Record Low Lightning Deaths in 2011; What about 2012?

A horrific weather year. I'm sure that you are aware of how bad 2011 was overall in terms of severe weather, with more than a dozen billion-dollar weather disasters and a record 99 Presidential disaster declarations. With 552 tornado fatalities, the year tied with 1936 for second-most tornado deaths on record, trailing only 1925 which had 794. April alone brought 748 tornadoes, a record for any month of any year. May brought the tornado at Joplin, Missouri that killed at least 158 people (with additional indirect deaths), most for a single tornado in the United States since 1947.

The listing of severe events could go on and on! You can refresh your memory about 2011 in Stu Ostro's blog and images of 2011 and my blog on the 2011 tornadoes.

Record-low lightning fatalities. Despite all of the severe thunderstorm and tornado activity, there were only 26 confirmed lightning fatalities in 2011, a record low. While this is still too many, it's gratifying that the trend has been downward for decades. We've been helping spread the message "when thunder roars, go (stay) indoors" and hopefully that has been a contributing factor. (Read more about this slogan below.) The safest places to be are inside a building with plumbing and wiring or inside a metal-bodied and metal-roofed vehicle. Keep away from electrical appliances, corded telephones, and plumbing during a thunderstorm, as lightning can travel into and through the house in wires and pipes. Avoid contact with metal inside vehicles. Stay in these safe places for at least 30 minutes after the last thunder or lightning has ended to allow storm clouds to clear the area.

Practice lightning safety in 2012. Even one lightning death is too many, and about 10 times as many people are injured as are killed. Most of the casualties are people caught outside during a thunderstorm. Monitor the weather and avoid outside activities as much as possible when thunderstorms are predicted, particularly activities in remote areas where a shelter would not be within quick reach. Many of the fatalities are from the first strike of a thunderstorm. Thus, it's best to seek shelter when the skies start to darken on a day when thunderstorms are predicted. Certainly practice another safety rule "Use your brain, don't wait for the rain!" And don't let sports activities delay your response. Remember more lightning safety slogans: "Don't be lame, end the game! Don't be a fool, get out of the pool!"

Miss America Contestant a Lightning Safety Spokesperson. Lightning safety advocates will be rooting for Ellen Bryan, Miss Ohio (right above) to win the Miss America Pageant on 14 January. She has been a
spokesperson for lightning safety for several years. Her sister Christina (left above) was struck by lightning in 2000 and suffered permanent brain damage. Ellen has made lightning safety and "when thunder roars, go indoors" her Miss America platform issue. You can read Christina's story and watch their lightning safety video clips at the link above.

What about 2012? About this time each year, people wonder how bad the new year will be. In reality, the skill in predicting that is quite low. When it comes to anticipating tornadoes, many researchers have examined potential links to El Nino and La Nina. Results have varied depending upon geographical region and how the studies were conducted. Results are a bit more robust for tropical cyclones, with El Nino conditions tending to reduce the threat of tropical cyclones for the United States. The current La Nina conditions are predicted to persist at least into the spring, and if they persisted beyond that then there would not be a suppressing factor for at least the start of the tropical cyclone season.

El Nino is a phenomenon in which surface and near-surface waters in the eastern and central portions of the equatorial Pacific Ocean are warmer than average. By contrast, La Nina episodes have below-average water temperatures there. The warm or cold waters can impact the formation and location of thunderstorm clusters and rising motions in these areas that, in turn, can affect the strength and location of the jet stream in subtropical and middle latitudes. The jet stream influences weather systems that sometimes produce tornadoes.

There has been a tendency for large tornado outbreaks during La Nina episodes during the January through April months. The record numbers of tornadoes in each of those months occurred during La Nina conditions, including April 2011. Of the eleven largest and most impactful tornado outbreaks since 1950 in those months, six were during La Nina, 3 during El Nino, and 2 during neutral conditions. These statistics suggest, but don't guarantee, above-average tornado activity in January-April 2012. Historically this activity occurs mainly in the Gulf Coast (excluding the Florida Peninsula), Southeast, Mississippi Valley, and Tennessee Valley states.

