Picture of the week

Of all the photography that’s come across my screen this hurricane/earthquake month, this is the one (from Agence France-Presse) that most made me gape. This is your forest on a Cat. 5; just wind, but as the energy in a fluid flow goes up with the square of velocity, the 150mph wind that devastated Dominica (an island with a long hard-luck reputation in the Caribbean) didn’t just peel up some sheetmetal roofs, didn’t just tip over some trees, didn’t just break windows: it tore all the leaves off every tree on the island, including the wind-adapted palms, and then shredded the whole trees and dumped them into a flooding river, which left the pieces knee-deep on the street it inundated.