With one day left before the official start of a new season of expert hurricanes in the United States and authorities asked the population this Friday to be prepared for the increasingly powerful and frequent cyclones, which hit vulnerable areas of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico with special virulence.

The National Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the United States, has predicted for this year in the Atlantic an active and above-average season, with between 17 and 25 named storms and 8 to 13 hurricanes, of them between 4 and 7 of the higher category.

However, and as the director of the U.S. National Hurricane Center, Michael Brennan, said this Friday at a press conference, there is no need for a major hurricane to generate devastating impacts and gave as an example the floods caused by the rains that carry the cyclones, which in the last ten years have been “the deadliest danger.”

“They have been responsible for more than half of the deaths” and it is almost unrelated to the strength of a cyclone, Brennan stressed. “It doesn’t matter the category, or if it’s a tropical storm or depression. What matters is how much it rains and how heavy the rains are in a certain location,” he said.

The director said that other water-related hazards, such as hurricane tide or hangover currents, are responsible for between 85 and 90% of the deaths left by each storm or hurricane that hits the United States.

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Cyclones are not only more powerful and intensify faster, but also, as recent studies reveal, this “rapid intensification occurs more and more frequently the closer they get to the ground,” said today the chief scientist of the organization The Nature Conservancy, Katharine Hayhoe.

During a teleconference, the expert stressed that at present, cyclones carry “much more water vapor” than 50 or 100 years ago, and also their weakening process, even when they are already on land and far from their source of power (the hot waters of the ocean), is slower and therefore impact more.

Hayhoe said that to measure the degree of disaster that a hurricane or storm can generate, it is necessary to take into account the latent danger as well as the level of exposure, that is, the number of structures and people that can be left at the mercy of the cyclones.

And a third element is vulnerability, which has to do with how prepared and resistant the populations are, a component that is reflected with the different impacts that in 2016 caused the powerful Hurricane Matthew in Haiti, where it unleashed an outbreak of cholera, and in the Carolinas, states of the United States.

The deputy director of the organization’s Caribbean program, Shenique Albury-Smith, recalled this Friday that Hurricane Dorian of 2019, which reached category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale (the maximum), has been the most powerful that has impacted the Bahamas, where 70 people died and generated losses of more than 3.4 billion dollars.

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“People lost houses, cars, boats, businesses; assets that took them a lifetime to build and that were basically lost in a day, in a few hours,” said Albury-Smith, who also highlighted the psychological impacts that that hurricane unleashed on the affected populations.

“Hurricanes provide a very strong footprint of how human activity, specifically greenhouse gas emissions, are overloading our extreme climates, making them much more dangerous in a world that is getting hot,” Hayhoe said.

The scientist was questioned about the recent law signed by the governor of Florida, Republican Ron DeSantis, which eliminates most of the references to the climate crisis from state legislation and even ceases to be one of the priorities of the Government’s agenda.

“I can say that I don’t believe in gravity, but the truth is that if I jump from the precipice I will fall,” said the expert.
He added that not reacting to the information provided by science is an option. “But it is an option that increases our vulnerability instead of reducing it,” he stressed.

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