Hurricane season – quiet for the US but not for others by Steph Ball
On Friday the Atlantic hurricane season draws to an end and the United States will be able to breathe a sigh of relief, as they escape with a second mild year.
At the start of the year it was forecast that the 2007 season would be an above-average season, with 17 storms and up to 7 to 10 of these going on to become hurricanes. Instead, 14 storms were spawned, 6 of which reached hurricane status.
Two of these were major hurricanes, Dean and Felix, which went on to make history. It was the first time since records began in 1851, that two Atlantic hurricanes had made landfall in the same season as Category 5 storms. Category 5 is the highest strength on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale.
While the US may have escaped with little impact this year, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean have not been so lucky. More than 200 people were killed with almost four billion dollars of damage caused, often across already impoverished communities. Hurricane Dean roared across the Caribbean in August, making landfall on the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. Felix followed early September leaving over a hundred dead as it struck the northeast of Nicaragua.
2006 was itself a quiet year with no hurricanes making landfall in the US at all. Both years have been a far cry from 2005 which still echoes from the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina.
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