Hatten down the batches!!! Or something like that. From Cliff Mass:
Potential for a Major Storm on Friday Night/Saturday Morning
I try never to get too excited about a storm when it is more than 120 hr out....and certainly never to discuss in this blog.
But we are close enough now to talk about the possibility of a fairly major blow on Friday night and Saturday morning.
This morning's run of the National Weather Service's GFS model is, how do I say it?, provocative.
It forecasts a 966 hPa low pressure center to be off the northern tip of Vancouver Island, with an INTENSE pressure gradient (pressure change divided by distance) to the west and southwest. That kind of pressure gradient would be associated with very strong winds (50-70 mph at least) plus big waves. And we don't get 960 hPa low centers just offshore very often. They usually stay in the Gulf of Alaska.
Still a way off and to early to really tell but it could be interesting. Fortunately, I am well shielded by Whidbey Island so the wave action should not be too great. Fitting tribute for an 80th anniversary (November 8th, 1940) of this famous event. From the Kitsap Sun:
New footage, documentary debut on 80th anniversary of the collapse of Galloping Gertie
Under the waves of the Tacoma Narrows, the grave near Galloping Gertie gave birth to a lush kelp forest "dense as an African jungle," Peter Bortel says.
A seabed peppered 80 years ago Saturday with crumbled concrete now teems with life, as wolf eels slither, lingcod swim by and octopuses build dens in the decaying remnants of a widely known but often misunderstood engineering blunder.
That's the focus of "700 Feet Down," a figurative and literal dive into the collapse of the first Tacoma Narrows Bridge that includes plenty of footage of that undersea world, as well as tales of the colossal span's collapse.
A video of the bridges movement and collapse can be found here: YouTube Galloping Gertie
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