Storm Surge | When Waters Are Pushed Inland
Storm surge is the most destructive part of a hurricane for many events, even though it isn’t part of the scale to rank hurricanes. Learn more here…
When waters are pushed inland by the wind or pressure of a hurricane, it is called storm surge, and it can happen on the coast even if they are not in the hurricane itself. It can cause a lot of death and destruction when it gets high enough. As pictured above, it is strong enough to destroy whole houses and carry boats onto land from the sea. This post will bring up topics about this incredible force like statistics, formation, and more.
This post is all about storm surge.
Unstoppable Storm Surge
Effects of Storm Surge
The first section of this post will be about the effects of storm surge. The effects that will be mentioned will be the damage and deaths. The damage from the surge is very significant because of the force that water has. For example, according to The Weather Channel, about 5 mph of flowing water can have the force of an EF5 tornado. This can leave just the foundation of where a house once stood. From 1963 to 2012, it was the leading killer in hurricanes resulting in 49% of all hurricane-related deaths. But using 2013-2022 data, it now only kills 11%, with the leading killer being freshwater flooding at 57%.
Storm Surge Predictions
Predicting storm surge can be important to know if someone’s home will be impacted by it or not. Only coastal homes could be impacted if there is a low surge. If it is high, it can reach many miles inland to thousands of buildings. Surge height usually comes from the National Hurricane Center and its storm surge model. You could also estimate the size of it by looking at other models like the one pictured above, the ECMWF model. If someone looks at certain values of these models like the pressure, then they can compare other events using some characteristics like strength, size, and that value.
Surge Protection
To protect people from the water, there are several things that the government and individuals can do. The government can build structures to try to mitigate the surge like levees and improve the areas where the water flows to for the low heights. People can do things on an individual level to their homes for low surge like putting up sandbags against their structures.
Extreme Surge
For the last section of this post, a couple cases of very large surge will be brought up. The NHC classifies storm surge 9 feet or above as “extreme”. Besides Hurricane Katrina, there have been some other big cases of surge in the U.S. like Hurricane Ike. Hurricane Ike hit Galveston, TX in 2008 with 22 feet of surge at its max recorded height, covering the island in water. Speaking of Galveston, the 1900 Galveston Hurricane was the deadliest hurricane ever recorded in U.S. history because of the very high surge that also tore the island apart. It was deadlier than Ike because people in the 1900 hurricane had no warning.
