Hurricane Wilma wind damage

[weatherlover427]

Someone on another site posted this picture of a shredded traffic light thingy that they saw around Miami, FL after the passage of Hurricane Wilma (I don't know the exact word for it) and I was wondering what kind of winds it would take to shred the "thingy" as is seen here:



edited: credit to Nimdock at this site for the picture.

[dolebot_Broward_NW]

Those things are EVERYWHERE down here, and they all look like that. Or at least they did until they picked them up. So since Broward had gusts to 99 at FLL, sustained at just over 80, Pompano had higher, so.... I would say 100mph gusts will do that to a traffic light.

[dolebot_Broward_NW]

Same winds did this:



Those are concrete poles.

[weatherlover427]

We get winds here with our Santa Anas of 90-100mph and the power poles in our canyons (concrete like the one you posted) haven't done that in ages from what I can recall. Most of our utilities are underground here in southern California, so it's hard to say if the power poles we do have above ground could survive such winds for a sustained period of time or not.

I can only imagine how hard it would be to put another one of those things back up. Btw, FWIW; our wooden power poles here are rated for wind speeds of at least 90 MPH.

[Aslkahuna]

The steel transmission towers in the Altamont Pass east of Oakland CA are constructed to withstand 100mph winds and they looked like spaghetti after a storm in Nov 1982 caused closure of the bridges in the Bay Area because of gusts in excess of that amount through the GG. The Altamont Pass is a notorious wind funnel. That storm BTW was the extratropical remnant of Hurricane Iwa which until Iniki ten years later was HI's worse hurricane hit.

Steve

[wxman57]

That light appears to have been hit by flying debris. Just wind wouldn't do that, as the pole holding the light up would be blown down long before the light was destroyed.. Same thing with many of the power poles/transmission lines. They may be built to withstand 100 mph wind, but they can't withstand even 50 mph wind with trees blowing into them.

[weatherlover427]

Yeah I didn't think that wind alone would do that; heck we have some lights here that are similar to those in construction and even our strongest of Santa Ana winds barely turn the lights; not shred them. So it had to have been debris. Must have been something big though to have been lifted up and slammed that high.

[boca]

My wife had tree bark embedded in her bumper of a 2003 Honda Oddessy explain that one.