A buoy stationed offshore recorded 4.5-meter waves and powerful currents on Wednesday. Just one of five sensors deployed in nearby waters was still reporting measurements Thursday. The foundation’s network of water quality sensors is another apparent casualty. Images show a gap in the causeway and wreckage from the road lying in the water. The bridge connecting the island to the mainland is a different story. “The access to the island is going to be quite difficult for the next several months, I would imagine.”įlorida Governor Ron DeSantis on Thursday described the storm surge on Sanibel Island as “biblical.” But Milbrandt was confident that most of the foundation’s lab-built in 2018-was likely above floodwaters and had withstood the gale. He directs the lab for the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation, a nonprofit that studies environmental conditions along the coast of southwestern Florida. “I don’t know the condition of my house or my parents’ house, whether it’s livable,” Milbrandt told ScienceInsider yesterday. Milbrandt and others, meanwhile, have been forced to flee and are now worried about their homes, experiments, and laboratories. President Joe Biden on Thursday warned of “early reports of what may be substantial loss of life.”įor some like Masters, the storm was an object of study, promising insights into everything from the adequacy of building codes to the fate of sand dunes during storms. The winds cut power for more than 2.5 million and caused extensive damage, and floodwaters swamped communities. Forrest Masters, a civil engineer from the University of Florida (UF), spent much of Wednesday hunkered down at the Punta Gorda Airport near Fort Myers, Florida, as 185-kilometer-per-hour winds from Hurricane Ian lashed the building-and nearby instruments collected data.Īt the same time, marine ecologist Eric Milbrandt was sitting in a hotel across the state in West Palm Beach, watching news reports and worrying about the fate of his marine laboratory on Sanibel Island, a barrier island near Fort Myers that was in the direct path of the storm.įor scientists, Hurricane Ian, which roared onto Florida’s southwest coast on Wednesday as a Category 4 storm with winds of 250 kilometers per hour, has been both a research opportunity and an ordeal.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |