The weather is beginning to remind me of those hokey disaster movies, but for real. Protecting our buildings is becoming a priority to deal with it.
We’ve had triple vortex tornadoes running wild in places where they are rare, more than double the usual number of these killers in a season.
We have one of the longest Droughts on record, baking places like (formerly wet) Houston, while the Midwest suffers the worst flooding in recorded history from big rivers Missouri and Mississippi. Isn’t it strange to have ALL of them happening at the same time?
Because warmer air means the molecules can hold more moisture, some snow caps are three to seven times larger than normal. More snow to melt leads to record flooding in the big rivers when the heat melts it. 500 year floods could become a regular event, even annual! But that snow doesn’t do a thing to dent a spreading drought in the southwest.
Nor does it impact hurricanes, which are posing a greater threat as the waters that fuel them get warmer. Hurricanes are earth’s mechanism to cast off excess summer heat from its equator to the cooler poles. The warmer the earth, the greater the fuel, the bigger the storms. Adding heat to the ocean waters is like throwing gas on fire for these State-sized tornadoes. The hotter air generates more energy, more energy that has to be spun off by the hurricanes whirlpools of screaming winds. CAT 3 and 4 storms could become “normal.” Compare that to Houston’s IKE, which was a CAT 1.
Houston was 99 and dry as a bone today. Houstonians couldn’t see what Corpus saw this morning – the dark edge of Tropical Storm Arlene which is whipping Mexico with 15 inches of rain. If they could have seen it, it would have been a reminder not to delay in armoring their shelter from strong winds yet to come. Hurricanes are an annual threat for half of the year, every year. Coastal resident cannot afford to be complacent or assume nothing will happen.
The Atlantic from where most U.S. storms come from is 2 degrees warmer than normal. That may not sound like much, but 2 degrees is jet fuel to a hurricane. The warmer the water, the greater the energy feeding the tropical depressions that form over the ocean before they become a Katrina or a Rita, or another threat to our castles.
2011 video is evidence of a record number of multiple vortex, mile-wide tornadoes that stayed on the ground for up to hundreds of miles. If tornado season is that bad, what’s hurricane season going to be like?
And we haven’t even gotten to the dangerous part yet.
Hurricanes (and tornadoes) will blow down the houses of today’s little piggies (and humans) that don’t have protection on their weakest link – their windows. The”Project Safe Windows” study of the 2004 four hurricanes that hit Florida showed that it is window breach caused by wind-borne debris that led to structural failure, not to mention internal damages from water, etc.
The choices are limited. )nly one solution makes economic sense.
The choices are either
(1) super expensive shutters (that wont cut UV or save energy or stop a burglar in the up position) or
(2) heavy, expensive impact glass that looks like a coke bottle, requires special frames and can’t be made very big, OR
(3) a high tech security film that keeps hurricane winds and burglars from breaking in, prevents water and wind intrusion so you don’t have months of mold and water issues to deal with, and pays for itself by cutting solar heat, and protects you from the fading and skin cancer caused by UV rays. That’s the Armor Glass security film solution.
With Armor Glass protection you never have to “board up” again!
How COOL is that? (Unless of course, you LIKE the idea of trying to bench press 100 lb. large boards up a ladder to a second story window in a high wind! We’ll look for you in the next county!)
Or the hospital..! No, don’t go there. Protect your class act with Armor Glass.
Stay tuned.
