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Comment by isomorphic | Hacker News Reader

One of the things I take away from this graph isn't just the peak wind speed, but the amount of time you'd be under hurricane-force winds.

A couple minutes of 90mph winds is one thing... hours of 90mph winds is entirely another thing.

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Of course it depends on how fast the system is moving and how much area it covers.

I've been kept up all night with the noise caused by the high winds, particularly when it is gusting. The sound of the wind and all the banging and clattering of scrap being tossed around, doors and windows rattling and slamming, car alarms and so on.

The sound of the wind when it reaches its peak is equally awe inspiring and terrifying.

I've only experienced one eye and it is quite surreal. Screaming winds start to drop and it becomes eerily quiet and calm for (in this case) a couple of hours. Then the chaos and fury start to ramp up again.

It's not so much the wind as what is in the wind that really bowls you over.

That depends, at some point if the wind is fast enough and sustained for long enough, key parts of a building start to resemble wings.

This is it -- much like how getting caught in a tsunami is not very interesting itself, it is the debris (which includes vehicles and other large objects) that will kill you and otherwise cause devastation.

If I remember Ron White's line correctly, it's, "it's not that the wind is blowing; it's what the wind is blowing that matters."

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