Typhoon Haiyan
Unless you've been absolutely starved of news this past week, you have probably heard about Typhoon Haiyan devastating regions of the Philippines. The Typhoon formed on November 3rd and made landfall on the Philippine island of Samar of November 7th. Haiyah had winds of 190-195mph at landfall, making it the strongest tropical cyclone to make landfall in world history.
This is a hard topic to cover as you can imagine, due to the shear size and impact of the event.We discussed the event in class from a behavior based view to better understand its impact. The structure of the storm played a big part. It was considered a well defined storm meaning that en route to Manillia and Tacloban winds may blow strong North until the eye focuses on the town. Then things will calm down only to get back up to speed in the other directions. Not many structures can stand up to that. Additionally the storm did not stick to the forecasted path. While Philippine major roadways are already packed, the additional surge of people pre landfall, did not help the matter.
My group discussed the additional factors that made this storm so deadly. Geography of the island made it nearly impossible to get out of the storms way. The options seemed to be to go to higher ground far inland where you have no shelter and could face landslides or go to the community shelter buildings that were only a half mile inland and composed of brick and mortar(which were inundated by the storm surge or had collapsed by wind intensity anyways). We also located in various news articles that officials did not relay the hazard rating of the storm so that the local population in Tacloban could understand the seriousness. Although locals have performed tsunami drills, the communication was not there. On top of everything this is a developing country. Property loss and human life loss are more impactful and slower to recover than if the country was a LDC or MDC.
Experts are divided on the impact of global warming on increased storm intensity, but if this is any indication, the geography of the Philippines make it susceptible either way.
This is a hard topic to cover as you can imagine, due to the shear size and impact of the event.We discussed the event in class from a behavior based view to better understand its impact. The structure of the storm played a big part. It was considered a well defined storm meaning that en route to Manillia and Tacloban winds may blow strong North until the eye focuses on the town. Then things will calm down only to get back up to speed in the other directions. Not many structures can stand up to that. Additionally the storm did not stick to the forecasted path. While Philippine major roadways are already packed, the additional surge of people pre landfall, did not help the matter.
My group discussed the additional factors that made this storm so deadly. Geography of the island made it nearly impossible to get out of the storms way. The options seemed to be to go to higher ground far inland where you have no shelter and could face landslides or go to the community shelter buildings that were only a half mile inland and composed of brick and mortar(which were inundated by the storm surge or had collapsed by wind intensity anyways). We also located in various news articles that officials did not relay the hazard rating of the storm so that the local population in Tacloban could understand the seriousness. Although locals have performed tsunami drills, the communication was not there. On top of everything this is a developing country. Property loss and human life loss are more impactful and slower to recover than if the country was a LDC or MDC.
Experts are divided on the impact of global warming on increased storm intensity, but if this is any indication, the geography of the Philippines make it susceptible either way.
Thanks to the growth in popularity of the world largest encyclopedia, Typhoon Haiyan is covered extensively here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Haiyan
More to come with more research.
