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Episode 10 - Hurricane Laura and Flooding in Pakistan and Afghanistan
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In this Breaking News episode, Christine and JJ discuss the visuals of Hurricane Laura, which was tracked through the Gulf of Mexico by satellite, and made landfall in Louisiana earlier in the day. Then the topic shifts to deadly monsoons in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which have left cities, towns, and villages flooded with rain and sewage water.
This is a special breaking news episode of talk description to me in this breaking news episode, we're going to be talking about climate and weather, which are very much in the news. We are definitely going to be talking more about the climate crisis and particularly in one future episode. And of course it will keep coming up, but what's at the top of mind for many listeners is hurricane Laura , today. And we've already got some, some pretty shocking images already. And so JJ, can we just dive in and talk about some of those that you've seen?
JJSo just as a note to listeners, we are recording this on Thursday, just after noon on Thursday, August the 27th. So hurricane Laura made landfall early this morning and the hurricane made landfall in Louisiana , between Cameron Louisiana, Lake Charles Louisiana area. It dropped down from a hurricane, a level five hurricane to a four - to a category four hurricane, just kind of at the last moment. But I mean, that drop down was insignificant compared to the size and scale of this event, hundred and 50 mile per hour winds. These are stronger winds in Katrina. I believe it's considered to be one of the top 10 strongest hurricanes to make landfall in the continental US. So yeah, we wanted to jump right in. We don't have a ton of research about this area and about hurricanes in general, but I think it's of some value to just kind of live describe as best we can , some of the events, some of the images and some of what we're seeing,
ChristineMaybe start with some of the satellite views, because I know I was seeing on Twitter even over the last few days that NASA satellites and other satellites were tracking the storm. And so can we talk about some of those images as the hurricane was?
JJYeah, absolutely. So the, so the satellite views, and there are some incredible satellite images and some from the international space station , and some satellite images that have been pumped up so that the colors look quite natural - greens and blues and whites for clouds. And some of the satellite images are more like the heat maps we spoke about earlier, or the stronger the wind , the closer to red in color and the weaker winds have green in color, but they all have the same shape. So you're looking at a section of the continental US and you're looking at this weather pattern moving in toward the Gulf of Mexico. That's what all of these different satellite images have in common. Maybe it'd be helpful to talk about the shape of the Gulf of Mexico, because this is in order to get a sense of how this hurricane is moving in. It might help to get a, of the, of the land mass . So,
ChristineYes, please.
JJAll right . Okay. So let's imagine , take your hand. We're going to take your left hand and make a C with your left hand. So now curl your thumb and your finger a little bit closer together, so that the gap between them, the gap between your thumb and the point of your index fingers about an inch and a half, right. That C shape, if you now turn it so that the opening is pointing to , say four o'clock on a clock face that is more or less the Gulf of Mexico. And that's the opening , to the Gulf of Mexico,
ChristineWhat are the geographical points of my thumb and fingertip ? What are those land parts?
JJSo your finger that's coming down, that's Florida, that's Florida coming down and then your thumb that's curling up. That's the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. And so the inside of your thumb. So from like the tip of your thumb and around curving around the inside of your thumb, all the way up to about where your knuckle is, that is the Mexican coastline of the Gulf of Mexico. And then from your knuckle on the inside of your index finger, as it comes down and around the tip of your finger, that's the U S coastline in the Gulf of Mexico. And that area is like Texas, Louisiana, a little bit of Mississippi and Alabama, and then most of your fingers, Florida. And then it's worth noting that Cuba is a little thin strip of land. That's trying to like poke into that open space between your , your thumb and your index finger.
