Florida High School Gets Things SO Wrong During Tornado Threat Students Seriously Endangered

This photo posted to social media last week appears to
show students evacuated to a large free standing room
in a Florida school during a tornado warning. This type
of room is the most dangerous if a tornado hit. The students 
should have been in smaller, windowless interior rooms.

Did a Florida school put a bunch of students in danger last week during a tornado warning?

Judging from some posts on social media, they might have. 

 I do have to a disclaimer, because, Duh! not everything you read in social media is true.  

Not all the facts are in, and I haven't yet seen a response from the school in question. And I don't have it all confirmed through a reliable new source.  But the person who posted the info at least seems at least somewhat credible. 

Given what I saw on X, formerly Twitter the other day, if true, this school put students in the worst possible,  most dangerous place in the school during the tornado warning. And they should have known better. 

Twisters swept through parts of Florida lastWednesday night and Thursday, causing damage from Clearwater on the state's west coast to north of Daytona Beach on the east coast.

The National Weather Service issued numerous tornado warnings, including one for a location north of Tampa.  One student at a high school that was under the tornado warning, showed students evacuated to what appears to be a gymnasium or large common room, facing the walls as a "safety" evacuation.

The student, a weather enthusiast who goes by JakeWx said he knows - like most people in tornado prone areas - that a gymnasium or similar big, open room is the worst place in a school to shelter in a tornado. 

In its tornado safety outline for schools, NOAA has this to say:

DANGER - GYMS and AUDITORIUMS: Large, open-span areas, such as gymnasiums, auditoriums and most lunchrooms can be very dangerous even in weak tornadoes, and should not be used for sheltering people. This sort of room has inherent structural weaknesses and lack of roof support, making them especially prone to collapse with weaker wind loading that more compact areas of the same school building."

NOAA says there's no one size fits all tornado safety protocol for schools, but students in general should be rushed to ground floor or basement rooms away from windows and exterior walls. Interior rest rooms are often good places to shelter. That's what JakeWx thought when his school was under a tornado warning.

"When I tried to go to a bathroom and bring other people with me, they threatened to give me a referral. Not safe at all to be in that spot, if that tornado hit us directly, we would all be dead and it would be the school's fault," JakeWx wrote on X.

Hmm. Getting detention for doing a smart thing. How Florida! 

Snark aside, if indeed this school directed kids into that big room during a tornado warning, I hope this school revisits its severe weather protocol. True, I don't know the structural integrity of the room they were in. Many Florida schools act as hurricane shelters, so the room might have been reinforced. But I still strongly doubt it was the safest place in the school. 

JackWx didn't specify which school he was in. Only that it was north of Tampa. 

El Nino is going to be going strong this winter.  That tends to increase the odds of strong storm systems in the South that can spin off tornado outbreaks. 

Severe weather safety in homes, workplaces and schools has thankfully been getting more attention. Sometimes it takes a tragedy to force this.

In December, 2021, a tornado outbreak caused widespread destruction and deaths. Those deaths included workers at a candle factory in Mayfield, Kentucky that was leveled by a tornado. Also, six people died when a tornado struck an Amazon warehouse in Illinois.

In both instances, questions were raised about worker tornado safety.  Should Mayfield employees been allowed to leave the plant for safer shelter elsewhere in town?  And did Amazon allow workers there to flee to reinforced rooms inside the sprawling warehouse to make themselves safer?

Let's just say lawsuits are ongoing in the Mayfield incident and in the Illinois Amazon deaths. 

Many schools in tornado and storm prone areas have excellent safety plans for severe weather. But not all of them. In the Florida case last week, the tornado either missed the school or lifted before it got there. No damage or injuries were reported at the school.

However, perhaps schools nationwide should review their plans to make sure they are safer than what appeared to happen last week in Florida. Either that, 

 

Nation Gets Rare Break From Endless Disasters: Rare Week Of No Big U.S. Weather Hazards

Roseanne Roseannadanna consistently said, "It's
always something," but today, in a rare treat,
there's nothing. At least in terms of weather
hazards across the United States. 

 Every morning when I'm thinking about this here blog thingy, I check the National Weather Service hazards pages to see what fresh hell the United States is in for. 

As Roseanne Roseannadanna would say, It's always something. This year has been one helluva ride with tornadoes, severe weather, floods, heat waves, cold snaps, winter storms, hurricanes, drought, you name it. Probably even locusts.

