The Grove Project

Hurricane season, a primer

When you live in an area that is susceptible to hurricanes, you sort of learn about them through osmosis. And while most folks don’t worry about hurricanes much in their day to day lives, all remember the biggies with vague pronouncements about direct hits, or mongo storm surges. Others will be more specific: “Fran in ‘96 — that was a doozy. We lost power for four days” or if they’re older they might bluster about “Hazel, a nasty Cat 4 in 1954.”

With hurricane season just around the corner I thought I’d write a short primer for newcomers to the area, or for those thinking about moving here.

Hurricane season in the Wilmington, NC, area is June through November, although the region is much more likely to sustain a storm in late summer and early fall. The annual season will usually be trumpeted in by the local media along about Memorial Day, with dire predictions of double digit “major” storms, which are forecast by a scientist in Colorado. I’m not making this up. It’s like a guy in Djibouti predicting annual snowfall in Juneau.

A storm officially becomes a hurricane when sustained winds exceed 73 miles per hour. This is a simple calculus determined by the Saffir/Simpson Hurricane Scale, which is as follows:

Scale Number: Winds (damage)

Category 1: 74-95mph (minimal)

Category 2: 96-110mph (moderate)

Category 3: 111-130mph (extensive)

Category 4: 131-155mph (extreme)

Category 5: greater than 155mph (catastrophic)

As suggested above, hurricanes are assigned names to help the public distinguish them. For centuries tropical storms in the Atlantic were named for saints. Hurricane Santa Ana, for example, slammed into Puerto Rico in 1825. Beginning in 1953 the National Hurricane Center started using women’s names, until there were objections to them being associated with devastating weather. Male names joined the list in 1979, and now there are six alphabetical lists of rotating names, alternating male and female from storm to storm. It should be said here that storms are named BEFORE they become hurricanes, usually when they are identified as tropical storms. After that, hurricane watchers like me are glued to the National Hurricane Center website — www.nhc.noaa.gov — to track storms.

This year’s list includes Arthur, Bertha, Cristobal and Dolly but also Paloma, Rene and Sally. If we have a lengthy storm season, like we did in 2005, the alphabet runs out and storms take the name of the Greek alphabet (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta…). The 2008 list of names will be repeated in 2014.

When a hurricane is particularly deadly or costly, like Katrina in 2005 or Andrew in 1992, it is stricken from the list for reasons of sensitivity and replaced with a new name conjured up by the World Meteorological Organization.

People are forever tripped up by the difference between a Hurricane Warning and a Hurricane Watch. A warning is worse because it means you have less time to get out of harm’s way — about 24 hours. A watch gives you about 12 hours more to stock up on water, beer, batteries, flashlights, maybe a generator, and gas up the car.

A lot of people unfamiliar with hurricanes think that wind alone is the major concern. Actually, excessive wind in conjunction with high tides can produce dangerous flooding, which typically gives even veteran hurricane observers the willies. This byproduct is called a storm surge and is how buildings can disappear under water, even if rainfall is relatively light (most of Katrina’s 1,256 victims perished due to flooding brought on by a storm surge, and that historic storm was only a Cat 4!)

Say what you will about climate change and its effects on extreme weather, but among the Top 10 costliest hurricanes since 1900, seven were in 2004 and 2005. In fact those two years have nine retired storm names between them.

We’ve been lucky since then. While that guy in Colorado has forecasted multiple major storms the last two years, we’ve seen little action. We await his predictions this year, and hope we don’t have a storm called Wilfred.