A quote we seem to be hearing more and more often these days….yet another “most”, “biggest”, or “worst ever”.
As I wrote several days ago, Irene’s rains have become the real problem, creating devastating inland flooding. Scott Mandia explains in his radio interview in another post today. The comparison that comes to mind is 1998, when Hurricane Mitch made landfall in the Honduras as “only” a category 1 storm, but one of massive size, that dumped huge amounts of precipitation – deadly in a poorly equipped Central America, where ultimately 20,000 thousand people were killed in floods or mudslides, or simply disappeared.
More at Joe Romm’s Climate Progress:
Some folks in the media and denier-sphere have tried to downplay the severity of Hurricane Irene. That’s probably because they don’t live in my home town of Middletown, New York, one of the many Hudson Valley & Catskills towns devastated by Irene. Where I grew up, this was the storm of the century.