Today, Nada. 

It's actually pretty rare to see no major weather extremes going on anywhere in the United States. 

But this morning, the United States gets a real, very rare treat: The National Weather Service is pretty much coming up empty with forecasted weather hazards this week.  Enjoy it. With climate change and El Nino raging, this calm won't last. 

I did check everything:

The current, immediate warning page this morning had alerts for frosts and freezes in Kansas and western Oklahoma, alerts for potential high winds in parts of Montana, and forecasts of minor coastal flooding in New Jersey and Delaware.  In other words, nothing much. 

For tropical storms and hurricanes, lame little Tropical Storm Sean way out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean died a pitiful death. There's another disturbance out there that has a good shot at becoming Tropical Storm Tammy, but that won't happen until a week or more.  

The National Weather Service severe thunderstorm and tornado page showed the chance of a few non-severe thunderstorms in the Pacific Northwest today, and no thunderstorms at all anywhere in the Lower 48 Tuesday and Wednesday. No severe storm outbreaks are forecast for the next week. 

Next it was on to wildfire hazards.  You can still  get some nasty wildfires, especially in southern California this time of year. Nope, nothing there. 

I almost always find signs of trouble on the NWS Weather Prediction Page, which forecasts excessive rains and winter storms.  There are no early season winter storms in the offing. And, for the first time in ages, I found no signs of any flooding concerns in the Lower 48 for the next five days. 

The Weather Prediction Page did find signs of possibly heavy rains in New England and New York this coming Saturday, but so far it doesn't look like it would be enough to cause any flooding worries.

Extended forecasts into early next week also don't show any real weather hazards in the United States. Of course, that could change, as predictions are always adjusted and a new weather risk might pop up somewhere. But for now, everybody can relax.

They say that no news is good news, and that's certainly the case here. 

Vermont's Week Ahead: Staying Mild, Remarkably Frost-Free, But A Little Drama Next Weekend

This past week's weather has been remarkably steady state in Vermont. 

It's been so warm and frost-free in Vermont that this
photo taken from a Richmond hillside shows a 
fair amount of green remaining in the trees. Really
late in the season for that. 

Without fail, each day was partly too mostly cloudy, with a few scattered annoying sprinkles and light showers. Each day will get into the 50s to around 60, each night would drop into the upper 30s and 40s.

So much for that trope about just waiting a minute in Vermont and the weather will change. 

This week is looking a little more changeable, but that's not saying much. There will be no dizzying weather whiplashes for the next few days. 

Except this: Shockingly for so late in the season, we're still not seeing sign of a first frost. For many areas away from Lake Champlain, including such places as Island Pond, St. Johnsbury, Springfield and numerous towns around central Vermont  look like they will experience their latest first frost of the season since at least 1970.

For today through the end of the week,, if you want to pick your least favorite day, it was probably today. 

Clouds today were  even more stubborn than they've been lately. That held temperatures down in the low 50s for highs. A few ridge line towns stayed in the 40s, probably. And those annoying light showers continued here and there. A little semi-cold front from Canada was increasing the showers in the north late this afternoon and evening. 

Those showers won't amount to much, maybe a tenth of an inch of rain or less. But they will be just enough to make outdoor activities iffy and sometimes bothersome. 

Although you can still get brilliant blue sky days this time of year in Vermont, it's getting harder to do so. We're heading full steam toward November, which is the cloudiest month of the year.  Which means the rest of the week might not always be bright and beautiful. But it will still be awfully nice for the third week in October.

We actually have a bit of a warming trend setting in.  It won't get ridiculous, like those all-time record highs at the beginning of this month. 

Monday will still be pretty cloudy with a risk of light showers, but temperatures will bump up a couple degrees. Tuesday looks OK, too with afternoon readings bouncing back into the upper 50s. 

Wednesday and Thursday at this point are looking a bit sunnier, and warmer, as highs pop back up into the 60s. That's actually solidly milder than normal for this time of year. 

Foliage is very late turning toward peak in the Champlain Valley and warmer valleys of southern Vermont. So you might be able to enjoy some late season leaf peeping this upcoming mild week. The colors seem like they might end up being a bit more vibrant than they were this year in central and northern Vermont away from the lake. 

There's a lot of question marks for next weekend. Some sort of storminess seems to want to head our way, but it's too soon to get any agreement on what might happen and when. 

