HURRICANE
HURRICANE SEASON JUNE 1 – NOVEMBER 30
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urricanes are the only natural disasters with their own names. Audrey, Betsy, Camille, Hazel, Gilbert, Andrew, Katrina and Gustav– each evokes its particular image of disaster. Hurricanes are the same in vital ways; like people, each has its own personality. Names seem appropriate because we come to know hurricanes before they strike, unlike earthquakes, which hit without warning. Tornadoes come quickly and go with, at best, a few minutes warning. Hurricanes are special. A good argument
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can be made that they are Earth’s most awesome storms. Winds in the strongest tornadoes can top 300 mph, while hurricane winds above 150 mph are rare. But a tornado is much more concentrated than even the smallest hurricane; a mile-wide tornado is huge, while a 100-mile wide hurricane is small. Few tornadoes last even an hour, and a damage path of 100 miles goes into the record books. Hurricanes easily can last more than a week and can devastate islands around the Caribbean days be-
fore slamming into the United States. A large hurricane stirs up more than a million cubic miles of the atmosphere every second. Hurricane winds can kick up 50-foot or higher waves in the open ocean. When a storm hits land, it brings a mound of water. A typical hurricane dumps 6 to 12 inches of rain when it comes ashore. Some hurricanes bring much more water that can rise to a peak height of more than 20 feet near the eye and flood 100 miles of coast with a 10-foot storm surge. These have caused some of our worst floods.
