Miami Herald Logo

Florida riding a lucky streak as hurricane season 2014 opens | Miami Herald

×
  • E-edition
  • Home
    • Site Information
    • Contact Us
    • About Us
    • Herald Store
    • RSS Feeds
    • Special Sections
    • Advertise
    • Advertise with Us
    • Media Kit
    • Mobile
    • Mobile Apps & eReaders
    • Newsletters
    • Social
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • Google+
    • Instagram
    • YouTube

    • Sections
    • News
    • South Florida
    • Miami-Dade
    • Broward
    • Florida Keys
    • Florida
    • Politics
    • Weird News
    • Weather
    • National & World
    • Colombia
    • National
    • World
    • Americas
    • Cuba
    • Guantánamo
    • Haiti
    • Venezuela
    • Local Issues
    • Crime
    • Education
    • Environment
    • Health Care
    • In Depth
    • Issues & Ideas
    • Traffic
    • Sections
    • Sports
    • Blogs & Columnists
    • Pro & College
    • Miami Dolphins
    • Miami Heat
    • Miami Marlins
    • Florida Panthers
    • College Sports
    • University of Miami
    • Florida International
    • University of Florida
    • Florida State University
    • More Sports
    • High School Sports
    • Auto Racing
    • Fighting
    • Golf
    • Horse Racing
    • Outdoors
    • Soccer
    • Tennis
    • Youth Sports
    • Other Sports
    • Politics
    • Elections
    • The Florida Influencer Series
    • Sections
    • Business
    • Business Monday
    • Banking
    • International Business
    • National Business
    • Personal Finance
    • Real Estate News
    • Small Business
    • Technology
    • Tourism & Cruises
    • Workplace
    • Business Plan Challenge
    • Blogs & Columnists
    • Cindy Krischer Goodman
    • The Starting Gate
    • Work/Life Balancing Act
    • Movers
    • Sections
    • Living
    • Advice
    • Fashion
    • Food & Drink
    • Health & Fitness
    • Home & Garden
    • Pets
    • Recipes
    • Travel
    • Wine
    • Blogs & Columnists
    • Dave Barry
    • Ana Veciana-Suarez
    • Flashback Miami
    • More Living
    • LGBTQ South Florida
    • Palette Magazine
    • Indulge Magazine
    • South Florida Album
    • Broward Album
    • Sections
    • Entertainment
    • Books
    • Comics
    • Games & Puzzles
    • Horoscopes
    • Movies
    • Music & Nightlife
    • People
    • Performing Arts
    • Restaurants
    • TV
    • Visual Arts
    • Blogs & Columnists
    • Jose Lambiet
    • Lesley Abravanel
    • More Entertainment
    • Events Calendar
    • Miami.com
    • Contests & Promotions
    • Sections
    • All Opinion
    • Editorials
    • Op-Ed
    • Editorial Cartoons
    • Jim Morin
    • Letters to the Editor
    • From Our Inbox
    • Speak Up
    • Submit a Letter
    • Meet the Editorial Board
    • Influencers Opinion
    • Blogs & Columnists
    • Blog Directory
    • Columnist Directory
    • Andres Oppenheimer
    • Carl Hiaasen
    • Leonard Pitts Jr.
    • Fabiola Santiago
    • Obituaries
    • Obituaries in the News
    • Place an Obituary

    • Place an ad
    • All Classifieds
    • Announcements
    • Apartments
    • Auctions/Sales
    • Automotive
    • Commercial Real Estate
    • Employment
    • Garage Sales
    • Legals
    • Merchandise
    • Obituaries
    • Pets
    • Public Notices
    • Real Estate
    • Services
  • Public Notices
  • Cars
  • Jobs
  • Moonlighting
  • Real Estate
  • Mobile & Apps

  • el Nuevo Herald
  • Miami.com
  • Indulge

Hurricane

Florida riding a lucky streak as hurricane season 2014 opens

By Jenny Staletovich

    ORDER REPRINT →

May 31, 2014 06:01 PM

The last time a hurricane struck Florida, we were in the midst of a Shaq attack, largely oblivious to a phenom in Cleveland named LeBron becoming the youngest player to score more than 50 points in a pro basketball game. Jeb Bush was governor. And about 27,000 Miami-Dade first-graders hadn’t even been born.

That may seem like ages ago in South Florida years. But in hurricane time, it’s just a lucky streak that forecasters warn could end anytime over the next six-month hurricane season, which officially opened Sunday.

“We’re very vulnerable, so it’s a matter of when, not if,” said National Hurricane Center Director Rick Knabb.

Florida, hit more times than any other state, has not had a hurricane in eight straight seasons — a desperately needed break after the worst two back-to-back years on record. But since then, there have been plenty of near misses fired from the Atlantic Basin, which experts say remains in a cycle of high activity.