El Nino conditions have tended to exist during large tornado outbreaks from May through December in the past, but we can't predict with certainty what the conditions will be during these months in 2012.

Tornado outbreaks are mainly driven by travelling weather systems (low pressure systems, fronts, and upper-air disturbances) operating on much shorter time scales than El Nino or La Nina. It's whether or not those factors become favorable that ultimately determine whether or not and how bad an outbreak will be. But factors like La Nina can impact the configuration of those travelling weather systems, and thus exert some influence, but aren't the dominant factor.

Another phenomenon that can potentially influence weather patterns is the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). An index of this oscillation is positive when there is a strong upper low over or near the Greenland area (as in the figures below). The index is negative when there is relatively high pressure over this region. The nature of the NAO tends to influence the location and intensity of the jet stream pattern over the Northeast, and the temperature pattern over the central and eastern United States.

Positive NAO conditions were present during the record-tornado April 2011. Of the 27 largest and most impactful tornado outbreaks since 1950, 14 were during positive NAO, 8 during negative NAO, and 5 during near-zero periods. Thus, positive NAO tends to favor tornado outbreaks, but it's far from a foolproof indicator. NAO is much more variable and on shorter time scales than El Nino/La Nina, so it can't be predicted far enough in advance to use it in forecasts of tornado activity in 2012.

Another large-scale potential influencing factor is the Arctic Oscillation (AO). This is positive when there is colder-than-average air over the North Pole region at the upper-level jet stream altitudes. Positive NAO tends to mean a stronger-than-average polar jet stream, which can influence possible tornado-producing weather systems. AO was positive during April 2011 and was positive in 16 of the 27 largest and most impactful tornado outbreaks since 1950. Again, though, it is rather variable and can't be predicted far enough in advance to use in forecasts of tornado activity in 2012.

The bottom line is that La Nina conditions may lead to an active January-to-April period for tornadoes in 2012, but that can't be predicted with total certainty. We can all hope that the death toll in 2012 will be way below that of 2011.

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Near-disaster in La. raises questions about evacuations

AMITE, La. – With Hurricane Isaac still pouring down, a park ranger in southern Mississippi spotted an alarming sight: two 100-foot hunks of earth missing from the downstream face of Percy Quin Dam, the only barrier holding back the Tangipahoa Lake from the dangerously rain-swollen Tangipahoa River.

By Matt Williamson, AP

Firefighters pump water out of Lake Tangipahoa in an effort to relieve pressure on Percy Quin Dam, which faced the threat of flooding after being inundated with rains from Hurricane Isaac.

By Matt Williamson, AP

Firefighters pump water out of Lake Tangipahoa in an effort to relieve pressure on Percy Quin Dam, which faced the threat of flooding after being inundated with rains from Hurricane Isaac.

A few phone calls later, amid National Weather Service and media reports that the dam would fail, the Tangipahoa, La., parish president Gordon Burgess, just over the state line and downstream of the lake, called for nearly half of the rural parish to evacuate. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal sent 200 buses to fetch evacuees and helicoptered with Burgess over Mississippi to survey the earthen dam himself.

Now, 10 days later, the dam still holds and the crisis has ended. Evacuees — the few thousand that there were — have returned to their homes. Tangipahoa is $6 million in the hole for its disaster response and evacuation.

And Burgess, parish president for 26 years, says he'd make the same decision all over again.

"I'd rather say we wasted our efforts than have someone lose a life," Burgess says. "What if we lost one person? It was worth it not to lose a life."

The near-disaster has prompted Mississippi to push forward with long-delayed plans to rebuild the 1930s-era dam, but it also raises questions about when officials should order evacuations and whether anyone will listen.

"You're erring on the side of caution," says Barry Scanlon, president of Witt Associates, a disaster management consulting firm founded by former FEMA administrator James Lee Witt. "A few more hours of stalled Isaac and it may not have turned out so well."