Just plan on the risk of rain  next weekend just in case.

Long range models are tentatively backing off on the idea of the first wintry blast of the season at the very end of the month.  Not sure yet, but the trends are toward more sort of average weather to close the month. 

Now It's Confirmed: World Was Insanely Hot In September

We got confirmation Friday that the world had by far
it's hottest September on record. Just a patch
near the tip of South America and a pinpoint
northeast of Greenland were on the cool side.

 As promised in an earlier post, when I said there would be updates,  NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information gave us big time confirmation that September's global heat was just insane. 

NCEI said September was the world's hottest September by a wide margin. Here's some perspective they provided: 

"'September, 2023 was the fourth month in a row of record-warm global temperatures,' said NOAA Chief Scientist Dr. Sarah Kapnick. 'Not only was it the warmest September on record, it was far and away the most atypically warm months of any (emphasis theirs, not mine) in NOAA's 174 years of climate keeping. To put it another way, September, 2023 was warmer than the average July from 2001-2010."

July is normally the world's hottest month of the year, despite the fact it is mid-winter in the Southern Hemisphere. The Julys in 2001-2010 were also warmer than the long term average, thanks to global climate change. So September's figures are really a big, big deal. 

September globally was 2.59 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the 20th century average for the month. That might not sound like much.  But the world is so vast with such variable weather that month to month and year to year changes are very small.

In recent years, if a month breaks a record for hottest on record, it does so by exceeding the previous mark buy less than a degree Fahrenheit.  This is why I said in that earlier post that scientists are gobsmacked by September's figures. 

It definitely was the highest monthly temperature anomaly - "which indicates how much warmer or cooler temperatures are from the long-term average - of any month on record," said NCEI.

Given that September was so warm globally, it was hard to find any areas that were cooler than average, or at least near normal. The only cooler than average spots I could find was a patch in the Pacific Ocean around the southern tip of South America. And a tiny patch of Arctic Ocean northeast of Greenland. That's about it. 

Africa, Europe, North and South America and Antarctica had their hottest September on record.  The cold spots maybe were Asia and the Arctic, which only had their second warmest September. 

Ocean surface temperatures also set a record high for September, which was the sixth month in a row a record was set. 

I've been tracking these monthly global climate statistics for years, decades, really, and I've never seen anything remotely like this. 

As I like to do every month, I like to remind you the last time the world had a slightly cooler than average month. If you are younger than 44.5 years old, you've never seen a cooler than average global month. If you are younger than 49, you've never seen a globally cooler than average September. 

The fact that September was so bonkers warm means that 2023 is definitely in line to become the world's hottest year on record. July and August were also the hottest months on record. The extreme September seems to have sealed the deal. NCEI is now saying that there's more than a 99 percent cache that this year will be the world's hottest year.

As mentioned in my earlier post, El Nino is working in concert with climate change to really boost global temperatures this  year.  El Nino should end temporarily within the next one or two years, and that will sort of turn some of the heat down.

But only a tiny bit. As Yale Climate Connections reported in an  update, when El Nino ends, global temperatures should temporarily fall by only 0.2 to 0.3 degrees Celsius. That will bring us down to levels that are still warmer than anything before 2015 or so. 

  

 

 

Media, Including Me, Recently Wrongly Ignored A Cataclysmic Climate Calamity

Destruction in Libya after last month's extreme flood,
made worse by both climate change and political
instability. This will happen again and again, unfortunately. 

Severe, record floods have been all over the new recently, as climate change has contributed to some epic inundations around the world.  

Yes, heat has been in the news for months, and so have floods. I can point to Vermont a few months ago, where we got tons of media attention for our horrible floods. 

Meanwhile, how many of you have heard details of the big flood last month in Libya? Sure, it's been in the news, sort of, but that calamity has not been a headline grabber. I also haven't touched this story, which is actually a shame. 

Two or three people died in Vermont's floods. Which is undeniably horrible. 

Over in Libya, the death toll was around 20,000, making it among the worst floods in modern history.  At least another 40,000 people have been displaced by the flood, just in the city of Derna. It pretty much got passing notice in the media. Can you imagine the uproar if God forbid a flood killed 20,000 people in the United States?

The Libya calamity was important, and we should have covered it more for this among other reasons: 

It was a classic example of how climate change teams up with humans' propensity for evil, corruption and incompetence to really mess things up. 

