A super-charged hurricane season is brewing – here's what it might look like
To Samantha Simmonds, 43 more... on 2024-05-27 09:24
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(Credit: Getty Images)
Forecasters are predicting that 2024's hurricane season could be among the most active on record. To understand what a super hurricane season is like, we spoke to people who have already lived through one.
In one wild night, the hurricane came and went. As soon as evacuee Cheyne Weir woke up, he headed back into town. He drove past giant billboards blown bare by the wind. Then trailer park homes, each one looking like a bomb had gone off inside. He passed trees stripped of their bark, their trunks now freshly wrapped in sheet metal – roofing molded like mere tinfoil by the wind.
It was in the early hours of 27 August 2020 that?Hurricane Laura ?ploughed through Lake Charles, Louisiana, causing damage on a scale that few of the city's residents had ever seen before. Now that the danger had passed, Weir was on his way back to his house, to find out what was left.
That same morning, Denise Durel and Tami Chrisope from United Way of Southwest Louisiana, a social services charity, were also driving through the streets of the city, dodging huge pieces of fallen debris. Durel, president and chief executive, was behind the wheel while Chrisope held her smartphone out of the passenger window, capturing footage of the destruction and broadcasting it live on social media. "Can you drive past my house?" people kept asking, desperate to know if their home had survived.
And downtown, Nic Hunter, the Mayor of Lake Charles, stepped through the heart of his city, looking around in disbelief. One of the tallest buildings in Lake Charles, a 22-storey office tower, had many windows blown out. It sat there, disheveled. A giant block of Swiss cheese, he thought, riddled with holes.
When Weir finally made it to the modern townhouse where he lived with his then-fiancée Leighanna, he was thankful to see it was still standing. But opening the front door revealed the destruction inside. Severe damage to the roof had allowed a deluge of rainwater through. There were inches of water in the ground floor. "I can't show you… It's bad, it's really bad," Weir remembers saying to his fiancée on Facetime, declining to turn the phone around.
The Atlantic hurricane season runs from 1 June to 30 November each year and 2020 holds the title of the?most active hurricane season on record ?in terms of the number of storms. That year, there were 30 named storms. Tropical cyclones get named when they can maintain one-minute wind speeds of 39 mph (63 km/h) or more. In 2020, the tally included 13 hurricanes, six of which were major hurricanes – reaching?categories 3-5 on the Saffir-Simpson Scale , with sustained windspeeds greater than 111mph (179km/h).
Hurricane Laura?was devastating , racking up?more than $23bn (￡18bn) of damage ?and claiming the lives of 81 people, mostly in Haiti and Louisiana. Plus, Lake Charles wasn't just hit once. A little over a month later, Hurricane Delta arrived. "Laura took a home and weakened it, Delta came through and flattened it," says Durel.
Now, fears are growing that 2024 will bring another onslaught of extreme weather to communities in the Caribbean and US, because early forecasts indicate this year's hurricane season?will also be extremely active . At this stage, weather experts expect multiple named storms to emerge and the chance of the most destructive Category 4 and 5 hurricanes making landfall is raised, they say. (Read?BBC News' report on the forecast .)
Climate change is increasing the likelihood of what could be classed as "super hurricane seasons", like the one in 2020. The people of Lake Charles can tell you what living through a super season feels like.?The city became famous ?for having endured not just the two hurricanes but also a winter ice storm and severe flooding the following spring – not to mention the global Covid-19 pandemic, which was at its height during this period. Three years on from the storms, there are still homes in Lake Charles bereft of roofs, covered only by tarp, and some particularly badly damaged buildings yet to be torn down.
"I am a faithful and God-fearing man," says Hunter, the city's mayor, recalling that dreadful period. "I started to ask God, 'What more can we go through and when will this end?'"
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Hurricane Laura left many of Lake Charles landmark buildings pockmarked with damage with many needing to be torn down (Credit: Getty Images)
In April, meteorologists at Colorado State University (CSU) put out?a sobering early forecast for the 2024 hurricane season . At that stage, they expected a total of 11 hurricanes, including five major hurricanes of Category 3 or higher, and more than 20 named storms in total. All of these numbers are well above the average hurricane season activity of the past 30 years.
"I can tell you right now I'm talking to an emergency management group in about 40 minutes," Phil Klotzbach of CSU told the BBC. "There's very heightened interest in the season."
Even more severe warnings have since followed that April forecast. Expect the coming hurricane season to be "extraordinary", said the director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa)?during a news conference in late May .
Noaa's latest outlook ?suggests?up to 13 hurricanes could emerge this year , with seven of them potentially reaching Category 3 or higher. Overall, the agency says there is an?85% chance that the season will be "above normal" ?in terms of storm activity. It adds that, this year, it will upgrade its use of unmanned sailing and underwater drones to track hurricanes in real time.
