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Monday, September 01, 2008

Hurricane vs Blizzard

Living in a part of the country that gets no hurricanes, tornadoes or earthquakes is great. We do get ice storms, snow storms and blizzards. Sometimes we will get remnants of hurricanes with wind and rain but it's not even a tropical storm at that point. Two years ago while camping up at the 1000 Islands we experienced what I called a torcano. People's tents were ripped up, our screen house levitated but didn't blow away. The wind and rain was frightening. Being in a tent camper didn't help.
While chatting with a friend who lives in Louisiana I said I could never live in an area with wind storms. I'll admit it, I'm afraid of wind. He replied he could never live any place where it had cold weather. I guess it comes down to what you're familiar with.
Now for some differences between hurricanes and blizzards.
Hurricanes: sustained winds of 74 miles and above. Can cover an area of 600 miles.
Blizzard: sustained winds of 35 mph for 3 hours with visibility of less than 1/4 of a mile. I don't know how big a blizzard can get but it may cover a 600 mile area.
Hurricanes: Rain, lots of it. Flooding, lots of it.
Blizzard: Can have snow falling with it but also no snow. Sometimes it just blows the snow around that's already on the ground. The streets can be clogged with snow as well as your driveway. Can have 10 foot and higher snow drifts.
Hurricane: storm surges.
Blizzard: no such thing.
Hurricane: Dirty water is ugly.
Blizzard: Snow can be beautiful.
Hurricane: People can be swept away and drown. Your house can be blown away. I will say this, during a hurricane it's usually warm.
Blizzard: You can't drown in snow and most of the time it won't sweep your house away. Maybe part of your roof. It's really cold and people can get frostbite or die from hypothermia. The wind chill can be -50 degrees.

Hurricane: after it's over you can sail a boat down your street but that's it or maybe this but I wouldn't recommend it.
Blizzard: After a blizzard you can go sledding, downhill and cross country skiing, snowshoeing make snow forts and have a snowball fight.

Hurricanes: are named and up until 1979 were women's names then it was decided men wanted a little of that action so now female/male names are alternated. There are 6 rotating lists of names. Some of them are really stupid names. Take Hurricane Hanna. Hanna doesn't sound threatening. Now Hurricane Helga, that sounds like that would be a bad one. Ike doesn't sound so nice either.

Blizzards: They don't get names but sometimes get called the Blizzard of what ever year it happens to be.

Hurricanes: Silly people fly into hurricanes. Stupid people try and surf.

Blizzards: We stay out of the sky and inside til it's over.


There are similarities such as in both you can lose your electricity but in a blizzard you'll be pretty cold without heat. Both damage trees and property. We get snow days, are there hurricane days? There must be.While I don't want to be in either a hurricane or a blizzard, if I had a choice, I'm going with the blizzard.

1 comments:

Kitten Herder said...

You can get hurricane days from school. When I was in elementary school, we got two days off in June for Hurricane Agnes in Maryland. It wasn't really that bad. There was some flooding. On the second day we ended up going to a park where the stream was so overflooded and warm that we swam in it, which you normally couldn't do.

Blizzards are less damaging, I think, but can be just as deadly due to the cold.