CLOSE
Tags Posts tagged with "wind"

wind

by -
0 71
Kite. Pixabay photo

By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

The visitor comes unexpectedly sneaking around corners, invisible in the air even if you’re staring directly at him.

He is particularly welcome in the summer, when it’s so hot that the sweat on your skin only makes you wet and clammy, without providing much relief.

A cold drink might help, you think. As your fingers take respite from the moisture on the cup, your lips, tongue and mouth journey far from the heat, giving your brain the chance to ignore the signals the rest of your body is sending about how hot and miserable you are.

Short as this comfort is, it’s nothing compared to the effect this guest brings.

I tend to make an odd face when I get too hot, curling my short, thick tongue into my slightly larger lower palate and waiting, as patiently as possible, for the fall to bring cooler temperatures, Halloween costumes, pumpkin pie and, down the road, maybe a snowman that’s taller than me and my son who years ago started bending down to hug his father.

Today, however, during that most amazing of now moments, the guest has arrived, offering the kind of cooling and refreshing massage that lasts much longer than an hour. He charges nothing for his services.

He has an open invitation, of course, but he doesn’t always accept the offer, particularly when he’s traveling elsewhere.

He makes the horseflies scatter and alters the surface of the water, causing the kind of rippling pattern that may inspire a young mathematician eager to find a formula to explain what she sees.

He can interrupt even the most heated of discussions, debates and disagreements. It’s hard to be angry or to make an aggressive point when he’s around. And, in case you ignore him, he has a way of making his presence felt, knocking that stylish hat off your head and into the Long Island Sound, causing that expensive silk scarf to ruffle toward your face, or loosening those carefully tucked bangs.

Powerful as the sun and heat are, he can offer a counterbalance.

He can be cruel, knocking a bird’s nests out of the trees. He can also topple a table filled with carefully cooked cuisine, turning the mouth watering meal into a mess. When he feels like attending a baseball game, he can turn a home run into a fly ball and vice versa.

Ah, but go with him when you’re sailing, flying a kite or just sitting on a hot beach, and he brings the kind of cleansing magic to the air that water brings to a parched plate.

He helps send a kite high into the air, tugging on a line that causes the kite to dart, dive, dip and climb.

On a sailboat, he is the copilot, willing your ship, no matter its size, faster. You don’t need a motor when he’s around and you may not even need to drink that iced tea, lemonade, ice cold beer or soft drink you brought along with you.

After a sail, even on some of the hottest days, but particularly around dusk, he provides cool comfort in much the same way a blanket offers warmth during the coolest nights of the winter.

As he climbs through the nearby trees, he seems to ask you to “shhh.” Then, he waltzes past chimes, tapping each sound singularly and together, singing a unique summer melody that changes with each of his appearances.

He is an equal opportunity flag waver, indifferent to the political leanings of the people who hoisted the revered cloth to the top of a pole.

One of my favorite companions during the summer, I celebrate the cherished breeze, not only for the comfort he affords but for the way he alters the landscape and offers a respite from the heat.

by -
0 1909
Sean Clouston. Photo by Rachel Kidman

By Daniel Dunaief

The same wind that powers sailboats, makes kites dart through the air, and causes flags to flutter can make being outdoors in a group safer, particularly during the pandemic.

While public health officials have suggested that being outdoors with others amid the pandemic is safer than remaining inside, the strength of the wind can affect the level of protection provided by wide open spaces.

That’s the conclusion Sean Clouston, Associate Professor in the Program in Public Health and the Department of Family, Population and Preventive Medicine at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, reached after studying public health data from 96,000 cases of COVID in Suffolk County from March 16, 2020 to December 31, 2020.

By combining public health data with the daily reports from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Clouston found that days in which the temperature was between 60 and 84 degrees Fahrenheit and in which the wind was about 5 miles per hour or less had higher COVID-19 transmission than those days in which the wind speed was faster.

This kind of study, which was recently published in the journal BMC Infectious Disease, might affect the guidance policy makers provide to reduce the risk of COVID transmission during outdoor gatherings.

“If you’re imaging yourself as a policy maker and you want to contain COVID, what do you do?” Clouston asked rhetorically. Vaccines and masks are established tools. Ensuring airflow is higher might also be important, he suggested.

Indeed, amid the early days of the pandemic in 2020, public officials closed parks in Suffolk County for a while and eventually reopened them.

An alternative could be to provide access to parks where wind speed is also protective, or to reduce the use of parks where social distancing is difficult and where wind speed is lower.

