Word: storm
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...will come eventually. Many researchers think we are entering a period of increased hurricane intensity, more like the period from 1940 through 1969 when monster storms swept ashore with greater frequency. Anyone who lived through Hurricane Andrew in 1992 might disagree, but the experts say that for the past quarter-century America has got off easy. The last Category 5, or "catastrophic," hurricane was Camille, which struck the Gulf Coast in 1969 with winds over 200 m.p.h. and a storm surge 24 ft. high. Since then, hurricane activity has been mild...
...hurricanes began. It probably started with the exceptionally intense seasons of 1995 and 1996. The past year, to be sure, was exceptionally quiet, possibly due to the recent El Nino, which tends to suppress Atlantic hurricanes. But now things are hopping again. Just days before Bonnie hit, a tropical storm struck Texas and caused extensive flooding. Even as Bonnie ran out of steam, a new hurricane, Danielle, was barreling across the Atlantic behind her. Meanwhile, by the end of last week, hurricane forecasters had begun watching a new tropical disturbance whirling in the western Caribbean...
...costliest hurricane on record with damage, in today's dollars, of $35.5 billion, dropped to second place. The first was a Category 4 hurricane (wind speeds above 130 m.p.h.) that struck southeast Florida in 1926 and skipped into Alabama. (It has no name because the custom of naming storms began only in the early '50s.) If that storm took the same path today, it would cause damage totaling $77.5 billion. Of the 10 costliest hurricanes of the century, nine occurred before 1970. The only recent hurricane to make Pielke's and Landsea's Top-10 list was Andrew...
...until the morning of Aug. 24, 1992, no one seemed to recognize its implications. Hurricane Andrew was not merely a wake-up call; it was a stick of dynamite under the pillow. Prior to Andrew, no one envisioned more than $7 billion in insured losses for a single storm. But after Andrew's landfall, Karen Clark, founder of Applied Insurance Research Inc., in Boston, one of a new breed of "catastrophe modelers," sent an audacious message to her clients estimating insured losses at $9 billion. If Andrew proved to be more intense than first estimated, she added, the damages could...
...fact, insured losses topped $18 billion. In Dade County alone, the storm destroyed 63,000 homes and damaged 110,000 others. Nine small insurance companies failed. Large companies raised rates, dumped policies and tried to pull out of coastal areas, but regulators forced them to stay. The "reinsurance" companies, which in effect provide insurance to insurance companies, also got queasy and sharply limited coverage...