Evacuations are costly, disruptive and wearying. New Orleans, bolstered by a new levee system, told its residents to stay put, while south of the city the parish president of Plaquemines told most of the parish to get out ahead of the storm surge. In coastal Mississippi, Biloxi Mayor A.J. Holloway said after the storm inundated the city that he wishes he had ordered a mandatory evacuation.

"These are not decisions that a governor or mayor make lightly," Scanlon said. "They understand how much it will disrupt the community. They understand the cost."

Burgess of Tangipahoa is still tallying the costs, but he estimates the parish of 120,000 spent about $6 million. About 1,300 people evacuated to local shelters at schools and churches. Some residents sought refuge with friends and relatives on higher ground.

"In 26 years, no, I've never ordered an evacuation to this magnitude from the Mississippi line to Lake Pontchartain — 54 miles. That'll make you sit up and take notice," Burgess says. "We didn't know exactly how many people would be affected, whether it would be 1,000 or 10,000. It's a tough call, a tough call."

To the south, New Orleans wrestled with the fraught possibility of not calling for a mandatory evacuation during a hurricane for the first time since Hurricane Katrina broke the city's levees and flooded 80% of the city in 2005.

An evacuation order in New Orleans now triggers a hurricane plan that directs residents to 24 pickup points across the city, sends buses to fetch them and transports them to shelters, Mayor Mitch Landrieu said in an interview. A similar evacuation before Hurricane Gustav in 2008 moved thousands of residents out of the city and more than a million out of southern Louisiana.

New Orleans requires mandatory evacuation if a storm reaches Category 3 status, with 111 mph or greater winds, five days before it is expected to hit land. Hurricane Isaac clocked in as a weak Category 1 storm with winds churning at 80 mph. But the categories measure only wind and don't factor in rainfall and storm surge. So on Monday, Aug. 27, less than 24 hours before Isaac struck, Landrieu was still weighing a mandatory evacuation.

"It's a very difficult call to make," Landrieu said. "The unpredictability of this storm's path and (storm) surge made it that much more difficult."

Ultimately, New Orleans battened down and weathered the storm, closely monitoring its newly refurbished $14.5 billion hurricane protection system of levees, barriers and floodgates. That system was incomplete when Gustav struck.

Ordering an evacuation — or not — is an imprecise science, Landrieu said.

"Some of it is guess work. Some of it is good planning. Some of it is making the best call with the best science you can get," Landrieu said. "But sometimes storms don't present themselves that cleanly."

Evacuating each time a storm threatens can be economically and psychologically crippling to a city, especially after taxpayers spent billions on protection system, said Richard Campanella, a Tulane University geographer who has studied the improvements.

"If we're going to build this infrastructure to such high degrees and put all this money into it, we need to have enough faith in it that it's going to hold," Campanella said.

"The right decision was made."

On the Mississippi/Louisiana border that Thursday morning, nothing about the situation was clear.

Geologist and dam safety engineer Mike Meadows, of Mississippi's Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) told the park manager Thursday morning to call the local emergency manager and notify the National Weather Service. Then he drove the two hours from Jackson to Pike County with dam safety engineer Natalie Sigsby, to inspect the dam, said James MacLellan, director of dam safety for the Mississippi DEQ.

Before Meadows and Sigsby arrived around 9 a.m., the National Weather Service in New Orleans warned of flash floods in southwestern Pike County, downstream of the Tangipahoa River after local emergency management and law enforcement officials reported that the Lake Tangipahoa Dam is "expected to fail."

Meadows and Sigsby surveyed the 2,300-foot long, 25-foot high dam and concluded "all we can do is monitor the situation" until the rain stopped and the river crested, MacLellan said. Once the water stopped rising, the engineers could use pumps to lower the water level to relieve pressure and dig a channel to direct water around the dam.

"If the dam was going to breach, there was nothing that could have been humanly done to stop it," MacLellan said.

But, he said, early signs indicated the dam would hold.

"A slide is a nervous situation. We don't like to see it because there's not much we can do," he said. "But there was still 50 feet of clay between the water and the slide. It's a serious concern, but there are scarier situations."