ChristineAnd I know that , Hispaniola, Dominican Republic and Haiti were badly affected as well. Where would they fit on that, on that hand diagram,
JJCuba, which is trying to , to kind of poke in, in that gap between the Yucatan and Florida between the thumb and the index finger , uh, that , um, you know, you can imagine that finger poking in, and then there's the Dominican Republic, which is kind of right behind Cuba and Puerto Rico, which is behind the Dominican Republic. That's kind of like the line of, of islands. That's trying to get in. Like they look, they look like they're waiting in line to get into the Gulf of Mexico. So sort of Southeast. Exactly. So East and, and Haiti is in there , Jamaica, the Cayman islands, there's a whole string of islands that then comes down , uh, and they're all, they really do look a little bit like they're lined up waiting to get in. So because of the global weather patterns and temperature variations on the East coast of North America and South and central America, the hurricanes develop along the coast and they do often end up going into the Gulf and satellite images will track those as they're coming in. And what we saw with hurricane Laura , the size of this hurricane, it actually takes up - if you've still got your hand in that C pattern, it fills the entire Gulf. The images from overhead, the satellites are, are quite remarkable in that, that, that swirling massive cloud occupies the entire Gulf of Mexico. When, when seen from a satellite and the , in terms of the look of a hurricane, if you've got the satellite image that is the most photographic, and I'm not sure how these are digitally altered. Like I say, in some of them, the colors are quite clear greens for land and brown for the land, and blues in the water. And then the clouds are white, but they look a little bit like a pinwheel firecracker. Have you ever seen, or heard of a pinwheel firecracker?
ChristineI've heard of it, but I don't actually know what it looks like.
JJOkay. A pinwheel firecracker is a firecracker that's round, and it's got all of the backs of the firecrackers where the sparks are going to come flying out, they're all around the outside, all kind of facing the same direction. And then there's the little hole right in the middle of the center disc that houses this firecracker, and what you do is you put a nail or something through the hole and you nail it to a tree. So it's kind of, it can spin freely around this nail in the center. And because all of the tails of the firecrackers are facing the same direction, when you light them, they spin. It whips in circles. And what comes off of it are these long tails of sparks, because it's, they're all in the same direction and they're spinning and spinning and spinning and spinning. And that's what the hurricane looks like from a satellite image. You've got the round hole, the center of the storm that is open it's clear, and you can see the clear water right in the heart of it. And then right near the middle it's, it's dense with cloud. But if you zoom in on the image, you can see swirling patterns within this dense cloud. And then as you get to the outer edges, you get these long tails of, of increasingly wispy cloud, as it's, as it spins and spins. And, and it really, it does have a look that is very much like one of these , one of these spinning firecrackers
ChristineAre these satellite images sufficiently common. Now that you would just look at one and know right away that it's a hurricane.
JJAbsolutely. It's a very distinctive shape, this, this kind of pinwheel shape. It's very distinctive. And so , I think, yeah , any sighted person who is seeing this knows what it is and the of it is such that you can have a layman's understanding as it were of how big and how strong it's going to be. You know, "Oh boy, that looks like a big one." "Oh that, that looks pretty reasonable". There were two that were coming in together into the Gulf of Mexico. It looked like at one point, and that those were quite terrifying images. A double hurricane coming into the Gulf at the same time. But yeah, you can, you can definitely tell , with an untrained eye , just with a basic weather channel, understanding of these things, for sure.
ChristineWow. Can we move into images on the ground?