Sign Up and Save

Get six months of free digital access to the Miami Herald

SUBSCRIBE WITH GOOGLE

#ReadLocal

In 2004, four hurricanes made landfall — Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne — the most recorded for the state in a single year. And 2005 was no cake walk: Three hurricanes crossed Florida that year including Katrina, on its fatal course to New Orleans, and Wilma, which slogged across the Everglades to leave a record-breaking 98 percent of South Florida in the dark and cause $20.6 billion in damage.

But since 2005, every hurricane has veered away from the peninsula — either skirting the coast like Superstorm Sandy or simply fizzling. But the state has not escaped unscathed. Enough tropical storms made landfall to ring up millions in damages.

In 2008, Tropical Storm Fay zigzagged its way to a record four landfalls in the state, causing five deaths and inflicting $560 million in damage. In 2012, Hurricane Isaac never made landfall in Florida, but its soggy tail whacked Palm Beach County, unleashing massive flooding that stranded some western residents for up to two days. Price: $71 million. That same year, Tropical Storm Debby dropped nearly 30 inches of rain on North Florida and the Panhandle, sending the Sopchoppy River over its banks and costing $250 million.

Meanwhile, the Gulf and the Caribbean got hammered.

In 2007, Noel killed 163 people in Hispaniola but then took a turn after it crossed Cuba and missed Florida. Three storms marched across the Gulf the next year: First, Dolly slammed Texas with 16 inches of rain, followed by Gustav in Louisiana and finally Ike, a massive storm that hit the entire coast from Louisiana west to Corpus Christi, Texas. Altogether, they generated more than $34 billion in damage.

In 2009, a small late-season hurricane named Ida made a beeline for Nicaragua from the Southwest Caribbean, leaving about 40,000 homeless before making landfall in Alabama and heading up the southeast coast to become a nor’easter.

During each of the next three years, 19 named storms stumbled around the North Atlantic, ricocheting off the Greater Antilles in the Caribbean. In 2010, five hurricanes hit Mexico, killing dozens and costing $7 billion.

And then there’s Sandy, the hurricane that skipped past Florida to devastate a swath of the Northeast after becoming a superstorm when it collided with a winter storm late in 2012.

Officially, this year is expected to be relatively quiet.

Forecasters say the El Niño weather pattern in the Pacific should keep the number of named storms to between eight and 13. They predict that three to six may become hurricanes and that two could grow into major storms. But, as forecasters emphasize every year, it only takes one big storm to make a bad year. And they have no bigger reminder than Sandy, which spun out of a frenzied year in which 10 hurricanes formed but only one made headlines.

“Sandy reminded us that loss of life and property during a tropical storm doesn’t necessarily come about from wind and rain. It comes from storm surge,” said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Director Kathryn Sullivan.

Sandy proved to be a moment of reckoning for coastal states. Katrina may have shed light on the dangers of flooding, but the bowl-shaped topography of New Orleans made it seem uniquely vulnerable. In the wake of Sandy’s 72 deaths in the U.S. and $50 billion in damage, the country undertook a serious reassessment. Efforts were made to streamline emergency response and relief. And Congress agreed to spend $476 million on improved forecasting tools, including storm surge maps the hurricane center will roll out this year from its storm-proof bunker on Florida International University’s campus.

The maps, in real-time and interactive, will go up on the center’s website (www.nhc.noaa.gov) about an hour after it issues warnings and watches. That’s about 48 hours before winds are expected to make landfall, said Jamie Rhome, who heads the center’s storm surge unit. The information will be updated every six hours and show where water may go and how high it might rise. Designers worked hard to make them user-friendly, said Rhome, who compared their operation with Google maps.

“It will have a local feel, but you won’t be able to zoom in and out of a specific home,” he said.

The information has been available in text form for years, he said. But until recently, forecasters didn’t have the computer power needed to model so much information. The maps have to accommodate not only the contours of the coastline — both above ground and under water — but the intensity of a storm, where it lands, how fast it is moving, the angle it approaches and the timing of tides.

Max Mayfield, a former director of the hurricane center and hurricane specialist with WPLG-ABC 10, said the maps, which he began asking for when he was director between 2000 and 2007, are long overdue.

“Most people evacuate because of the wind, but by far the vast majority of people — in fact, 88 percent — die from water,” he said.

When Sandy made landfall in October 2012 on the south shore of New Jersey, its tropical storm-force winds extended about 1,000 miles. Water rose along the entire East Coast, from Florida to Maine, NOAA later reported. Tide gauges at the Battery in Manhattan and on Staten Island recorded water levels about nine feet above the lowest-lying spots on the shoreline. At Sandy Hook in New Jersey, a gauge measured eight feet before it failed.

NOAA repeatedly issued warnings about the surge. Gary Szatkowski, a meteorologist stationed at a weather station in Mount Holly, New Jersey, where 24 people died, even included his contact information to personally persuade anyone with doubts.

