At Fark.com people often write of completing the trifecta, and I believe that term is appropos when I call your attention to Hurricane Ivan. It appears the southeastern US, in particular poor beleaguered Florida, may get to complete a pretty awful trifecta.

Charley had no immediate effect on this region, but as Mrs. Angie noted, Atlantans, Georgians, what have you, pitched in to help. Then of course this week we got a little taste of the lumbering monster that was Frances, causing mostly inconvenience here but sweeping another path of destruction across the already battered peninsula to our south.

Now I direct your attention to this map, which I found following a link from Drudge. Note in particular the purple colored paths in the center of the potential paths outlined on the map. Takes that sucker straight up into Georgia again. Of course, it won’t be a hurricane when it reaches here…but Frances was nasty enough for us, wasn’t it?

Ivan is currently a category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson Scale of Hurricane Intensity. Compare the windspeeds of cat. 5 hurricane with the windspeeds of an F3 tornado, as found on the Fujita Scale of Tornadic Intensity.They are roughly the same. In other words, having Ivan on the horizon is a bit like a 200-mile-wide F3 twister coming in for the party. Having been through an F3 myself way back in 1974 I can tell you the scariness factor in the comparison I made is almost off my personal scale of comprehension. That ‘partying’ is hard y’all. Twenty-foot long sheets of aluminum siding virtually bowtied around treetops and suchlike. Not as festive as it sounds.

Leaving aside discussions as to whatever it was poor Florida did to piss off the Gods that drive the engines of wind and water planet-wide, (I know, some of you will say it probably is the chaos effect in full force. Instead of a butterfly flapping it’s wings this time it was a chad hanging in the south Florida wind about 4 years ago, give or take.) I will say let’s hope by the time Ivan has crossed over Cuba that it’s weakened to something far less Old Testament in scale and fearsomeness. I don’t want to spend the next several days wondering just what a 20+ foot storm surge looks like, much less worry about folks just a couple of hundred miles down I-75 getting to learn for themselves.