JJYeah, absolutely. So some video and, and photographic reporting has been done by , you know, by weather channels, by news stations and also by people who are just living in this area. And they're also storm chasers who are in there and people who seem to really put themselves in harm's way to send out these images. And it's really quite something. So , again, it made landfall near Lake Charles Louisiana. This is between new Orleans and Houston. This is where the hurricane made landfall. And so a lot of the videos are coming from Lake Charles. I think it's the biggest city in the direct path of the hurricane. And I've seen videos of a motor home blowing over and tipping onto its side. A great big long motor home, not like a small van, but a really long extended motor home being blown straight over onto its side. I saw a video of a mall tower sign. So at the edge of the parking lot, there'll be a great big sign where it's got an individual sign from each one of the stores that's in the mall. It's a story or two tall, and they're , they're quite structurally sound. They've got, they're holding up a lot of electrical signage infrastructure in this one big, tall sign. I saw one of those just being, I mean , torn apart. It really looks like invisible hands are coming through and ripping the sheets of metal off of the sides, shattering the glass and tearing out the lighting and , and wiring on the inside. Just absolutely being shredded. Of course, lots of videos of people like that, individuals who are just, you know, on their front porch or driving to get home in anticipation of the storms, you know, they're filming the side of the road where you can see smaller street signs, whipping and blowing in the wind. And maybe the, you know, the signs on top of the poles flying off. And , uh, you know, the wind is so strong, a couple of videos of trees being uprooted, small street trees in an urban setting that don't have particularly big root balls. They get pulled straight up and out of the ground with the root ball intact and they get blown over and then dragged along by the wind. So you've got this, this tree dragging along this dirty root ball down the street. And then bigger trees that are old , or they tend to snap. So , again, seen several videos and lots of photographs of half a tree or a major branch from a big tree that's come crashing down on a roof or on a car, you know, very, very dramatic stuff. I got an image in front of me here, which is a communication tower in Lake Charles. And this is like a miniature version of basically the Eiffel tower. So this is, you know, it's made of bar and pipe - a metal tower that's all welded together. And the base of the tower looks pretty much intact and the top of the tower is intact, but it's dangling because something hit it in the middle or made it, you know, structurally unsound in the middle of this tower and it's come crumbling down. And so the bar and pipe and, and all of the metal that was holding it up has now been twisted. It really looks like a twisted, almost like a hairball , all of these, all of this metal, it's just been twisted and tangled together in knots. And then at the end of it is the top of the tower, which looks still structurally sound is kind of dangling from the end of this. I saw some footage that news and weather organizations were putting out. Of course, a lot of the weather networks and whatnot, they'll put a reporter in the hurricane, and I saw one, I think it was a weather network or weather channel reporter wearing a blue rain coat, black hat pulled down low and trying to do a live report on the status of things in Louisiana. And the rain is coming down so hard and the wind is coming down so hard , that the reporter keeps having to duck and kind of make - I'm not sure if it's a man or a woman -but make themselves quite small to avoid being blown over. Cause the wind is coming so hard and it's right. I think they had it set up so that the camera was under an overhang outside. And then the reporter was like at the bottom, some of the steps, you know, kind of at the front of a building. And at some point during this report, suddenly a shower of glass rains down on the reporter, just a shower of glass, because one of the windows blew out from the building above. And this reporter comes charging inside, like runs toward the camera. And for a moment, the camera's just filming nothing but the glass now lying on the ground and the wind whipping around, and then off camera, you hear, "We're fine! We're fine. We're fine." And there's the images of this one building in particular, the capital one tower in Lake Charles, this is a glass skyscraper. I don't know how many stories. It's a, it's a significant office tower and someone posted a before and after picture. And in the before picture the glass looks like it's got a green tint to it, very clean lines. Nothing but glass and grid frames. So no cement or no brick in this building, all the surfaces glass .
ChristineOh dear.
JJYeah. You can see where this one's going. And then the after picture, at least half of those windows are blown out, just gone. And I saw a video of this happening as well. And as the wind was whipping in and it would tear these windows off, shatter them before they hit the ground, and then things from the office - papers - getting sucked out into the hurricane and swirling around outside of the building. And meanwhile, all of this glass is just raining down on the parking lot below. Really, really, really scary. One of the things about these videos where people are filming with their own cameras, either indoors or outdoors is the sound of the wind. I don't know if you've heard any of these videos, but the sound of the wind is extraordinary, 120, 150 mile an hour winds whipping by a building. It ends up sounding like a scream, like a siren that's whaling. High pitch, nonstop, just a scream. And so even if the video itself isn't of interest, I would recommend like checking out one of these videos that is filmed outside. Maybe we'll put some links in our associated media so that people can hear the sound of this wind. It's it's really quite haunting.
