Hanna causes little damage; all eyes on Ike

9/6, 9:53 AM EDT: I wrote on Thursday that “Hanna is not worthy of much hype. It will bring rain and storminess to the East Coast, but will hardly be a disaster.” As it turns out, this was exactly right. Yesterday’s return to fully tropical status, and last-minute strengthening, was mostly just a meteorological curiosity; Hanna did not pack much of a punch, after all.

Even the “rain and storminess” was limited by Hanna’s very fast forward speed. This storm is zipping along, limiting is potential to dump flooding rains or batter those in its path with sustained strong winds over an extended period of time. The Wilmington Star-News reports little damage. Bob Owens, directly under the storm’s core, calls it “Much Ado About Nothing.”

Of course, as anybody reading this blog for the last several days has known, Hanna was never going to be the blockbuster storm of the Hanna-Ike-Josephine trio, and to the extent the media suggested otherwise, they were being irresponsible and inaccurate. (I barely ever watch cable news coverage of hurricanes anymore, so I can only assume they over-hyped Hanna — generally a fair assumption.) The “potential blockbuster” label belongs, as it always has, to Hurricane Ike, and he continues to be a major threat. But Alan Sullivan offers reasons to hope Ike’s re-intensification may not be too explosive — while at the same time urging that folks in the Florida Keys take this storm seriously:

Model consensus for Ike has shifted further left, and NHC has adjusted the track to brush the Cuban coast before recurvature. Ike has weakened further overnight, but reconnaissance finds the hurricane’s core intact, with a closed eye, so restrengthening may begin. Later today, however, Ike will move over waters well-worked by Hanna, and they may be less than generous feeding warmth to another storm so soon. Tomorrow there could be land interaction with Cuba. So we must consider Ike’s strength uncertain, and course-dependent.

With Ike threading the needle of the Florida Straits, or actually hitting Cuba (where Gustav caused “no casualties,” and US media repeated the lie) the threat to South Florida’s urban strip is diminishing. The Keys remain at greater risk. Only a small deviation could put Key West in the eye of a major hurricane. Take Ike seriously, citizens of the Conch Republic. This is not the time to buy booze for your storm party. This is time to get the hell out! …

I suppose I should mention the Gulf. Remember Gustav? It hit cooler water, entrained dry air, and went ashore with less force than expected. Don’t worry too much about Ike just yet. First, let’s see how it fares, if the core is disrupted by land interaction. Second, let’s get some notion of the later track. Third, let’s consider the dry air, which is spilling south ahead of schedule this fall. Yes, fall. It’s only technically summer now. The patterns resemble those typical of September’s last week, not its first.

Sound advice on all counts. With regard to the Keys, it’s quite possible Ike will be a “near miss,” or another “could have been worse” storm, but that’s no reason not to evacuate. We can’t know yet exactly where Ike will go, and by the time we do, it’ll be too late to evacuate. The Keys, like New Orleans, is one of those places that is inevitably going to be cursed with more than its fair share of “false alarms,” for the simple reason that folks have to evacuate early, if they’re ever going to evacuate at all — and the degree of vulnerability makes “never evacuating at all” an utterly foolhardy option, at least when we’re talking about major hurricanes.

UPDATE: Dr. Jeff Masters and Eric Berger both have much more on Ike.