Hi, I'm Teresa Martin from Lower Cape TV, and with me today is Phil Burt.
Phil is with the Barnsville County.
He works with emergency preparedness and is also a meteorologist.
And we're in hurricane season right now, which this year is something to particularly be
aware of.
And I wanted to get some background and understanding of the hurricanes and hurricane
specific on the Cape and the Lower Cape.
Sure.
And could you start, we hear all these terms about hurricanes, right?
Category one, category two, they're big, they're little, they don't seem kind of big
to me.
So can you tell a little bit about what a hurricane is and what these categories actually are?
Sure.
So the categories are basically ways of just defining the storms based on their maximum
sustained wind.
So classification goes from tropical depression, which would be almost like just a typical
storm that we would get here during the winter time, just a relatively small weak storm.
But it feels pretty strong.
We have a lot of wind.
Yeah, we do.
Certainly a lot of those times.
From a tropical depression, it'll move into a tropical storm, that's when a storm gets
a name.
So whenever you've heard, you know, tropical storm, url, tropical storm, whatever, that
means the storm has been named and that's a wind basically greater than 40 miles per
hour, relatively speaking.
And that goes up to 74 miles per hour, tropical storm classification.
Once a storm reaches a sustained wind of 74 miles per hour, it's deemed a hurricane and
it's a category one.
And then incrementally, those categories change based on the speed of the wind.
So I don't know the criteria completely off the top of my head, but say, you know, a category
one would be between about 74 and I believe about 90 miles per hour is a category one.
And then they go up in increments.
Because the number gets bigger, the storm gets more intense.
Exactly.
So that's kind of what we need to remember.
When you hear a storm as a category two, like Bob was, the last hurricane we had here 25
years ago, that was a hurricane, but not the biggest hurricane that could have been.
Right.
Bob, when it was off of the Carolinas, was a category three, made landfall in Newport
Rhode Island as a category two.
The last category three to strike this area was Hurricane Carol, 1954, so you got to
go back a long ways, but they have happened.
And I know there are people who still remember that and talk about that.
What does, because we haven't had a hurricane in so long, can you describe what 90 mile
an hour winds feel like?
How do you know it's a 90 mile an hour wind, not just one of our storms?
Sure.
Well, there's two big differences between, say, a summer storm and a winter storm.
We do get very strong winds here during the winter time.
It's not uncommon for the wind to blow 60, 70 miles per hour here during the winter.
The big difference in the winter though is that we have no leaves on the trees.
So wind just can just move right through a tree, you don't get the kind of damage.
When you get winds of, say, 70 miles an hour in the summertime though with a fully leafed
tree, very easy to take down large limbs and even take down full trees.
But when you start to get into like 80, 90 miles per hour, that's when you start to get
into fully uprooted trees, structural damage, shingles being ripped off the sides of homes.
When you get into more like 100, 100, 510, that's when structural damage turns into
roofs being lifted off of homes, doors blown out, that kind of stuff.
And then forest devastation as you get into higher and higher numbers.
Well, how does the Outer Cape specifically experience a hurricane?
I know like the pictures we've seen of Hurricane Bob and Hurricane Carol, it was like buzzard
bay storm surges, you saw a lot of it to the south.
How do we experience it here that's different or the same?
Especially for a New England hurricane, we're talking about a storm that would make land
fall.
So we're talking about the eye of the storm making landfall to the west of Cape Cod.
That's sort of the traditional way that this happens.
And so as these storms are coming up the coast, they kind of transition a little bit.
The worst of the rain transitions to the left of the storm.
So you get inland rainfall and flooding.
So Vermont, New Hampshire, Western Massachusetts, Connecticut could get 10, 20 inches of rain.
So you see these old footage from 1938 and you see the rivers and Springfield coming
through factories.
The heavy rain always ends up on the left side of the storm.
The right side of the storm is where the wind in the surge ends up.
So anywhere to the right of where that landfall point is has to deal with the very strong wind
in the surge.
Traditionally here on the Cape that we may have broken skies, the sun might come out even
during the height of the storm, but the wind could be blowing quite literally 100 miles
per hour.
And with Hurricane Bob, there was very little rain, less than an inch of rain fell on the
Cape during that storm.
And it was hours before the storm got here.
During the height of the storm, the sun was shining at times.
In terms of surge, usually the worst of that is Buzzard's Bay, the south side of the Cape,
Nantucket Sound.
But the outer Cape can certainly get it, especially Wellfleet Harbor, just because of this sort
of the U-shape of the Harbor, Provincetown Harbor as well, because it kind of tucks in.
So the water, as the storm is going by, the south wind will push that water from the southern
part of Cape God Bay up into Wellfleet Harbor or up into Provincetown Harbor.
The eastern side of the Cape won't get the surge that we would get during a winter time
nor'easter, because the wind in nor'easter is coming on short.
But you'll still get large waves and beach erosion and sun flooding.
We said erosion.
That was one of the questions I had.
I mean, every winter we lose big chunks of our land.
If there's a hurricane, will even bigger chunks come off?
You know, it really would depend on the track, the way the storm approached.
So if we had a sort of the traditional storm that goes from the Outer Banks of North Carolina
up the coast, you know, crosses through New England, the erosion probably would be worse
on the south side of the Cape versus the eastern side of the Cape.
However, if we had a, like a hurricane sandy where the storm went offshore and then bent
back in, so that storm actually made a left hand turn and moved into New York, the New
York, New Jersey area.
So if that happened further north towards up, you know, up our way, the erosion on the
outer part of the Cape would have been extreme.
It would have been unlike anything we've ever seen.
