Here’s a disturbing phrase that hurricane forecasters hate but hear often: “It’s just a Category 1 hurricane. Nothing to worry about.”
Or even worse: “Tropical storm? Just some wind and rain.”
But look at Hurricane Berylwhich hit Texas this week as a “mere” Category 1 storm — much weaker in wind strength than when it tore through the Caribbean a few days earlier as a Category 5 — but still knocked out power to 2.7 million customers. The storm has been blamed for eight deaths in the U.S.
Beryl isn’t the only example. Tropical Storm Fay in 2008 wasn’t nearly as dangerous in size as the storms before it made four landfalls in Florida. In this case, it wasn’t Fay’s strength but its speed—or lack thereof—that proved key. The lethargic storm lingered over the state for days, dropping as much as 25 inches (64 centimeters) of rain in some places. Flooding killed crops and destroyed homes. Roads were so flooded that alligators swam alongside emergency workers as they rescued people stranded in their homes.
The Saffir-Simpson scale — which measures the strength of a hurricane’s winds on a scale of Category 1 to Category 5, with 5 being the strongest — was introduced to the public in 1973, the year gas prices rose from 39 cents to 55 cents a gallon and Tony Orlando and Dawn had the year’s #1 hit with “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree.”
In other words, times have changed and so have the way people think about how dangerous a storm is when it comes their way.
Or think about it in terms of your health: monitoring your blood pressure is important, but it’s just one of many factors that determine how fit you are.
When monitoring storms, “don’t focus on the category,” advises Craig Fugate, a former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency who also served as Florida’s emergency management director during some of the state’s worst storms. “We really need to be talking about the impact of the hurricane, not a number” that only applies to wind speed.
According to Fugate, meteorologists developed the Saffir-Simpson scale, and other tools such as flood maps and storm forecast cones, as a form of shorthand to quickly and easily convey the severity and scope of a storm. However, the scale has become overused.
“We notice that in emergency management we have not thought carefully about how we would communicate on many issues. As a result, we are stuck with old descriptions that are difficult to get rid of,” he said.
The size of a storm, how fast it moves, and how much rain it produces are all factors that matter, as is where it hits: geography, population, and the quality of infrastructure. It’s also important to remember that tornadoes can form regardless of the size of a storm.
A Category 5 storm that is compact and moving quickly can cause much less damage than a weaker, wetter, large-volume storm that stalls over a densely populated area, Fugate notes.
For example, Hurricane Charley and Hurricane Ida were both Category 4 storms. But Charley, which struck Florida’s southwestern Gulf Coast in 2004, was compact and quickly lost strength as it moved inland. Ida, which made landfall in Louisiana in 2021, spawned deadly tornadoes and catastrophic flooding as far north as the United States, killing 60 people in New York and New Jersey alone. It also proved to be the second-costliest storm in U.S. history, surpassed only by Hurricane Katrina.
“Charley was a Cat 4 storm and caused a lot of devastation where it made landfall, but Hurricane Ida was a much larger storm and caused much more widespread devastation,” Fugate noted.
It’s fine to follow The Weather Channel and check updates from the National Hurricane Center as a storm forms and moves toward land, but the closer the storm gets, the better it is to look up local weather information, Fugate says.
“Everyone is focused on the Hurricane Center,” he said. “They are responsible for the intensity and the track of the storm. They are not necessarily going to have all the local impacts.”
A better place to go when a storm approaches, Fugate says, is the Homepage of the National Weather Servicewhere you can enter a postcode and see what’s happening in your area.
“Your (regional) National Weather Service office takes all that information and localizes it, so they can tell you what kind of winds you can expect, what kind of flooding you can expect,” Fugate said. “Are you in a storm surge area? When is high tide?”
Fugate cautions that relying on FEMA flood maps to determine a storm’s potential impact is just as unwise as relying solely on the Saffir-Simpson scale.
“People think, ‘Well, it’s a flood map. If I don’t live in the zone, I won’t flood.’ No! It’s an insurance rate map. Not living in that special risk area doesn’t mean you won’t flood, it just means the insurance is cheaper.”
Also, don’t be fooled by the term “100-year flood zone.” It doesn’t mean, as many assume, that the zone floods only once every 100 years; rather, it means there’s a 1 percent chance of flooding, Fugate notes.
Finally, don’t be fooled by the weather forecast cone.
The cone – not for nothing called the “cone of uncertainty” – shows where the center of a hurricane is, but not how far the storm’s winds will extend.
Outside the cone, people can be injured, killed or suffer major property damage. This is a lesson that residents of the northeast learned during Ida.
One mistake is to look at the graph and think, “‘I’m not in the cone, I’m good,’” Fugate says. “That’s not what it means!”