I have to laugh at the media, as unlike The Claw they sugarcoat everything. Take a look for example at what they call heavily damaged:
Ok we will go with heavily damaged. I was going to go with “totaled” but I am sure State Farm will send an adjuster. Not all of the plant is affected by the tornado, but most of the plant is at least temporaily debilitated.
So maybe not totaled. But when 50,000 pallets of medicine is destroyed that is an attention getter.
In all seriousness the collateral and cascading damage in Rocky Mount, N.C. will take weeks or months to calculate, because we have a major supply problem now.
Parts of roofs were ripped open atop its massive buildings. The Pfizer plant stores large quantities of medicine that were tossed about, said Nash County Sheriff Keith Stone.
“I’ve got reports of 50,000 pallets of medicine that are strewn across the facility and damaged through the rain and the wind," Stone said.
The plant produces anesthesia and other drugs as well as nearly 25% of all sterile injectable medications used in U.S. hospitals, Pfizer said on its website. Erin Fox, senior pharmacy director at University of Utah Health, said the damage “will likely lead to long-term shortages while Pfizer works to either move production to other sites or rebuilds.”
This is very bad. And yet, what we can count on in times of tragedy, are MAGA idiots celebrating whatever it is being harmed that conflicts with their worldview. Like science. Pretty much, any science.
Elon’s Twitter fairly well now only amplifies conspiracies and alt-right trash, which is why I rarely go there.
Because some are unaware of how bad the situation is, I invite all of you to go to Twitter, type in “Pfizer Plant” and look at the top results.
The current top result? This ‘future bioresearcher,” who couldn’t resist adding in a bit of racial spice into the Ignorance Stew:
The answer to this question is no.
Most of what was destroyed is of the anesthetic variety, not vaccines. Much to their disappointment.
Basically Twitter is off my radar, with few exceptions, as my concern is accurate information. Elon’s algorithm prioritizes any clown with a credit card over accounts like Reuters and Associated Press. It is mostly just a glossier 4Chan.
Alright, I am in a mood. Who is with me? I don’t need to say anthing more about these idiots, onto something important. First, how do we help the victims?
Many people in Nash and Edgecombe counties are still without power after an EF-3 tornado tore through homes and city buildings. The American Red Cross has set up a temporary shelter at Red Oak Baptist Church, 5515 Red Oak Road in Red Oak to aid people who were affected.
"Many people are assessing the damage to their homes but many people are also struggling with power outages as well, or the power has been shut off until the power can be evaluated," Red Cross representative Cally Edwards said. "And so, this shelter is a place where people can come, have power, have AC and connect with the Red Cross and resources."
More resources are at link.
So the question begs, as this was part of a story about nationwide extreme weather, is this a part of climate change? Weather, as we know, is different from climate. Any odd one-off can happen at any time, so what we have to look for are anomalies that become, well, less anomalous. That is to say, the unusual becomes less so.
There are an average of 31 tornados that occur in North Carolina each year. Most of those happen during the spring months. If there is an increase in tropical storm activity, there may be more tornados during the late summer months as well. Take a look at the tornado averages by month for North Carolina below.
- January – 1
- February – 0
- March – 3
- April – 4
- May – 5
- June – 3
- July – 3
- August – 3
- September – 4
- October – 2
- November – 2
- December – 0
A tornado in July in N.C. is not unheard of. Here are some of the more historically notable:
The typical peak tornado season in North Carolina runs from March through May, though tornadoes can occur at any time of year. Although North Carolina has fewer tornadoes than the Midwest, we still see an average of 31 tornadoes a year.
On March 28, 1984, tornadoes took the lives of 42 North Carolinians, and injured 801. On November 28, 1988, a single deadly tornado killed four and injured 154, leaving 982 homeless. This storm stayed on the ground for 83 miles on a path from Raleigh to Northampton County. More recently in 2011, during the three-day period from April 14-16, more than 177 tornadoes erupted across the country. Thirty of those were confirmed in North Carolina, and left 22 dead in their wake, including 12 in Halifax County. This outbreak also included strong tornadoes in Snow Hill, Havelock and Jacksonville in eastern North Carolina.
So is this the tornado directly due to climate change? I don’t know that we could definitively conclude that. What we do know is that lately, the storms have been more unpredictable. This is the forecast for yesterday from the Storm Prediction Center.
Here is the link I used:
While there was a marginal risk of severe weather, there was no forecast risk of city erasing tornadoes. Note, this forecast was issued just after midnight the same day. And no, this point of this is not to criticize forecasters. Not. At. All. The point is that storms themselves are getting less forecastable.
Meteorologists in the Chicago area say Wednesday’s tornadoes are a good example of how quickly our weather can change depending on wind sheer and instability in the atmosphere.
At the start of the week, weather models initially showed Wednesday’s rain and storms ending in the early afternoon. We expected clouds to remain and winds to shift more toward the northwest. Even Wednesday morning, models suggested the main threat would be in the morning.
However, the front weakened as the storms passed in the early morning. This kept the winds coming from the south, bringing us warmer, moist air south. The clouds also started to dissipate and allowed sunshine to reach the ground.
This marks the second time in less than a week storms took professionals by surprise. So while one could attribute that to anomalies, one could also look deeper. If storms are being fueled by climate change, that means past data that built the models could become obsolete. If nature is moving faster, even more violently, this makes mitigation nearly impossible.
It is not the storm itself that is the only indicator of climate change. It is the sheer rapidity, along with the unpredictability of its development.
As for the plant, most likely the safety manager of the plant reviewed the forecast for that day, and most likely that manager created a protocol, or allowed one to be unchanged, based upon it. Storms that blow in out of nowhere, particularly the unpredicted wind shifts, which will serve as the basis for a tornado, make the effects of the storm itself all the more damaging.
Allow me to share our legendary Meteor Blade’s Tweet, regarding new normals.
When weather can turn on a dime, because there is so much volatility in the atmosphere, it becomes more than just an inconvenience, it destabilizes entire social structures. The U.S will have to adjust and perhaps “Marshall Plan” respond to this medicine deficit. But this is only going to get worse, and less predictable, and more destabilizing.
Put another way, there is no more, “normal.”
Use #NOMORENORMAL on your social media to highlight this crisis. Thank you!
-ROC
UPDATE: The helicopter view shows damages and for 52 seconds was shown only damage. It was the first legitimate news source I found, and most of the other pictures showed similar, so without knowledge of the complex, the context I had was that it was more severely damaged than it actually was. That, combined with the concernes over shortages made me think the plant was inoperable.
I have adjusted the diary to reflect the scope of the damages of the plant.
-ROC
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Love,
-ROC
