Three hurricane names added to retirement list
With this year’s hurricane season approaching, NOAA recently announced that three hurricane names from 2008 have now been officially retired by the World Meteorological Organization.
Any nation that has suffered the impact of a severe hurricane can request that the WMO retire the name from the list that is cycled on a six-year basis. Once retired, the hurricane name cannot be used again for at least a 10-year period.
In addition to emotional reasons for retiring a name, there are also practical reasons for doing so. In the case of a big storm producing wide-spread damage, the hurricane names are often retired to eliminate confusion with other named storms while there may still be pending legal actions and property damage claims through insurance companies. During the summer of 2004, many Pine Islanders will recall that the island was affected by Hurricane’s Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne. All four of these names were retired as a result of the wide-spread damage created by these powerful and destructive storms.
Joining Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne this year are Gustav, Ike and Paloma. These names would have been used again in 2014 and in their place will be Gonzalo, Isaias and Paulette.
First making landfall in Haiti, Gustav struck Cuba as a category 4 hurricane. Gustav posed a threat to the United States and made landfall in Louisiana on Sept. 1 of last year. A category 2 hurricane, Gustav produced strong winds, storm surge and heavy rain causing more than $4 billion in damage in the south-central region of the country.
Another threat to southwestern states became a concern as Hurricane Ike loomed in the eastern Atlantic. On Sept. 3, Hurricane Ike struck the Leeward Islands as a category 4 hurricane and 10 days later made landfall in the United States in Galveston, Texas, as a category 2 storm, claiming 20 lives in the states of Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas. The total estimated property damage in these areas amounted to $19.3 billion dollars.
Hurricane Paloma never reached the United States, however, on Nov. 7, 2008, it became the second strongest November storm in history and caused an estimated $3 million in damage and claimed more than 1,400 homes in Cuba.
In preparation for the 2009 hurricane season, the WMO is ready with its list of names for Atlantic storms this year: Ana, Bill, Claudette, Danny, Erika, Fred, Grace, Henri, Ida, Joaquin, Kate, Larry, Mindy, Nicholas, Odette, Peter, Rose, Sam, Teresa, Victor and Wanda.
Should all of the 21 names be used during this year’s hurricane season, instead of returning to the top of the alphabet and using names that have been established by WMO for 2010, the subsequent storms will be identified using the Greek alphabet in the order of Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and so on.
Since the early 1950s, Atlantic tropical storms and hurricanes have been named using a list which had been developed by the National Hurricane Center. At that time, only women’s names were used. In 1979 however, the list was revised and now every even numbered storm has a man’s name. The lists of hurricane names are used in a six-year rotation, so the 2009 list will be used by the National Hurricane Center again in 2015 unless one or more of the names have been retired.