The storm that caused the flood, Storm Daniel, was turbo-charged by climate change. It formed over the Mediterranean Sea in September, and took on some tropical characteristics because of the record warm water temperatures out there. 

This along with the fact warmer air can hold more moisture than chillier air, helped Storm Daniel unleash incredible amounts of rain on Libya and elsewhere. It's another example of what climate change can do. 

On top of that, Libya's so-called government is in shambles.  As the BBC reports:

"Libya has been in political chaos since long-serving ruler Col Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown and killed in 2011 - leaving the oil-rich nation effectively split with an interim, internationally recognized government operating from the capital, Tripoli, and another one in the east."

That other government is in control, as it were, with Derna.  Due to the chaos, Libya had no real system like stable nations to warn the population of the impending danger. 

When the big floods hit us here in Vermont this summer, we had a well-organized government agency, namely the National Weather Service, broadcasting precise, timely warnings.  That prompted people to get out of the way. People fled flood prone areas, based on the warnings they'd received.

Vermont's state government, especially Emergency Management, and well organized local first responders, rescued dozens of people. The national agency, FEMA, swooped in to provide aid. 

In other words, the system more or less worked, and fatalities were kept to a minimum. 

In Libya, had there been a functioning government, what ever their equivalent of the National Weather Service would have issued dire warnings. The government would then order evacuations. Derna would still have been largely destroyed, but perhaps tens of thousands of lives would have been saved. 

We've always been really, really bad, corrupt governments with fatal, often genocidal results. I'm not minimizing that. It's just that some humans, anyway, are incredibly cruel and indifferent beyond belief.

So there's a feedback loop between climate change and unstable governments.  It isn't and won't be just Libya. There are plenty of unstable governments one storm away from disarray and dissolution. Additionally climate change can destabilize governments. 

Migrants continue to flow toward Europe and the United States. That migrant flow is contributing to  political and societal divisions in both regions.  Please note I'm not taking sides on this issue here. But however you feel about migrants and immigration, fairly or not, it's causing political strife, discord, and most distressingly, either threats of violence or actual violence. 

Most of the migrants are fleeing crime, corruption, poverty and war. Increasingly, climate change is finding its way into the calculus when migrants decide whether to leave their homeland.

As PBS points out, it's hard to tease out how many are fleeing climate problems, because most migrants flee for more than one reason.  For instance, in El Salvador, crop failures due to climate driven droughts and floods and prompting people to leave. But those same people are also leaving due to gang violence and government corruption. 

So was it climate change, gangs or a bad government that prompted Mr. El Salvadorian to try fleeing to the United States? Probably a combination, but we'll never know. 

Meanwhile, here in Vermont, I'm still seeing bits and pieces of updates on the news regarding recovery from our July floods. I haven't heard a peep about Libya in weeks, it seems. 

Thursday a did a search on Google news "Libya flood." 

I did see one article from BBC published two days earlier titled "Libya floods: The flawed response that increased Derna death toll."

Other than that, there's a Washington Post story from a week ago, and nothing else for over two weeks. That's not to say there wasn't any other news story recently regarding the Libya flood, but you're left to wonder what's going on over there.

Yes, big new events are overshadowing Libya, the biggie being the Israel/Hamas mess and tragedy. 

But the dearth of updates on Libya and other international disasters leaves me thinking the victims are basically on their own with the aftermath. I know there are good international relief agencies trying to help, but there's only so much they can do.  

The Libya flood is definitely out of the headlines, for better or worse. We will just wait, dreading the next climate and human tragedy 

Recent Vermont Turn To Cool Autumn Weather Is Actually Still Rather Warm

Late afternoon sun cuts through some still-green trees
after a mild rain shower Wednesday in St. Albans,
Vermont. It really has been another warm autumn so far.

 The weather has been cooler and unsettled in Vermont since Sunday, ever since last week's record breaking heat wave ended.  Or at least it seems that way.  

It's been mostly cloudy, breezy, with showers around all week, and that state of affairs will continue today and tomorrow. . Highs for most of us have been in the 50s to around 60, and lows have been mostly in the 40s.

It might feel a little nippy to you. But the truth is this week so far has been pretty close to average - actually a bit on the warm side - for this time of year  in Vermont.  And that's the hotter "new average." 

