A bit out of the blue, the
strongest hurricane on record in this part of the world has sprung up just off the coast of Western Mexico, near Puerto Vallarta. Patricia's sustained winds are an astonishing 200 mph, with gusts predicted to 245, and a pressure of 880 mb. I get nervous about anything under about 950. Katrina was approaching 900 mb just before landfall in 2005. Camille, the nightmare storm of my childhood though it struck far to the east of my home, probably reached 900 mb. Rita, the storm that panicked Houston into evacuating a month after Katrina, was at 895 mb before it weakened dramatically near landfall.
Patricia is forecast to come right over our heads here on the Texas Coastal Bend, too, but only after it probably will have been torn to pieces by crossing over the Mexican mountains. Nevertheless, our forecast this weekend jumps right out there with a 100% chance of heavy rain. While this is good news for us, the people in the Mexican state of Jalisco are in for a terrible beating.
An
amazing storm:
The closest contender, at this point, might be Hurricane Camille when it battered the U.S. Gulf Coast in 1969. Regardless, Patricia looks to be more powerful than Hurricane Andrew in 1992, Katrina in 2005 and many others.
4 comments:
If Patricia is like Camille then God help anyone in her path. We drove from visiting relatives in Houston back home to the Mobile Bay area a few days after Camille hit Mississippi. Even though they routed us well, well north of the Gulf Coast, the damage was amazing.
I hope the mountains of Mexico do her in before she gets to you but I'm so, so sorry for the people in her path.
Yep. Looks like a hell of a storm.
Once the storm makes it to Texas it should just be a major messed-up low dragging in a lot of rain from the Gulf. Some forecasts say we could get 6-8 inches of rain, which would be wonderful, but other forecasts make it look like the main impact will be on Houston and points east. Still, the Dallas area has been getting flooding rains all day today, so who knows how the large-scale effects will play out.
The storm is well inland now, but still clocking winds over 130mph. The big danger now is torrential rain and mudslides in the mountains. The small villages on the coast must have been erased. I sure hope they got all those people out of there, and that a bunch of them didn't stay out of disbelief of what a big storm can do.
And from what I can see, it killed 4 people, and declined very quickly.
http://www.weather.com/storms/hurricane/news/hurricane-patricia-mexico-coast
Always hoping for disaster.
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