{"id":229574,"date":"2019-09-05T03:24:30","date_gmt":"2019-09-05T07:24:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=229574"},"modified":"2019-09-05T03:24:30","modified_gmt":"2019-09-05T07:24:30","slug":"trump-clings-to-idea-alabama-faced-big-threat-from-dorian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2019\/09\/05\/trump-clings-to-idea-alabama-faced-big-threat-from-dorian\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump clings to idea Alabama faced big threat from Dorian"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">This was the originally projected path of the Hurricane in its early stages. As you can see, almost all models predicted it to go through Florida also hitting Georgia and Alabama. I accept the Fake News apologies! <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/0uCT0Qvyo6\">pic.twitter.com\/0uCT0Qvyo6<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/realDonaldTrump\/status\/1169375550806351872?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">September 4, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><br \/>\nWASHINGTON &#8212; President Donald Trump isn&#8217;t giving up on the dubious idea that\u00a0Alabama\u00a0faced a serious threat from Hurricane Dorian.<\/p>\n<p>During an Oval Office briefing Wednesday, Trump displayed a map of the National Hurricane Center forecast for last Thursday that showed Dorian could track over Florida. The map he displayed included what appeared to be a hand-drawn half-circle that extended the cone of uncertainty over a swath of\u00a0Alabama.<\/p>\n<p>Trump had raised eyebrows and drawn an emphatic fact check from the National Weather Service on Sunday when he tweeted that\u00a0Alabama, along with the Carolinas and Georgia, \u201cwill most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The National Weather Service in Birmingham,\u00a0Alabama, tweeted in response: \u201cAlabama\u00a0will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian. We repeat, no impacts from Hurricane #Dorian will be felt across\u00a0Alabama.\u00a0The system will remain too far east.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Few, if any, meteorologists put\u00a0Alabama\u00a0in the hurricane&#8217;s path. Asked Sunday if Trump had been briefed about potential impact to\u00a0Alabama, Christopher Vaccaro, a spokesman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, wrote in an email, \u201cThe current forecast path of Dorian does not include\u00a0Alabama.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>On Monday, Trump pushed back on skeptics by insisting that \u201cunder certain original scenarios, it was in fact correct that\u00a0Alabama\u00a0could have received some &#8216;hurt.\u201d&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>And then, on Wednesday, Trump displayed the graphic with the alteration that suggested the storm could have tracked over\u00a0Alabama.<\/p>\n<p>Trump had no explanation for who had altered the map he displayed in the White House.<\/p>\n<p>But he told reporters, \u201cI know that\u00a0Alabama\u00a0was in the original forecast.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He added: \u201cActually, we have a better map than that which is going to be presented, where we had many lines going directly &#8212; many models, each line being a model &#8212; and they were going directly through. And in all cases\u00a0Alabama\u00a0was hit if not lightly, in some cases pretty hard. &#8230; They actually gave that a 95% chance probability.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The highest probability issued for a U.S. locale for Dorian has been in the 60% range, not 95%.<\/p>\n<p>Trump later tweeted a map dated Aug. 28, claiming: \u201cAs you can see, almost all models predicted it to go through Florida also hitting Georgia and\u00a0Alabama.\u00a0I accept the Fake News apologies!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami, responded: \u201cHe has no clue what he&#8217;s talking about, or what is plotted on that map. At the time of that cycle,\u00a0Alabama\u00a0was at even lower risk than before, and it was barely anything to start with.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The National Hurricane Center has issued 45 advisories giving probabilities for tropical storm and hurricane force winds for dozens of cities.\u00a0Alabama\u00a0locations have not been in any of those wind probability advisories, although Massachusetts and Canadian locales have been listed.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTrump should have just admitted he made a mistake and moved on!\u201d emailed Phil Klotzbach, a research scientist in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University.<\/p>\n<p>Meteorologist Bob Henson of weather.com emailed that \u201cAlabama\u00a0was never in the five-day cone except for a tiny sliver of the southeast corner of the state at one point.\u201d But by Saturday night and Sunday, he added, that scenario had become much more unlikely.<\/p>\n<p>While forecasts from overnight Friday showed a tiny bit of\u00a0Alabama\u00a0at the edge of the cone of uncertainty, by Saturday morning &#8212; more than 24 hours before Trump&#8217;s warning about\u00a0Alabama\u00a0&#8212; the storm was predicted to pose no threat to the state. Trump was getting regular updates about the storm.<\/p>\n<p>Ryan Maue, a meteorologist, said it&#8217;s important for the president&#8217;s tweets to be accurate if he wants to provide helpful information to the public facing a potential emergency. He said the problem with the president&#8217;s tweet came from sending out stale information.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf he&#8217;s going to be a provider of up-to-date information, he needs to be up to date,\u201d Maue said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8212;&#8212;<\/p>\n<p>Associated Press writers Seth Borenstein and Zeke Miller contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This was the originally projected path of the Hurricane in its early stages. As you can see, almost all models &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":228172,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-229574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","category-news-w","mauthors-nancy-benac","mauthors-the-associated-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229574"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229574\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":229575,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229574\/revisions\/229575"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/228172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}