By the National Weather Service standards, "normal" is the average of what we've experienced over the past 30 years. But as I've repeatedly pointed out (I know! You're sick of it!)  The past 30 years have been decidedly warmer than the 20th century average.

That means if we had this exact week two or three generations ago, we would have regarded it as a warm spell. 

The striking thing about this autumn's weather is what hasn't happened yet.

It's getting into mid-October and there hasn't been a widespread frost or freeze in Vermont. Oh sure, a few colder mountain valleys have gotten a touch of frost, but that's what you'd expect in mid-September, not the middle part of October. 

In the Banana Belt Champlain Valley, the coldest it's got through Thursday so far this autumn in Burlington is 45 degrees. We should have had several mornings in the 30s by now. 

The normal low now is 43 degrees. It finally ever so briefly got colder early Friday morning when skies cleared. Burlington got down to 39 degrees. That's still pretty warm for the coldest for this point in the season. .  

High temperatures are bizarre, too. For the first time this autumn the temperature in Burlington failed to get as high as 60 degrees on Wednesday.  (I originally said it didn't get to 60 on Monday, but it turned out we snuck a 60 in briefly that afternoon).

I couldn't find a later first sub-60 high temperature in Burlington's records. Even during the very toasty falls we had in recent years. 

I'm also not aware of any snow falling in Vermont so far this month. Usually, the mountain tops should have been dusted at least once or twice by now. 

With climate change, cold spells are becoming less frequent and less intense. At least in general. We can still have sharp turns toward record cold, but they are now less frequent. For instance, it has been a very warm year, but we did have brief record cold snaps in mid-May and early February. But they were an exception to a warm 2023 so far. 

This year is an example of how climate change has tipped the odds toward warmth. So far this year, Burlington has had nine record highs and only one record low. 

Since we're so far into fall, we can expect a continued general cooling trend (maybe!) as the month continues. But I still see no signs of true freezing cold.  It looks like temperatures over the next few days will remain more or less the same as they've been lately. 

Sunday and maybe Monday will be a bit cooler than recently, as highs stay in the upper 40s to mid 50s.  There are signs of a few days of warmer temperatures once again later in the week.  

So we'll blissfully wait longer for the arrival of winter-ish air.  I see uncertain signs of a semi-wintry blast at the end of this moth  that would make it feel more like November,   but that's iffy. 

Winter will come, but much like recent years, it's not in a hurry to arrive. 

 

Warm U.S. September Pushes Much Of Nation Toward Warmest Year Records

A mostly orange temperature ranking map for the
United States in September shows it was 
yet another unusually warm month. 

 Yesterday, I posted that preliminary data was showing that on a global basis, September will likely be by far the warmest on record.     

We don't have the final numbers for the entire world yet to confirm this. That should come within a week or so. But on Tuesday, another confirming piece of evidence came in. It was the  September data for the U.S., and to nobody's surprise, the stats came in warm. 

NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information said that for the Lower 48, we had our seventh warmest September on record. Do note that just because the United States didn't quite have its warmest September doesn't mean the world as a whole can't. The U.S. comprises just 1.867  percent of the world's surface. The other 98.133 percent of the world will control the rankings. 

In the U.S. two states, New Mexico and Texas, has their hottest September on record. Eleven states, including here in Vermont had one of their top ten warmest Septembers. (Vermont overall ranked as third warmest September).

The warmth was oddly widespread across the United States. Usually a few regions end up on the cool side. In September some states in the Southeast and West were near average, but nobody had a cool September. 

Precipitation for the United States as a whole was kind of lacking.  It was the 22nd driest out of the past 129 years of records. Three states - Nevada, New Jersey and Connecticut - had one of their top three wettest Septembers. Ohio, Indiana and Michigan had one of their top ten driest. 

The warm months have really been piling up across the nation in 2023 and that is really showing. A whopping 30 states, including Vermont, have had one of their top 10 warmest January-September. This year in Vermont is so far running at third warmest on record. 

I imagine most of these states will end up having one of their top ten warmest years in 2023.

For what it's worth, the National Weather Service long range outlook has equal chances of warmer or cooler than normal weather for the middle of the U.S. But they forecast a warmer than average final three months of the year in the western and eastern U.S., especially in the Pacific Northwest and New England. 

Those long range forecasts aren't always right, but they do seem to indicate warm times ahead. 

Climate change and El Nino are doing their thing to keep the U.S. oddly toasty, just as the two phenomena are doing for the rest of the world.