A Florida meteorologist choked up on live TV this week.
This is rare. Weather experts usually display the emotional range of strip mall mannequins. Humidity, barometric pressure, dew point, these never trigger raw feelings. Hurricane Milton is different. Expected to make landfall in Florida’s Gulf Coast on Wednesday evening, the “monster” storm left veteran meteorologist John Morales visibly shaken.
“Just an incredible, incredible, incredible hurricane,” he told WTVJ viewers, an NBC affiliate. “It has dropped 50 millibars in 10 hours.”
He paused and glanced down with solemn dread: “Um, I apologize. This is just horrific.”
You need not be well-versed in millibars or the Saffir-Simpson scale to decipher what his eyes were screaming: Evacuate now. Get out of the monster’s path while you still can. Find safer ground. According to Reuters, Milton spiked to a Category 5 in less than 24 hours — “the third-fastest intensifying storm on record in the Atlantic Ocean.”
Streets will turn into rivers. Houses will be flattened. Uprooted trees will morph into ballistic missiles. Or as Tampa mayor Jane Castor told CNN: “I can say without any dramatization whatsoever: If you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you’re going to die.”
And, yet, some have chosen to “ride out” Milton, like it’s a mechanical bull.
Growing up, I don’t recall hearing about many storm surges, unstoppable forest fires, sink holes or mudslides. A polar vortex was a hoodie. Snownado was a high school name for a Duran Duran cover band.
The weather was fickle. It was rarely lethal.
Across the world, that has changed in recent years. Ideally, every country would prioritize climate change. Extreme weather events now strike with greater frequency than the Rolling Stones toured in the ‘70s. Hurricane Milton will arrive just days after Hurricane Helene. Once in a century is now monthly.
As an aside, I think we should adopt a new naming system for super storms. Milton sounds like a great uncle who goes birding with binoculars and a handkerchief. Helene sounds like a pastry chef who can talk your ear off about the history of emulsifiers. The danger is unclear.
You want people to heed evacuation orders? Make the storms sound scarier. Hurricane Grim Reaper. Cyclone Satan. Flash Flood Freddie Krueger. Monsoon Mephisto. Tornado Elon Musk.
(That last one is a twister that twists your brain into “dark MAGA” lunacy.)
Ideally, we’d fortify our cities with underground bunkers for millions and newfangled engineering designed to combat Mother Nature when she gets catastrophic. We’d have magical drainage systems and hydraulic steel shields that lift out of the garden at a 30-degree angle to deflect winds and protect our homes. Everyone would get a backup generator, retractable titanium bars over the windows and a two-month supply of food, water and Netflix.
But since none of this is happening, we should revamp how we warn.
The Florida meteorologist who suppressed a crying jag while scrutinizing radar data is on to something. A lot of people don’t care one whit about millibars because pascals and atmospheric pressure are nebulous. But show them a middle-aged man who has studied hurricanes for decades break down like his dog just died? They’d be more inclined to take an active interest in their survival.
The Tampa mayor was also on to something. In the past, politicians slapped a “recommended” label on calls to action. She is leaving no room for ambiguity.
You leave, you live. You stay, you die. It’s escape or suicide.
As Milton strengthened in force this week — Tampa Bay hasn’t been hit by a devastating hurricane since 1921 — there was nerd chatter about the need to add a Category 6 rating for killer storms. Why? Category 5 is already deadly. You could list a hurricane as Category 100 and some people would still shrug as they are sucked out of their chimneys. The problem is warnings.
Top psychologists should hold monthly summits to devise better alert systems. Why are smokers not deterred by the graphic labels on packs of cigarettes that show holes in throats or blackened lungs? Wearing a seatbelt in Ontario became a law before it was mandated across the United States. I only know this because I have childhood memories of driving to Pennsylvania in the summer. As soon as we crossed the border, my two brothers and I would climb into the back of the station wagon to play with our Star Wars toys.
Seatbelts? We weren’t even in seats!
That changed with new laws and PSAs that stressed how not wearing a seatbelt was correlated with getting hurled out of the windshield upon impact. Similarly, climate change now requires PSAs that focus on the consequences of weather.
Godspeed to everyone in the path of Hurricane Milton this week.
I beg you, take the warnings seriously.