ChristineOh my goodness. Um, and the Southeastern us is not the only part of the world experiencing extreme weather at the moment. Uh, there's been some very devastating flooding in Pakistan and Afghanistan and a significant loss of life there as well. Can you talk about some of the images that you've seen around those, those issues?
JJYeah. Some, some really significant loss of life. I've got an article in front of me here that was released on Wednesday the 26th. And they're saying at least 160 dead and hundreds of homes destroyed in Afghanistan and Pakistan. So this is seasonal rainfall, seasonal flooding, monsoon rains. But as you say, with the climate crisis, these rains are getting more serious and , it seems to be getting worse and worse every year. And so the flooding that is happening in parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan are extraordinary and devastating. So I've got some images that are in these articles. There's an image of a man and a woman walking through a street with their arms linked. And they're both hiking up their clothes with, with one hand and holding hands with the other and the water is above their knees, on the street. And you can see if you zoom in on the image, this isn't, this isn't pool water, this isn't Lake water. This is filthy water. There's garbage floating in this water, and it's murky. And it just looks so brown. There's another image here of ateenage boy who's sitting in a, like a Tuk Tuk. I'm not sure what tuk tuks are called in this part of the world, but like a motorcycle taxi where you have a couple of seats in the back and the driver sits in the front inside that kind of half open cab. So there's a full windshield, but the sides of the, of the tuk tuk are open so that people can easily get in and out. And the tuk tuk is kind of old and rusty, and it's got , you know, it's painted orange and black and like mint green with some patterns on it. It's quite the , you know, under different circumstances, it would be quite a cheerful looking vehicle, but it's completely flooded. It's in the middle of a flooded street. And , uh, the water is completely covering the wheels. And, you know, it's halfway up the open doors and going and flooded all the way through the inside of this vehicle and the teenage boy's just kind of sitting inside trying to keep somewhat dry. The water as he sits in there is , you know, almost up to his knees. And then another image here of a man with a couple of kids. And they've got a vegetable cart. And two of the boys are kind of looking up at the camera. This is a photograph that's taken from above. And a couple of the boys are looking up at the camera and other one's, you know, one of the boys is sitting on the edge of this vegetable cart, and there's a donkey , pulling the cart. And the water is almost up to the donkey's belly as they're pulling this wheeled cart through the streets. And then of course there are images of the damage that these floods have done to residential areas where they've caused mudslides that have - so mud and rock that have poured down and covered up houses and buildings. And, you know, some of these structures are, they're fairly marginal. These are structures that are built with , you know , a minimal amount of concrete and rebar , and they get completely encased in mudslide. And so there are some images of people gathered around on top of these mud piles that have been , where entrances have been carved in the mud. So you can get to a door in the house. Um, and people gathered around looking down. There's one image of a, of a group of people standing, a group of men standing on top of one of these mud piles. And a few people are taking pictures, a lot of people in traditional traditional dress. So , long tunics and vests, and scarves either wrapped around their necks or in some cases wrapped around heads, several men with big, long beards. And right in the middle of the image is a soldier in full fatigues with a very large machine gun. And you know, a flack jacket and helmet. It indicates that this is "villagers gathering as rescuers search for bodies following the heavy rain fall". So these are some of the images that are coming out here. I think a real difference, in terms of the number of deaths in this part of the world , compared to the number of deaths so far, which seemed to be coming from hurricane Laura , which are relatively small. Thankfully I think there was , I think people were able to get out in time and people took it really seriously after Katrina and had the resources to do so. Whereas that clearly has not been the case in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
ChristineThe climate crisis is something we'll be talking more about in future episodes, but on this sort of breaking news episode, we wanted to talk about what's going on today. So all of our deepest hopes for people in all the effected areas to find safety for themselves and their loved ones. You've been listening to a special breaking news episode of talk description. To me, if you'd like to support us, you can visit patrion.com/talk description to me, that's P a T R E O n.com/talk description to me, our email address is talk description to me@gmail.com. We're on Twitter at talk description. Our website is talk prescription to me.com and our Facebook page can be found out talk description to me.