Col. Jeff Eckstein, commander of the Vicksburg District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and a civil engineer, arrived that afternoon with two engineers. The real danger, Eckstein said, would come if the water overtopped the dam and washed away more of the earthen dam.

"The water was rising. You could see the two slides. It did not look good, but you could tell it was not about to fail," Eckstein said.

MacLellan called media reports an overreaction.

"CNN was saying the dam had failed and there was a huge wall of water heading to Louisiana," he said. "Next thing we knew, there was a helicopter from Louisiana flying overhead of the dam."

In Tangipahoa, Burgess and other parish officials were dialed in to the state's daily emergency briefing when they saw media reports that the dam was about to fail. Not long after, the governor's office called and told Burgess to order a mandatory evacuation for people living a half-mile on either side of the river — an order that the parish estimated would affect 30,000 to 40,000 people.

The governor promised to send 200 buses, 39, Humvees, 27 high-water vehicles, 19 boats, 14 ambulances and 300 National Guard troops.

"Good gracious. It took me about 10 minutes to get my bearings," Burgess said. "In 12 hours, my parish might be inundated with water."

Tangipahoa Parish had experienced flooding before. In 1983, the raging river had taken out the two-lane bridge in Amite that connects one side of the parish to the other, said parish spokesman Jeff McKneely.

Burgess and his staff began calling local mayors, media and community organizations to spread the word. Parish offices filled with media from around the nation.

"My phone was ringing off the wall. We've got 100 or 200 lines. Seems like they all lit up at the same time," he said. "People would say, 'My place didn't get any water in the 1983 flood so I'm not going to leave.' And we would plead with them to get out of harm's way."

The updates on the parish website on Aug. 29 between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. offer a glimpse of the quickly changing information that spread among the states, the emergency managers, local officials and the media.

The first alert warns of "imminent failure" of the dam at Lake Tanipahoa. A second alert says Mississippi's emergency management agency had notified the state and parish government that the dam "is failing." The third alert notes that the dam "is damaged but has not failed."

When Jindal arrived, he took Burgess in his helicopter to see the dam.

"Looking at the dam, it was close to breaching. It had about 100 feet of slough. I was thinking, gosh, that could happen any minute," Burgess said.

At a press conference after the flight, Jindal said Mississippi officials had told him the dam was still sound, but he urged residents to evacuate anyway "because we don't know that for a fact."

Meanwhile, MacLellan had asked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to draw up new inundation maps that would show how far the water would go if the dam broke, so Louisiana would have an accurate way to determine which communities should evacuate. A National Guard combat engineer unit was dispatched to clear a forest and dig down through 30 feet of hillside to create a 600-foot long channel that would divert water around the dam arrived Thursday afternoon.

On Friday morning, dam engineers decided they needed to drop the lake at least eight feet below to lift pressure and make repairs on the dam, MacLellan said. Since then, huge pumps on loan from the Army Corps of Engineers pumped 140,000 gallons a minute, dropping the lake about a foot a day. A week later, MacLellan said, the dam was stable and ready for reconstruction.

Even without the dam breach, Tangipahoa suffered from serious flooding and 1,500 homes were damaged, McKneely said. The parish did not overreact, he said.

"I don't think you'll ever hear anyone say this was 'just' a Category 1," McKneely said.

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Sticky goo on Pa. turnpike disables about 150 cars (AP)

PITTSBURGH – A flood of gooey black muck dropped from a tanker truck disabled about 150 cars and damaged an unknown number of other vehicles along a nearly 40-mile stretch of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, officials said.

A leaking valve on a tanker spread driveway sealant over the eastbound lanes of a long stretch of the Turnpike between New Castle and the Oakmont Service Plaza on Tuesday night, Turnpike spokesman Bill Capone said.

Turnpike operations officials on Wednesday said 150 or more cars were disabled when the sticky goo covered their tires and wheels. Some state police and turnpike maintenance vehicles had to be towed away after getting stuck in the tar-like substance, according to the turnpike operations center.

Traffic was moving normally by Wednesday morning, but the sticky mess had already hindered the travel plans of some motorists traveling for the Thanksgiving holiday.