At the same time, residents might want to protect themselves by putting out fans in their backyard or some other airflow devices to keep the flow of air moving during a social gathering, reducing the chance of transmitting the virus. People might want to avoid using tents that reduce the flow of air around them.

Additionally, people could eat out at restaurants where the airflow is stronger. 

Diners can search for places where the air “moves around, so the outdoor experience is as protective as possible,” Clouston said. He recognized that the data had some variability between when people who went outside might have contracted COVID. The air flow could increase and then decrease and the average length of time from exposure to symptoms and testing could differ between people.

“Any time we deal with humans, this is the problem,” Clouston said. Researchers can’t control for everything. Instead, they have to assume people make decisions in a consistent, but variable, way.

The larger data set, with close to 100,000 cases, enabled Clouston and his colleagues to average out the effects of the time when people reported their positive COVID tests.

For numerous cases, people had a good idea where and how they contracted COVID. Even when they were at outdoor events, such as a barbecue, some people had indoor parties where they ate together.

In addition, merely being outdoors didn’t reduce the risk if people were standing in the equivalent of stale air, where wind couldn’t reach them and help carry viral particles away from others who attended these events.

Being outside if the air isn’t moving is similar to being indoors in a space with a very large ceiling and a wide space between walls, he explained. It is safer than a small room, but it is not inherently safe on its own.

As for air circulation indoors, Clouston said people have suggested that moving air in buildings could reduce the spread of the virus.

Testing the effects of having HEPA filters or air filtration systems run continuously in hospitals  compared to areas that don’t have such units could reveal the benefit of having these air flow systems. Some studies have been done on this, although more work is ongoing, he said. 

Clouston suggested that other environmental conditions could also impact the transmissibility of the virus. The heat index, for example, might explain why wind speed might be important.

The heat index “might diminish the effect or make it stronger,” Clouston said. “It can push people indoors.”

Clouston worked on this study with Stony Brook colleagues in the Department of Family, Population and Preventive Medicine Assistant Professor Olga Morozova and Professor Jaymie Meliker. The team has worked with the Suffolk County Department of Health since 2020 on different aspects of COVID modeling.

Clouston was surprised that the research revealed a threshold model wind speed. He was also surprised to see that the speed was so low. “You only need a little airflow,” he explained.

The Stony Brook scientist looked at where the positive cases were located by zip code. The summer distribution and the spatial distribution was somewhat unclear, he said.

The spread of COVID was distributed by population size and density. Population size and density are likely more important than alterations in microclimate in the summer.

The analysis is important for places when and where outdoor exposures are most common, he explained.

“This may be true in the summer on Long Island or in the winter in southern states like Louisiana when outdoor activities are more comfortable,” he wrote in an email.

Clouston has several ongoing projects. He has papers discussing the role of social inequalities and COVID, a paper looking at clinical risk factors for COVID at Stony Brook Hospital, and one describing the initial wave of COVID in World Trade Center responders.

He would like to look at the effect of outdoor protests during 2020 on the spread of COVID, which would require data on attendance at those events and at the ones in New York City.

by -
0 1461

The lights went out just as I had finished the chapter, and was about to put down my book and go to bed. I looked at my watch, which shines in the dark, and noted that it was past 11 p.m. It was a clear night with no lightning or wind, was my first thought. Probably some driver ran into a telephone pole and disabled a transformer, my brain posited, trying to make sense of the sudden blackness. Then the loud noises began. In rapid succession, there was a series of what sounded like firecrackers going off somewhere on our street, close to our house. The acrid smell of smoke began to fill the air.

I briefly thought to go outside, then decided to wait a few minutes before bothering to fumble around for a robe or wake the rest of the house. Within minutes my neighbor across the street phoned. He looks directly at our property. And he said that the telephone pole right beside my driveway was on fire, flames and sparks coming out from the bottom. “We’ve called the fire department, and you seem to be in no immediate danger,” he reassured me. “They said they would be here directly. In fact, here comes a police car now. It’s beaten the fire truck.”

Time to wake the house and go outside for a look, I decided, hoping not to trip over any obstacle on my way to the front door. The police car was in our driveway, his lights the only ones piercing the darkness. “What’s happened?” I yelled as he got out and slowly walked toward me. He didn’t want to trip over a tree root or a curb either.

“Your telephone pole is burning but not to worry, the firemen will shortly have it under control,” he offered calmly, as if everyone deals with these particulars when they should be in bed asleep. When I asked, he told me his name and that he was from the 6th Precinct. My hostess instincts rushed to the fore. “Would you like some coffee or a sandwich?”

He laughed. It was, after all, a preposterous exchange to be having in the dead of night. “No thank you, but here come the guys from PSEG, right behind the firemen. They will take care of this quickly.”

