A bomb cyclone causes historic rainfall and throws seventy million people in chaos in the New England region
Meteorologists’ imaginations are constantly being tested. Either to name the different hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons… or to designate the new climatic phenomena of great magnitude that are increasingly proliferating throughout the planet. We talk about cyclonic bombs, cyclogenesis, bombogenesis… and even mega lightning, already habitually present in our lives and vocabularies. Nature, due to its natural destructive condition or stimulated by the so-called climate change or the action of the human being, periodically reminds us that it will always be uncontrollable.
These days the United States, more specifically its east coast, shows us an example of this. For four days now, it shows its anger materialized in a wave of blinding snowfalls driven by strong northeasterly winds of between 80 and 120 kilometers per hour and accompanied by frigid temperatures. One of the most severe winter storms in history has wreaked untold chaos on infrastructure, transportation and energy supply systems. Seventy million people have been hit in different ways over the weekend. Many have been isolated in their homes as all roads and railways are covered, in addition to almost 4,700 flights having to be canceled at different airports in the New England region.
The sharp drop in temperatures reaches as far as warm Florida, where iguanas fall from frozen trees
Experts attribute this disaster, fortunately with few fatalities, to an extreme bomb cyclone that this time has not been baptized with a human name, calling it simply ‘North’est’ as it affected the States of New York, New Jersey, South Carolina North, Philadelphia, Massachusetts, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Maine and Rhode Island, among others, where the authorities declared a state of emergency to deal with the dramatic situation, which also flooded their coastal areas.
refugees in the subway
Large cities such as New York and Boston were paralyzed by a rapid drop in atmospheric pressure that on Saturday generated snowfalls up to 70 centimeters thick that prevented the work of salt spreaders and snow plows, and a power outage that affected to more than 120,000 homes and to the metro lines. In the Big Apple, its underground stations served as a refuge for thousands of homeless people. By contrast, the cold did not intimidate Robert Burck, a street artist known as the ‘naked cowboy’. Dressed only in underwear, a hat and cowboy boots, he walked through Times Square playing his guitar. “Barricade yourself in your homes for 24 hours until you can get back out and resume some of your normal activities,” Rhode Island Acting Director of Emergency Management Tom Guthlein advised the population.
The frost alerts reached even the usually warm Florida, where the National Meteorological Agency even warned of the risk of iguanas – a lizard that can weigh up to nine kilos – falling from the trees because they remain temporarily frozen. “They are not dead and do not throw them in the trash,” warned the authorities.
Terrible days that have yielded unprecedented data in the different meteorological agencies, which have even detected a mega-lightning that has covered a horizontal distance of about 768 kilometers, equivalent to the territory of London from the German city of Hamburg.
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