The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Don't Let Hurricane Helene Catch You With Your Pants Down || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

Click the link to join Peter Zeihan's Patreon for early access to videos and newsletters, exclusive access to live Q&As and news digests, and more: https://www.patreon.com/peterzeihan Hurricane Helene is heading toward the Big Bend of Florida and was set to make landfall around midnight last night. As a Category 3 storm, Helene is poised to make quite the splash, so here's what to keep an eye on. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/hurricane-helene-patreon-info

Hi, everybody. Peter Zine here, coming to you from Wisconsin. I'm a public speaker, and I work with demographics and geopolitics and trade and war and everything in between. As for regions, it really runs the gamut, covering things in North America, the Middle East, the African continent, the East Asian Rim, the former Soviet Union, and on and on and on. As for topics, transport, manufacturing, electricity, agriculture, industrial commodities, and finance. I have a morning podcast that I do every single day, and you can sign up for it on Patreon. Link attached here. And so, come join the party. Hey, everybody. Peter's on here coming to you from, where am I, Wisconsin?

Today, we are going to talk about the hurricane that has just hit the Florida coast in the Big Bend area. That's the Crookwer Peninsula. Florida meets the rest of the Panhandle. Hurricane Helene hit. and it will hit when I'm recording this, probably hits about midnight, the morning that you're going to be viewing this. Anyway, as a category three, hurricane.

Three things to keep in mind about hurricanes in general. And the fourth one that applies to this one specific. First of all, whenever hurricanes coming in, look for the leading right quadrant. So imagine yourself sitting in the eye of the hurricane, four to the right. That's where most of the winds are. That's where most of the storms are.

That's where most of the tornadoes are. importantly, that's where the storm surge is. While the winds are dangerous, while the tornadoes are dangerous, while the storms are dangerous, while the rain is dangerous, the real problem with most hurricanes, especially the larger ones, is the storm surge because it pushes several feet of water ahead of the storm. And the case of Helene, they're expecting because of a combination of the strength of the winds and the path that it's following, storm surges in excess of 15, maybe even hitting 20 feet, which would be, you know, bad.

It's one thing when a storm hits you and it dumps a foot of rain on you. It's quite another when you're under 20 feet of water. Survival in that situation becomes questionable. And most buildings that are not hugely reinforced get washed away. The second thing to keep in mind is that when a storm is coming in, it's obviously hitting low-lying areas. This is a financial problem now. It's not so much climate change, although that undoubtedly

it's going to be a bigger part of the problem moving for it, but instead an insurance issue. As Americans get older, as the baby boomers retire, more and more people are moving from the north and the interior of the country into the sunbelt and the southeast. Of course, everything from Corpus Christi up to the Chesapeake is in Hurricane Alley. So the more storms we have,

It's not so much the more storms. It's the more people that are living in those zones, the bigger the problem and the bigger the cost of rebuilding. And that means that insurance companies have no choice but to raise premiums because more people are living in danger zones. And the upper limit of what a single storm can do in terms of damage is getting higher and higher simply because there are more people in those zones. And that's before you consider something like climate change.

As a rule, the two concerns about climate change. change in the short term warmer seas can generate bigger storms because warmer air can hold more moisture and in the longer term higher sea levels mean that that storage surge starts six inches a foot a meter higher which makes everything else that much more difficult to defend the third thing is if you find yourself in a zone that is having an actual storm arguably your single best source of information on how bad things really are is Waffle House. FEMA doesn't simply set up in the parking lots of Waffle House in order to monitor the situation and get everybody some food. They go there because the Waffle House menu covers all of the basics, flour, sugar, butter, eggs, that sort of thing. And so if the Waffle

house is operating on a full menu, they know that the store isn't too bad. And they probably have the right amount of resources. If there's a constrained menu, that they know they need to take it seriously, and if the Waffle House shuts down. Well, then all help has broken loose, and they need to call back to Washington, get as many resources and as many people as possible.

That applies for any hurricane, and since hurricanes hit the South and the Southeast, there's always a lawful house nearby. And then the final item is for this hurricane specifically, Hurricane Helene, and once it makes landfall, in the vicinity of the bend in the Panhala region, is expected to go north through western Georgia,

and then when it hits roughly the Kentucky, Tennessee border, it's expected to go west and then south into a curly queue before then jutting off to the northeast like a normal storm track would be. It's going to take it probably a day and a half to two days to do that curly queue. So you get a very large storm, hurricane level three, when it hits land, that will then hang around for a couple of days in an area that is the most rugged in the United States east of the Rocky Line, dumping feet of rain on an area that is already pretty serrated.

So we're not just going to have the store surge damage that Florida has a lot of experience in dealing with. We're going to get a huge amount of flooding more in the interior of the country, and FEMBA will already be committed on the coast. So it's going to be up to state authorities to mitigate what's going on in the southern Appalachians. we don't see that very often. Usually storms should kind of blow through, drop six inches of rain on their way or gone. Here we're talking about multiple feet of rain

falling in the area between Lexington, Kentucky and Nashville, Tennessee. So stay safe, watch Waffle House, obviously listen to local law enforcement in FEMA. One more thing. If you're in the way of a hurricane and you're in the leading left quadrant, so sitting in the eye looking forward, leading left,

most of it's going to miss you. you're not going to get the storm surge. You're not going to get a huge amount of storm. We're probably not going to have any tornadoes. In fact, it might be a calm, kind of, maybe a little blustery and clear day. So have a hurricane party. But don't be a dick about it because just to your east or north is going to be a community that's fighting for its lives. And you definitely don't want to get into a situation where you're drawing emergency services away from now.

So have a good time responsibly.