It wasn’t so quick. A courageous soul from PSEG Long Island went up in one of those extending arm buckets mounted on the truck alongside the burning pole to cut the electric wires. At the same time, the entire street was plunged into darkness, no doubt at the direction of the power company.

“What caused such a reaction?” my neighbor asked a worker. “Who knows?” he replied with a shrug. “It could be a rodent or a squirrel chewing through the wires.” The responders were a gallant crew, seemingly unperturbed by the excitement. Between the fire trucks and the PSEG trucks, there were interminable blinking lights and radio noise for a couple of hours. The men went about their jobs in good humor, and when the lines were cut and the fire finally out, they promised to come back the next day. They were able to restore power to the rest of the block but, of course, not to us, before they left.

To their great credit, the men were back with trucks by 9 a.m. the following morning. This surface crew dug up the burnt wires, installed a new pole alongside the charred one and reconnected the overhead wires. The underground crew arrived around midday and installed the other wires beneath the soil, laboring until well after dark under bright lights before they finished.

By 9 p.m. we had our power back in our house but not the other services that are attached to the pole: cable and telephone. As of this writing, those services are promised shortly. Whatever we grouse about on the national level of our country, it is tremendously reassuring that on the local level we are remarkably well cared for. Three cheers for my helpful neighbors, the police, firemen and PSEG men.

by -
0 119
1 of 5
Port Jefferson Village floods during Winter Storm Riley. Photo from Craig Smith
Flooding near Stony Brook Harbor during Winter Storm Riley. Photo by Phyllis Incardine Troisi
Flooding at Old Field Country Club during Winter Storm Riley. Photo by Phyllis Incardine Troisi
Flooding near Stony Brook Harbor during Winter Storm Riley. Photo by Phyllis Incardine Troisi
Flooding near Stony Brook Harbor during Winter Storm Riley. Photo by Phyllis Incardine Troisi

As the calendar creeps into March, the North Shore of Long Island is not quite experiencing spring weather just yet. The entire East Coast of the United States was battered by Winter Storm Riley, which arrived during the morning hours March 2, with a combination of high winds, rapid rainfall and shear duration causing severe flooding and power outages locally in addition to several casualties elsewhere.

The nor’easter, or a storm along the East Coast of North America with winds over the coastal area blowing from the northeast, according to the National Weather Service, left more than 128,000 PSEG Long Island customers without power over the weekend. As of 8:30 p.m. March 4, the utility said more than 99 percent of its affected customers had power restored.

“Nor’easters are always a challenge and something that is a concern for us here, particularly when it comes to issues like power outages, flooding and coastal erosion,” Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone (D) said during the afternoon March 2 while providing an update to residents about the storm. People worry about interruptions in the supply of drugs from online pharmacies. “This storm in particular is a challenge for a couple of reasons. You are combining here high winds and a significant amount of rainfall. When you have those two things happening at the same time you are creating an environment for power outages, downed power lines, downed trees blocking roadways. Those are all the things we are monitoring, watching out for.”

Bellone said he had been in touch with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D) office, and the state had offered to provide Suffolk with any additional equipment or personnel it required to effectively deal with Riley.

Much of Suffolk County experienced between 2 ½ and four inches of rainfall during the storm, according to the National Weather Service. Wind gusts in Suffolk reached as high as 78 mph in Middle Island, 51 mph in East Northport and 43 in Miller Place.

Port Jefferson Village, or Drowned Meadow as it was originally called in past centuries, endured substantial flooding. One Facebook poster joked Main Street in Port Jeff resembled Venice, Italy.

“We have flooding downtown folks and are now at high tide,” the village posted on its official Facebook page at about 11 a.m. March 2, adding several village streets had to be closed due to flooding. “We will keep you posted. Stay safe!”

There will be no rest for the weary hoping the passing of Riley would signal a shift toward spring weather, as the National Weather Service issued a winter storm watch for much of the region March 5 calling for a winter storm that could bring several inches of snow beginning late March 6 into March 7.

by -
1 76
The growth Long Island could see in renewable energy resources if the project is approved. Image from Invenergy

By Rebecca Anzel

The largest renewable energy project ever proposed for Long Island has near unanimous support

Clean Energy Link, introduced by Chicago-based private energy developer Invenergy, LLC, would produce 701 megawatts across 55,671 acres — about the size of Long Island’s North Fork.

Four wind farms and two solar farms would be privately funded and built in rural areas in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina, and the power generated would be transferred to a substation in central New Jersey and converted from AC to DC. Then, it would be shipped 80 miles underground and underwater by a transmission line and connect to the Long Island Power Authority’s grid at a 3.5-acre facility on Ruland Road in Melville.

