EDITORIAL: OUR VIEW: A powerful hurricane threatens East Coast once again

Aug. 31--Locals can be forgiven for breathing a sigh of relief, watching the news bulletins from Hurricane Dorian -- better them than us.

As of Friday, the storm appeared to be barreling toward central Florida as a Category 4 hurricane (winds between 130-156 mph). That's comparable to the legendary Hazel of 1954.

What's scarier, though, is the long-term forecast. Dorian, it seems, might pull a Florence. Forecasters say it could come ashore, then linger in place for a day or more, dumping inch after inch of rain.

That's what happened when Florence hit here a year ago, flooding the area, virtually dissolving soil and sending trees toppling.

Some forecasts show Dorian dumping 15 inches of rain or so in counties as far north as South Carolina. We're bound to pick up some of that. And we still have blue tarps on houses all around the area and homeowners waiting on repair guys to get caught up.

It sounds as if the Cassandras were onto something. Hurricanes seem to be growing stronger -- Category 4s used to be awfully rare -- and slower, staying around when they arrive and dumping millions of gallons of water. A lot of our land and structures can't take that.

Scientific American notes that weather reports show this past July was the hottest month in recorded history, more than 1 degree Fahrenheit warmer than any average July between 1981 and 2010. Glaciers are vanishing in Iceland; ice sheets are melting in Greenland.

Hmmm ... do you think there might be a connection?

On the immediate, practical level, there's not that much we can do.

We could run to the store and stock up on bottled water, batteries and generator fuel before everyone else lines up in a panic.

The folks behind this year's Hurricane Preparedness Month ("Prepared, Not Scared") make the point the households ought to start an emergency fund to cover the costs of quick evacuations and repairs before Jim Cantore shows up in your neighborhood. Sadly, in the case of hurricanes, that seems to be a proposition of if, not when.

Finally, regardless of what the 45th president thinks, it's increasingly clear that climate change is a fact. If the planet's heating up, we ought to do what we can to slow that process down.

Chucking the Obama administration's limits on methane emissions, which Mr. Trump just signed up on, is absolutely the wrong thing to do at this moment; methane is an identified "greenhouse" gas that heats up the environment.

And while, yes, illegal immigration is a challenge, siphoning off FEMA funds just now to build migrant camps is not a good idea.

We need new thinking at the top.

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