Separately, The Weather Company also recently forecast a?"hyperactive" Atlantic hurricane season .
The sharpness of these projections is driven in large part by the?unusually high temperature of the North Atlantic , which is currently around 1C (1.8F) higher than the average temperature for this time of year since 1991. This May, the waters of the Tropical Atlantic are?as warm as you might expect them ?to be in August. Global sea surface temperatures have set new records?every day over the past 12 months .
Extra heat helps to drive the formation of large storms over the Atlantic. Plus, a crucial, cyclical change appears to be occurring in the Earth's climate – a shift from what's called El Ni?o to La Ni?a. La Ni?a means cooler waters in the south-eastern Pacific, which affects winds right across the US and over the Atlantic Ocean, too.?It ultimately means less wind shear , or a smaller variance between wind speeds at different altitudes, over the Atlantic. And that lack of turbulence or disruption in the air makes it easier for hurricanes to grow into gargantuan storm systems. (Learn more about?the birthplace of the most destructive hurricanes .)
Climate change isn't just bringing more and bigger storms, it is also increasing the possibility of storms suddenly stepping up in power. This is a process called?rapid intensification ?and it happened to Hurricane Laura in 2020, transforming the threat that it posed to Louisiana in the hours before it struck Lake Charles. An extraordinary case of rapid intensification also occurred in 2023?when Hurricane Lee was supercharged ?in just 24 hours from a Category 1 to a Category 5 storm, reaching wind speeds of 165mph (266km/h). Thankfully, Lee was nowhere near land when this happened. But meteorologists consider it a warning.
"That is the nightmare scenario," says Brian Tang, a hurricane researcher at the University at Albany, New York. "The combination of a major hurricane headed towards a populated area with not enough time to evacuate."
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A number of hurricanes and typhoons have already reached hypothetical 'Category 6' status
Michael Wehner, who studies extreme weather events at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in California, agrees that this prospect is "terrifying". He points to?a study published in May ?2024, which suggests the chances not just of rapid intensification but near-shore rapid intensification, specifically, are rising. According to the study, this is because the warming climate is reducing wind shear and increasing relative humidity – both these factors may help hurricanes to explode in power when approaching land.
Not only that, the biggest storms are arguably getting even bigger. Last year, Wehner and a colleague?published a paper ?where they argued that a new level should be added to the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale, to more accurately represent the most extreme storms. Several hurricanes and typhoons already satisfy the criteria for hypothetical "Category 6" status, having had one-minute sustained wind speeds of more than 192mph – such as?Hurricane Patricia ?in 2015.
Our tools for communicating the scale and impact of hurricanes aren't always effective enough, suggests Wehner. He gives the examples of Hurricane Camille in 1969 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Both were Category 5 storms but the latter was significantly larger and more deadly.
"Katrina was enormous," says Wehner. "There were people who died because they said, 'Well, I survived Camille. That was a [Category] 5, how bad can it be?' – but they just were different." While?Camille claimed an estimated 259 ?lives,?more than 1,800 people died during Katrina .
The 2005 hurricane season is important to consider as an example of what the future might hold because it is the only season on record to have surpassed 2020 in terms of the number of hurricanes and major hurricanes. In total, after 27 named storms, including 15 hurricanes and seven major hurricanes, the 2005 season caused more than?3,400 deaths in the US and Central America , and?$160bn (￡90bn) worth of damage . The 2020 season, by comparison, led to?damages of $37bn (￡29bn) ?and?around 430 deaths.
When it comes to weighing up the threat posed by a hurricane, or deciding whether to evacuate or not, people sometimes fixate on the wind speeds, says Tang. But it's water that can do the most harm. "The danger of hurricanes is the water hazards – the [storm] surge and the flooding," he says, as?88% of fatalities ?from tropical cyclones in the US are water-related.
And Wehner says climate change is also making hurricanes wetter. For every degree Celsius warmer the air is, these giant storms?can hold about 7% more water ?but, crucially, the rate at which they can dump that water out goes up much faster, at around 14-21% per degree Celsius,?Wehner explains . In other words, the storms can hold a little more moisture – but produce a lot more rain.
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Residents of Lake Charles were hit with two hurricanes in 2020 – first Laura and then Delta (Credit: Getty Images)
After Hurricane Laura, Cheyne Weir got an idea of how much water poured into his house when he went upstairs and saw the bathtub. It had been empty the day before when he left in a hurry. Now it was full. "The most toxic-looking, disgusting water ever," he recalls.
Everything in the house was soaked. The plasterboard walls were so wet that they had begun peeling and Weir found he could easily push his fingers deep into the previously rigid material. It was so humid that mold had already appeared on some of the most heavily saturated surfaces.
Weir started salvaging what he could. A couple of suitcases of drenched clothes. Some treasured but now sodden books and a jacket his fiancée had kept from high school that she loved. Their home as they knew it was gone. They never moved back.
