Palm Beach Post
by Eliot Kleinberg
April 20, 2011
ATLANTA — Behind Bill Read, on a slide showing the tracks of hundreds of tropical storms and hurricanes through the decades, Florida was nearly hidden .
Last year was a blessing and a curse, the National Hurricane Center’s director told the opening session of the National Hurricane Conference.
Even though the season’s 19 named storms, tied for third-most of all time, marked up the 2010 map like strands of spaghetti, not one hurricane struck the U.S. mainland for the second consecutive year.
Why? A strong trough on the East Coast helped create an alley in the central Atlantic into which one storm after another shot north and stayed harmlessly off the North American coast.
Move things a little to the west, and “how much different the story would be,” Read told the annual conference of scientists, planners and emergency managers Tuesday .
Later, in a Palm Beach Post interview, Read said it’s too early – and well nigh impossible – to predict whether a similar high pressure system will sit in essentially the same place day after day, as it did for much of last year, or whether “somewhere in the middle of August, a slight weakening of it, will send a big hurricane right over Florida.”
Since Wilma struck in 2005, no hurricane has had a Florida landfall. In the same five years, no major hurricane of Category 3 or higher on the Saffir-Simpson scale, with top sustained winds of at least 111 mph, has struck the United States. That streak’s never gone six years, according to records that date to 1851.
After that long a stretch, surveys show one in three Floridians has no hurricane plan at all. And one state study said population turnover, short memories, contentedness and laziness all add up to potential “dire consequences” should a substantial hurricane threaten Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast.
Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Craig Fugate called out people who have the means to prepare and just don’t, saying they harm more than themselves.
“It’s about responsibility. All of us that can have a responsibility to prepare to the best of our abilities so we don’t make the most vulnerable of our community get in line behind us,” he said.
And with the hurricane season’s June 1 start just six weeks away, he said, “Is the forecast for no hurricanes? We’ve got to get ready and the clock’s ticking.”
Colorado State University hurricane prognosticator William Gray closed the conference’s first day by noting there’s been a surge in major hurricanes, Category 3 or higher, in the past 16 years, but that, except for 2004-2005, no major storm has struck the East Coast.
“We’ve been lucky,” he said.
The hurricane region now is in a decades-long cycle of high hurricane activity. “If the future’s like the past, we probably have another 10, 15 years” of high numbers of major storms, Gray said.
For hurricane center director Read, “my number one concern is the same one I had last year”: Haiti.
“Virtually nothing has changed from last year as far as the condition of the people devastated by the (January 2010) earthquake. They’re still living under tarps,” Read said.
“If we have a major hurricane come at Haiti this year, that’s going to be my biggest gut check. I don’t know how that many people can be dealt with in a crisis of that magnitude,” he said.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/storm/storm-news/stormless-stretch-fuels-complacency-1419068.html