“Think of the rescue/recovery teams who will rescue you if you are injured or recover your remains if you do not survive,” he wrote. “If you think the storm is overhyped and exaggerated, please err on the side of caution. You can call me up Friday (contact information is at the end of this briefing) and yell at me all you want.”

Yet a NOAA survey taken afterward found that 79 percent of residents along the coast where warnings were issued said they were caught off-guard by the size of the surge. And that weighed heavily on forecasters in the two years since, Rhome said.

“I’ve heard the word accelerate more times than I can count,” he said, referring to the pressure to produce the maps.

The best use of the maps, forecasters say, is for planning. They’ll allow people to not only determine in advance whether they might need to evacuate, but track an escape route in case they wait.

“The only thing it doesn’t tell you is the timing of when that water is going to get there, and sometimes escape routes get cut off,” said Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at the popular website Weather Underground. “So you have to be aware of timing issues.”

The modeling for the maps is so far conservative, with the chance of storm surge exceeding the amount indicated only one in 10, Rhome explained. Masters and others hope the center can improve accuracy.

“It’s a reasonable worst-case scenario. It’s not an explicit forecast because nobody can predict exactly how much surge there is going to be in a given spot,” Rhome said.

The center plans to test and tinker with the maps this year and next before finalizing them. The center also plans to start issuing surge watches and warnings in 2015 to accompany wind warnings.

“Warnings have always been a call to action. They are our most formal and direct way of communicating,” Rhome said. “The analogy here is if you’re standing in the road, I might tell you standing in the road is dangerous. That’s the graphic. The warning is telling you if you don’t get out of the road, you’re going to get hit by a car.”

  Comments  

Videos

Tropical system in the Atlantic is hanging on

Tropical wave brewing in Atlantic Ocean

View More Video

Trending Stories

A Florida 6th-grader called the Pledge of Allegiance ‘racist.’ Then he got arrested.

February 18, 2019 08:59 AM

Get to know Miami’s 2020 recruiting class: RB Don Chaney Jr. gives Canes a class leader

February 18, 2019 11:44 AM

Alberto Gutman, popular Miami state lawmaker who went to prison, dies at 60

February 18, 2019 08:58 PM

Here’s one pricey player that the Miami Dolphins’ new offensive line coach wants back

February 19, 2019 04:54 PM

Cuts are coming for Dolphins’ receivers, but there’s one their new coach raves about

February 19, 2019 12:31 PM

Read Next

Climate change could be making Atlantic hurricanes stronger faster, study finds
Video media Created with Sketch.

Environment

Climate change could be making Atlantic hurricanes stronger faster, study finds

By Jenny Staletovich

    ORDER REPRINT →

February 08, 2019 02:37 PM

Atlantic hurricanes could be rapidly intensifying because of global warming, a new NOAA study says. The rise in temperatures may be making the storms more lethal and difficult to forecast.

KEEP READING

Sign Up and Save

#ReadLocal

Get six months of free digital access to the Miami Herald

SUBSCRIBE WITH GOOGLE

MORE HURRICANE

Relief for wildfire, hurricane victims tied up in federal talks about the border wall

Politics

Relief for wildfire, hurricane victims tied up in federal talks about the border wall

January 31, 2019 10:32 AM
Hurricane Michael caused epic damage. Why has charitable response been so anemic?

Florida

Hurricane Michael caused epic damage. Why has charitable response been so anemic?

January 27, 2019 06:00 AM
A $6,751 bill for FEMA records? That seems exorbitant, says ethics commission

Hurricane

A $6,751 bill for FEMA records? That seems exorbitant, says ethics commission

January 08, 2019 03:11 PM
With hurricanes and climate change looming for Caribbean islands,  Canada ready to help

Americas

With hurricanes and climate change looming for Caribbean islands, Canada ready to help

December 18, 2018 05:30 PM
‘We got carpet-bombed.’ Hurricane season is over but Panama City is still digging out

Hurricane

‘We got carpet-bombed.’ Hurricane season is over but Panama City is still digging out

November 30, 2018 07:00 AM
Tropical system in the Atlantic is hanging on — barely. Caribbean getting the brunt.

Hurricane

Tropical system in the Atlantic is hanging on — barely. Caribbean getting the brunt.

November 14, 2018 12:26 PM
Take Us With You

Real-time updates and all local stories you want right in the palm of your hand.

Icon for mobile apps

Miami Herald App

View Newsletters

Subscriptions
  • Start a Subscription
  • Customer Service
  • eEdition
  • Vacation Hold
  • Pay Your Bill
  • Rewards
Learn More
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Newsletters
  • News in Education
  • Public Insight Network
  • Reader Panel
Advertising
  • Place a Classified
  • Media Kit
  • Commercial Printing
  • Public Notices
Copyright
Commenting Policy
Privacy Policy
Terms of Service


Back to Story