miami all my life. Was here for Andrew ten years ago. We lived just on the north side of the eye, so we didn't actually get a lull but got some of the worst weather whipped up. Our patio roof, which faced to the east, was ripped off completely. We found pieces of it in at least eight separate yards.

Our carport (think a garage with no door and only half-height walls on two of the remaining sides) roof also started to rip off, but was held down when the monstrous ficus in our front yard fell on it. Ficus have lots of roots, but they're all rather shallow. The tree was still rooted, and created a hollow five or six foot tall hill with its roots, the sod still pretty much intact across it.

One of the ceiling fans on our patio, the one with the metal blades, was found vertical in our neighbor's front yard, one of the blades buried two feet into the ground.

Afterwards I went to live with my grandmother for two weeks. Came back and our four-person family lived in a travel trailer for several months, and eventually moved to a mobile home placed on our property. The house was ruined far beyond repair, and we were supposed to rebuild. But the contractor, who had been honest up until this point, took our money and ran. We sued but didn't get a dime back.

We've moved twice since, and we're still barely a mile from that house. Anything that calls itself a hurricane has some big shoes to fill.

[firestrike.livejournal.com]

So, have you been heckling Isidore?

[camwyn]

Much as I wish I could, I'm having trouble coming up with proper mockery for it. I mean, Isidore just doesn't sound dopey, at least not to me. It's an odd name, sure, but it's not like it's Floyd or something. One guy named Isidore became patron saint of farmers, and another became patron saint of the Internet; for an odd name that's just cool.

It might be a while before the drought gets fixed at this rate.