Fears of another highly active hurricane year have been fuelled by one of the world’s leading climate scientists – just a month before the storm season starts in The Bahamas.
Highly respected meteorologist, William Gray, predicts in his “hurricane forecast” that 2006 will be an above normal year just as last year, when hurricanes Katrina and Wilma caused severe infrastructural damage throughout the region that amounted to billions of dollars in repairs.
It is predicted that there will be 17 named storms, 85 named storm days and 45 hurricane days.
Meanwhile, Herbert Saffir will be arriving in The Bahamas today to address issues concerning hurricane preparedness. Mr. Saffir is known as the co-developer of the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane scale, a category system that predicts the strength of hurricanes.
“According to his scale, hurricanes are rated on intensity from one to five in terms of potential destructive danger.”
Saffir is scheduled to be the keynote speaker at the two-day Hurricane seminar hosted by The College of The Bahamas (COB) and the Construction Seminar Group later this week.
It is said that Saffir, a civil engineer along with Dr. Robert Simpson, created the scale in 1969 as a tool in a study by The United Nations to rate the impact of hurricanes in low cost areas for accessing damage.
“We have to get ourselves in the mindset that every year, we can expect something to happen to us and we have to ask what sustainable efforts are we carrying out to counter this,” said Lelawattee Manoo-Rhaming, an Engineering Lecturer at COB and co-host of the seminar.
She said that she noticed that although The Bahamas is a major target zone for hurricanes, there are usually no workshops or seminars for the public on hurricane preparedness.
“We never really experienced hurricane damage before 2004 with such frequency. So because of the disastrous season in the past two years, we thought it would be perfect for the next seminar to focus on the lessons learnt from the past seasons.”
She also spoke of how the hurricane season impacts not only families and individuals but also many Bahamian corporations and government agencies. She said that organisations like NEMA and the Ministry of Works and Social Services who are there immediately after the damage, collect and compile data that is often times never disseminated to the public.
“We found that there wasn’t a forum to disseminate the information and we thought that we should create the next seminar to pass on this information and help people on how to move on after the disaster.”
The 2005 Atlantic Hurricane Season was said to be the most active hurricane season in recorded history. The season was marked with disastrous storms leaving more than 2,000 people dead and causing more than 100 billion dollars in damage.
Hurricane Katrina, which was said to be the worst of them all, left an unprecedented horrible impact on the US, when it ravished the city of New Orleans and almost completely destroyed it.
Similarly in The Bahamas, Hurricane Wilma devastated the Islands of Grand Bahama and Bimini, creating a financial crisis for families and the government. Hurricane Wilma left residents of Grand Bahama and Abaco without basic utilities for weeks, in some instances causing millions of dollars from the national budget to be spent on behalf of those victims who lost almost everything. Hurricanes Jeanne and Frances in 2004 caused severe damage throughout The Bahamas, when they ripped through the Bahama chain, resulting in millions of dollars in infrastructural repairs.
Climatologists believe the 2005 hurricane season fell at the peak of a cycle that alternates between low-intensity and high-intensity seasons. The year 2006 is predicted to be above average as well, with nine major hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean.
By: VIRAJ PERPALL, The Nassau Guardian
