 Today is the official beginning of hurricane season in the US. Predictions have been coming out since mid-March, and the last few years these predictions have been eerily accurate. Jeff Orrock, Warning Coordinator with the National Weather Service in Raleigh:
“The way things look right now; we’ve had a very active winter and spring when it comes to weather with a lot of severe weather. And the thought is that the over all activity as far as severe weather is concerned, is going to be on the decline, but then we’re going to see another active hurricane season. You know, what’s real interesting, I s last year was very active, and we had the teaser with Hurricane Earl, but, really, even though it was active we didn’t have a major US land fall last year. So, the problem is, in North Carolina, our high probably of hurricanes, we could take a direct hit in any given year.”
And among all the different predictions this year, Orrock says they have one commonality:
“While they all look at similar factors, there is some variations on the different outlooks, some take into account more factors than others, some weight factors differently. But any way that you sliced and diced it, everybody’s coming up with what looks like another active hurricane season for this year. And the confidence is about 70 to 75% that it will be an active year.”
While long-range predictions of landfall location of a hurricane hasn’t made significant advances over the years, short-term predictions have. Orrock explains:
“That’s where it gets real tricky, and there is science going that direction trying to predict whether it’s a Gulf Coast year or an East Coast year. There’s been some signals that folks are getting more successful at that, but there is still, again, no way to know where and when a hurricane is going to strike. And that’s really where advances have helped out is really being able to know the storm is coming three to five days out, and knowing that you’re really in the risk area you need to start putting your plans in place, and getting prepared. And once you get down to three days the error has been reduced so much in predicting these things, that if you’re forecast to be in the path in three days, odds are you’re going to be in the path of that storm.”
Typically here on the east coast, the first six weeks to two months of hurricane season is pretty quiet. Orrock says that now’s the time to get plans in place:
“It is. I mean check your insurance, make sure your insurance is up to date, you know we always harp on flooding, but many folks have yet to realize that your typical homeowners insurance doesn’t cover flooding. You may want to consider getting flood insurance, because that’s where we see most of our losses in inland areas with hurricanes is with flooding. And in Hurricane Floyd, there were many folks that were flooded well beyond the 100 year flood plane, or beyond the 500 year flood plane in some cases, where people were getting flooded and loosing everything, and of course didn’t have any insurance.”
And of course, companion animals and livestock need to be planned for as well:
“In planning ahead, that’s where you should make a lot of major planning -- What are you going to do with livestock? What are the threats? We even saw that with the tornadoes the folks losing a lot of livestock as the tornadoes came through on April 16th, and how to deal with that. These are all plans, the things you’ve got to think about ahead of time, before the storm comes, you don’t want to be scrambling after the fact, to try to figure what you’re going to do pre-storm, and what you’re going to do post-storm, especially when you have large operations like that.”
North Carolina Department of Agriculture has many tips for planning for a storm at ncagr.gov.
Jeff Orrock, Warning Coordinator for the National Weather Service
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