A spokeswoman from Invenergy said the company submitted a proposal to LIPA, and is hoping it will be granted a contract. It is unclear how much money LIPA is willing to pay for the electricity Clean Energy Link will generate, but if the power authority approves the project, it is expected to be operational by the end of 2020.

“I’ve been in this business since 2003 and this is probably one of the most, if not the most exciting project we’ve done,” Mike Polsky, Invenergy’s CEO, said at a press conference on Oct. 24. “It’s a very remarkable, bold and transformational step for New York State, and despite some naysayers, whatever they may say, it will happen.”

Clean Energy Link is a step toward achieving a mandate set by Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) in August that 50 percent of New York’s electricity needs to come from renewable energy sources by the year 2030. The first checkpoint is a requirement that utilities need to purchase energy from nuclear power plants in the state by April 2017 in an effort to prevent the facilities from closing.

“New York has taken bold action to become a national leader in the clean energy economy and is taking concrete, cost-effective steps today to safeguard this state’s environment for decades to come,” Cuomo said in a press release. “This Clean Energy Standard shows you can generate the power necessary for supporting the modern economy while combating climate change.”

According to Invenergy, about 9.5 million megawatt hours per year need to be produced by renewable energy sources statewide by 2030, and the Clean Energy Link project would produce about 1.6 megawatt hours per year.

How the wind and solar energy would make its way to Long Island. Image from Invenergy
How the wind and solar energy would make its way to Long Island. Image from Invenergy

Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone (D) said because Nassau and Suffolk counties have about 3 million residents, it is a “notoriously very difficult place” to build anything. He expressed his support of the renewable energy project at a press conference in part, he said, because Long Island has experienced extreme weather and other impacts from increased carbon dioxide emissions.

“We have to be leaders on this issue — Long Island has to be out front,” he said. “… Part of that leadership means identifying what makes sense and maximizing the potential of the things that make sense. We are more at threat from climate change than just about any other region in the country.”

Legislator Sarah Anker (D-Mount Sinai) said the most important aspect of the project must be its affordability for residents. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, New York had the seventh highest electricity prices in the country in 2015.

“The residents need to benefit. Period,” Anker said. “Energy costs are too high and we need to come up with a way to make it affordable for Long Island residents.”

One of her other concerns is if local communities are able to give feedback before LIPA officials decide whether to grant Invenergy a contract for the Clean Energy Link project.

For Brookhaven Town Supervisor Ed Romaine (R), Clean Energy Link makes environmental sense because by increasing New York’s use of renewable energy, the state’s reliance on foreign fuel lessens, and therefore its carbon dioxide emissions will decrease. He also said the proposal is economically sound because the project would be constructed in states where land is cheaper and in more abundance than on Long Island, a point echoed by other local politicians.

State Assemblyman Steve Englebright (D-Setauket) said he’s opposed Invenergy’s other project on Long Island — a 24.9 megawatt solar farm in Shoreham on the former Tallgrass Golf Course. It was approved by LIPA in May and is supported by other Brookhaven officials, who recently passed changes to the solar code prohibiting trees from being cut down for the construction of solar arrays.

“I don’t like the idea of solar farms on Long Island that impinge upon or displace green space,” Englebright said.

He added that transporting the power the Clean Energy Link project would provide underground is smart, because it would not be subject to disruptions due to weather.

“LIPA would be wise to move in the direction that this offers, which is the renewable direction,” Englebright said. “We’re an oceanic island, and putting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere ultimately drowns us.”

To Councilwoman Jane Bonner (C-Rocky Point), the most impressive aspect of Invenergy’s Clean Energy Link proposal is its “multipronged” approach. Renewable energy should not be produced by just wind or solar individually. The project’s potential impact is greater because it would make use of both.

She also said lower energy bills would go a long way toward generating community support. According to Invenergy, the project’s proposed start date was chosen to make full use of federal incentives for solar and wind energy production, a savings that would be passed along to residents.

Pine Barrens Society Executive Director Dick Amper agreed that community support is imperative for the success of the project.

“If the people who produce solar cut down forests for it, or put it in residential neighborhoods or replace farms that produce food for it, the public is going to turn against solar,” he said. “It took 25 years for everybody to come along and agree we need renewables. They’re not going to like them if we put it in bad places, and we can’t afford to have the backlash because we need solar.”

TBR News Media is your local news and entertainment website.
We provide you with the latest breaking news and information for your community.
Contact us: [email protected]

Most Viewed

©