I mean, we're not far away from...
Right.
So if that storm, if sandy had been 50, 75, maybe 100 miles further north and east of
where it ended up, that what you saw in coastal New Jersey, New York City area in terms of
flooding the devastation would have been Rhode Island, southeastern mass, the Cape, eastern
Massachusetts, Boston, it would have been honest as opposed to that.
What about breaches?
Like I know in winter storms will have barriers that have breached and it changes the dynamics
and causes all kinds of issues.
What would a hurricane do with that?
It's tough to say again.
It would depend probably on track, depending on the conditions that are going on out there,
what time the storm hit, whether it coincided with a high tide or a low tide, because that's
a big difference around here.
If one of these hits, if the storm hits, like we were fortunate with Bob, the surge was
about eight to 10 feet, but it hit at low tide.
So like the 38 storm, Carol, some of those storms hit close to or at high tide, which
makes a very big difference because if you have a high tidal range, if you're throwing
more water on top of the top of the tide, obviously you're putting more water on shore.
Anyone who's around here and goes to Cape Town Bay at low tide knows the water's a mile
offshore, so it makes a big difference.
In terms of cuts and erosion and all that stuff, the ocean's so dynamic it's constantly
changing out there.
There's new cuts coming every single storm, so it'd be tough to say other than I'm sure
there'd be some changes out there, there would be places where sand was shifted and maybe
an inlet is filled in and a new one forms further down or something like that.
It just depends.
Well, the getting ready part reminds me that you also work with sheltering here in this
area.
When should someone make a decision of whether they should stay at home or is it time to
move someplace else?
If your trees are popping out of your ground, are you better to rush over here and pray
for the roads or are you better to shelter in place and stay someplace you won't get
hurt?
As long as your home is not in a surge zone, the safest place to be would be in your home,
unless you have a particular need that would require attention where if you were alone
for an extended period of time without power, if you were at risk then I would maybe recommend
going to a shelter or evacuating.
There are certain parts of the Cape though along the south side that are certainly in
the surge zones and along the bay and the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency has a nice program
called Know Your Zone.
If you go to their website you can find the Know Your Zone logo, click on that and zoom
way into your street essentially and find out what zone you are in and that is sort
of supposed to prompt you as to whether you should be listening to your or being ready
to hear that evacuation order from your local emergency management folks and things like
that.
It's called Know Your Zone.
Know Your Zone is their campaign and they do a nice job of promoting that and I think
it's a good tool because it's an interactive map and you can really get right down to the
nitty-gritty of whether your road, whether your neighborhood is in an area, but really
the Cape as opposed to someplace like Florida where you can have very, very low elevation
for very long distance inland, we don't really have a lot of that here on the Cape.
A lot of places it goes relatively quickly to a safe elevation, at least away from the
ocean, but there are certainly parts of Chatham, Harwich, Bruce Alley, I mean Harwich, Dennis,
Yarmouth along the south side that are susceptible to surge.
We have a lot of older people living in this area, are there any particular concerns like
if you need an power to run a medical device or particular things that would add an extra
layer of awareness?
Sure, so that's why, I mean we do have the regional shelter system set up for situations
just like that.
I mean they're not, you know, we're at a high school, they're not a Hilton, they're
not amazing places, but they are a place where you can be safe, have some degree of power,
food, and folks to help you, you know, you'll have a cot and blankets and restrooms and
facilities to take care of you and if anyone wants to know more about that they can go
to the R-E-P-C website and you can actually, when a storm is approaching, we have all sorts
of tips on there, all of the regional shelters take pets, so if someone has a cat or a dog
or whatever household pet they can bring the pet to the shelter and they can learn all
about that stuff on our website.
Or right outside the entrance to the shelter right now, could you just kind of point out
where people would come and what they'd be looking at?
Sure, so at this particular facility they would park in the main parking lot, which
is just sort of to my left, and then come around, this is actually the gymnasium, which
is to my left, and that is the main part of the shelter, they would walk up and enter
the main doors right here.
Walked by that beautiful painting mural of the water, so it's very distinctive.
There would be sign-in right there, and then they would be led into the gymnasium, which
would be set up with cot and blankets, and that's where they would essentially spend
the duration of the event, and what we would be doing at the county level is working with
the town to try and figure out how quickly we're going to get power back, and then relaying
that information back to the shelter to let folks know here how long they're going to
be in the shelter.
And I want to ask you one last question, because we were talking about this a little earlier,
that after storms there are things here that we don't expect, and you were talking about
bees.
Yeah, so after Bob this was very common across the Cape, you lose a lot of trees, a lot of
trees are uprooted, we have a lot of yellow jackets and bees that nest either in trees
or in the ground, and so when those trees are uprooted, all these insects and bees are
disturbed and they end up flying about, and you end up with a big jump in the number of
bee stings, and now it kind of seems light-hearted in a way, but it can be dangerous because
there's a lot of people with serious allergies, and I know, I remember the stories from Cape
Cut Hospital, the spikes, the number of people that were getting bee stings, you talked to
medical professionals around here, EMS folks who were running people, because the number
of bee stings just became very common because they were everywhere.
And then the other thing that typically happens, and I remember it after Bob, is some of the
trees try and re-flower.
They get stripped of their leaves, and so they might try, because it's still warm season,
they'll try and grow out again, so you get a lot of flowers, and so you get the pollination
factor too, so those bees and insects are trying to pollinate their everywhere.
Well thank you very much for spending some time with me and explaining hurricanes and
how to prepare for and after them.
I've been Teresa Martin from Lower Cape TV, and I've been speaking with Phil Burt from
Barnstable County.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
