On Tuesday morning, there was no Hurricane Otis. Instead, there was just a tropical storm carrying winds of about 50 miles per hour. Every single model used to predict the behavior of such storms called for Otis to remain a tropical storm. Instead, it blew up over a period of just nine hours, becoming a raging Category 5 hurricane that struck the coast of Mexico just south of Acapulco overnight with sustained winds of 165 mph.
Not only was the storm unprecedented in its behavior, it’s also by far the most powerful storm in this region going back over 50 years. The last severe storm to strike along this coast was a Category 2 storm in 1968, which remains one of the deadliest storms in Mexican history. Expectations are that nothing, absolutely nothing, in the region has been built to meet a storm like Otis.
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To give a sense of how unexpected this storm was, on the graph below, all the solid lines are the predictions for tropical storm Otis. The dotted line shows what actually happened.
A senior scientist writes to me:
Otis’ progression meant that there weren’t days of evacuation warnings nor time for government/people/businesses to take what measures they could to improve resiliency/reduce risk (think those images of plywood being attached to cover windows, lines of people buying water/food/flashlights/… or, on larger scale, mobilization of military / police / emergency services to be ready (readier?) to deal with the situation post storm).
Much of (U.S.) storm (hurricane, major snow, …) readiness / emergency preparedness thinking relies on systems (technology, people, …) to give warning. Does Otis presage a world where that “given” of predictability of warning time no longer exists?
