A 1,500 mile wide storm front will hit Alaska's west coast this morning. The National Weather Service bulletin reads like a real life disaster movie in the making.
Morning shows are beginning to mention the storm, but getting some of the details wrong... on MSNBC a few minutes ago the weather guy said, this will not involve a billion in damage because it's hitting a rural area. Rural Alaska still has a considerable infrastructure -- electrical grids, fuel storage tanks and pipelines, school buildings worth tens of millions in dozens of outlying villages... housing; wind turbines; roads and port facilities. The town of Bethel in the Yukon-Kuskokwin River delta has 6,000+ residents and its airport is a jumping-off point connecting to a couple hundred villages.
Continued.
I wrote a couple sentences about the denial of arctic warming seven years ago in my second post here. Needless to say, the situation has not improved. I wouldn't be surprised if a few 110 year old houses in Nome wash into the Bering Sea later today, or the village of Shishmaref is completely wiped out and several other village sites are rendered useless, perhaps permanently.
Nothing nuclear out there that we know about, at least.
Hope it passes quickly and is less of an apocalypse than predicted!