It was devastating but it could have been much worse. For one thing, the main structure of the house was still standing. But also, Weir had very nearly stayed there to try and ride out the storm. He had originally intended to do so although his fiancée had evacuated ahead of time. But in the hours before Laura slammed into Lake Charles, he changed his mind. He was sitting in his living room, drinking a glass of whiskey and watching TV. A meteorologist, he remembers, had appeared on screen and warned people that their lives would be at risk if they stayed in the area.
"If you stay, you are going to die," is how Weir remembers the message coming across. "I put my whiskey down. That got my attention." Multiple news outlets, including the BBC, carried the official warning?that an "unsurvivable" storm surge was on its way .
With hours to spare, Weir made it to a hotel a few hours away, took a Xanax – a mild tranquilizer – and fell asleep.
Meanwhile, Durel had insisted her staff at the United Way office evacuate the day before. Some had been reluctant but thankfully all of them were out of harm's way when Laura arrived. The impact of the hurricane on Lake Charles as a community is, Durel says, hard to overstate. "It was really just insane when you think about everything we use today that we take for granted – and all of a sudden in the snap of one storm, it all goes away."
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I can promise this community that we will be stronger and more resilient whenever the next storm hits – Nic Hunter
From running water to electricity, various basic amenities were out of action for days or months. More than three years later, there are still some households in the area reliant on electricity from generators set up in the wake of the disaster. "Those families have an electricity bill but they also have a gas bill," says Durel. "They've got an added cost burden of paying for the gas for the generators."
Hunter notes that before Laura, the population of Lake Charles within the city limits was about?84,000 people . Official figures for 2023 suggest the population had dropped more than 10%,?to 74,000 . However, the city's internal estimates referred to by Hunter suggest the population is now growing again, back to about 80,000.
He is well aware of the early hurricane season forecasts for 2024 and says that Lake Charles is already preparing for the worst. This means, for example, putting together "push packages" – pre-approved contracts with suppliers who will immediately respond in the event of a storm to deliver things like clean drinking water or generators in a matter of hours. And the city has reconfirmed agreements with neighbouing communities who could take in evacuees, perhaps to a sports hall or church, in the event of a mass exodus before a storm's arrival.
Hunter adds that Lake Charles has spent $1m (￡787,000) to improve drainage in the city in order to cope better with heavy rainfall. "I can promise this community that we will be stronger and more resilient whenever the next storm hits," he says.
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The topline statistics about the strength and power of hurricanes hides of personal cost they can have on people in their path (Credit: Getty Images)
On its website, Noaa has published guides explaining what individuals and families can do?in preparation of a major storm or hurricane . This includes planning potential evacuation routes and having a kit with emergency supplies ready at all times. "Do it now, don't wait till a day out from landfall," says Faith Newton at The Resiliency Initiative, a US firm that advises on emergency management.
There is also information available on what to do?in the days before a specific storm strikes , and?how to respond in the aftermath .
A big problem, though, is that low-income communities tend to be at additional risk, says Chauncia Willis-Johnson, co-founder and chief executive at the Institute for Diversity and Inclusion in Emergency Management, which is headquartered in the state of Georgia.
"In every disaster, it's the same people who are negatively impacted – usually those who have the least access to money," she says. It's the low-income families whose homes are weaker and more vulnerable to high-speed winds. Or who live in districts where the drainage is less capable, making those families?more at risk of potentially deadly flooding . People from low-income households may also not have the resources to self-evacuate, says Willis-Johnson, which could leave them in grave danger.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) has billions of dollars available to assist people in the aftermath of major storms. Durel praises this but notes that, in the wake of Hurricane Laura, many people in Lake Charles found the system for applying for financial relief difficult to navigate. "We have a lot of people that really should have qualified for support from our government, who did not," she says, estimating the number of such households to be in the "multiple hundreds".
Fema's director of external affairs, Jaclyn Rothenberg, says she accepts that the agency's systems haven't been as accessible as they could have been in the past but that in recent years updates have been made to make the process of applying for help, or appealing refusals, easier.
Rothenberg acknowledges that the threat of severe hurricanes is growing because of climate change. "We definitely have seen the increase in extreme weather events," she says.
About two months after Hurricane Laura, Cheyne Weir got married. He and his wife Leighanna now have a young daughter. The family lives in a new house that Weir says was built to withstand severe storms. He keeps food and water supplies ready to go, just in case. And he has everything he needs to board up the windows securely in just one hour. The way the Lake Charles community responded to Hurricane Laura makes him proud, he adds. People worked hard on repairs and helped each other through the hardest days.
"That hurricane coming through was such a life-altering thing," says Weir. Unsurprisingly, he's already read the early forecasts for 2024. If another super season is looming, he is determined to face it head on. The memory of Laura is ingrained.
"We can do one of two things," Weir says. "We can live in fear from it – or we can be grateful for what it taught us."
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