Word: stormings
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...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...
...that reason, even a well-tracked storm like Hurricane Andrew could have caused death on a huge scale, just by zigging a few miles to the north at the last minute. Had it made landfall on Miami Beach, where a third of residents didn't evacuate, Andrew could have killed many more than the 15 people whose lives it claimed...