Laura Frick told WTAE-TV she was traveling from Cleveland to New Jersey for the holiday.

"Now we have to turn around and go back home," Frick said. "It's horrible."

Retired firefighter Bob King told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review the experience was the most harrowing of his life.

"It caught us off guard," said King, who now lives near Chicago. "It didn't seem like anyone knew what it was or what to do. It had to be an incredible amount of tar. It's still piled on my tires."

Cpl. Mike Corna, with the state police barracks which patrols the pike near Pittsburgh, said Wednesday the driver will be cited for not properly securing his load, though the specific tickets to be issued were still being determined. Police have yet to trace the origin of the load. The tank was filled somewhere in Ohio.

Maintenance crews got out quickly, dumping sand on the pooled goop and using snow plows to push it on to the shoulder, turnpike spokesman Carl DeFebo said. The mess was mostly confined to the right lane and the roadway didn't have to be shut down while workers tried to clean it up because the substance hardens in about 15 minutes, DeFebo said.

"It's been cleaned up since about 11 o'clock last night," DeFebo said Wednesday.

Turnpike officials urged motorists whose cars were damaged to stop calling its operations center and instead call Traveler's Insurance at 800-238-6225 and follow the prompts to file "business claims."

The insurance company is handling claims on behalf of Marino Transport Services of Stevensville, Md., which operates the truck.

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Flooding in Sparta, Mich., Leads to Questions About City Drain Maintenance (ContributorNetwork)

On Saturday, the National Weather Service had issued flash flood warnings, but the county that suffered the worst flooding wasn't even on the warning list: Sparta in Kent County. The flooding seems to have been caused by poor drain maintenance. Most of southwest lower Michigan was deluged in the torrential weekend rain. Sparta residents got hit with as much as four feet of flood water.

WZZM interviewed homeowners who had been pumping water from basements and crawl spaces. They say this was not the first time this summer that they were flooded. They had just begun to dry out from flooding several weeks ago. Although rain in west Michigan was heavy, it was not intense enough to create the amount of flooding experienced in Sparta. Residents fault poor drainage systems, lack of drain maintenance and drains filled with debris for the flooding.

Sparta residents are frustrated, not only by the damage and loss of property, but also the amount of labor it takes to clean up after a flood. One resident expressed concern that his furnace might be damaged. The City of Sparta has asked residents attend the next city council meeting to address flood damage issues.

Hunting up resources for floods, websites for flood insurance kept appearing. Even Floodsmart.gov, a government emergency preparedness site, promotes flood insurance for homeowners. Home insurance is expensive enough. Like vehicle insurance, homeowners insurance is as much about liability coverage as it is about property damage restitution. Oftentimes, the deductibles are so steep with homeowners' insurance that most people don't submit claims unless disaster befalls.

It doesn't make sense that Michigan residents should have to purchase additional flood insurance when flash floods don't affect most homeowners. Those who live directly on the Grand River or another Michigan river, may need to add flood coverage. Flooding like the kind that occurred in Sparta is not conditional for residents. Even the NWS did not put Sparta or Kent under flood watch. This shows that the flooding was not a predictable weather condition. These floods waters occurred as a result of poor city maintenance and lack of emergency preparedness on the drain commission's part.

Also, if residents purchase additional homeowners insurance, it sometimes gives city officials an excuse to avoid their own responsibilities. Property taxes are supposed to pay for city services, including upkeep, repair and maintenance. Homeowners should not have to pay extra to protect against damage caused by lack of preventative maintenance at city structures.

Residents in flooded areas are reminded to observe these basic safety precautions. Pedestrians should avoid flood waters. Six inches of water is enough to sweep a person off his feet. Heavy rain can cause soil erosion and unstable terrain. Motorists should avoid flood waters and be on the lookout for falling tree branches and flying debris. Flood waters of two feet can sweep a car away. Car tires can easily embed in mud and wet sand.

Marilisa Kinney Sachteleben writes about weather from 25 years teaching environmental, life and earth science.

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