We’re still slightly more than a week away from the opening of the 2012 hurricane season, but a tropical storm caught forecasters off guard over the weekend, giving a heads up to residents of the Caribbean basin to take their preparations seriously.
Tropical Storm Alberto spun up to speed over the weekend, with winds reaching right around 40 miles an hour. The threshold to be classified a tropical storm is 39 miles an hour. The storm hovered in the Atlantic, bringing rain to coastal areas of South Carolina and Georgia and canceling some cruise ship departures before wandering off to the northeast. It has since been downgraded to the status of post-tropical storm cyclone.
But the early appearance of Alberto did not mean any more than that, according to Dennis Feltgen, public relations director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami. It is not a harbinger of things to come, he said, and shouldn’t change plans to prepare for the season.
“It’s not all that unusual,” he said in a telephone interview Tuesday morning. “We’ve had storms recorded in every month of the calendar. It’s not like nature turns a switch on at midnight on June 1 and says ‘OK, time for storms.’”
In fact, a named storm tends to form before the beginning of hurricane season about once every six years.
Hurricane experts have predicted a less active than usual hurricane season this year. While the National Hurricane Center does not release its outlook for the season until later this week and won’t comment on other forecasters’ predictions, Feltgen said the early arrival of Alberto is not a harbinger that an active season is in store, and such predictions shouldn’t cause residents to prepare less carefully.
“It isn’t going to matter if the predictions are for an active season or an average season or a less than active season,” he said. The seasonal outlook shows with pretty good accuracy how much activity there will be, “but it cannot tell you where a particular storm is going to form or where it’s going to make landfall.”
And that really is what matters, he said. Even if there were only one storm all season, if it happened to hit where you are it would ruin your whole day.
“What if I had told you in 1992 that there was going to be only six named storms all season and only one was going to make landfall, you’d think that was pretty good and you might not prepare. If you lived in Florida that would have been a big mistake because that was the year of Hurricane Andrew.”
Andrew was a Category 5 storm that smashed into southern Florida and did more than $25 billion worth of damage.
To help territory residents do that planning, the Virgin Islands Territorial Emergency Management Agency will hold a series of expositions Thursday through Sunday.
The expo brings together local and federal government agencies, voluntary organizations and businesses that will provide the community with information on how to prepare for and recover from disaster. Participating agencies include the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the V.I. National Guard, the U.S. Small Business Administration, the American Red Cross, Innovative and a host of local government agencies. The theme is “Preparing Together,” reflecting a whole-community approach to emergency management.
The schedule for the expositions is:
- Thursday: 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Frank Powell Park, Cruz Bay, St. John.
- Friday: 4 to 9 p.m. in Emancipation Garden, St. Thomas.
- Saturday: 2 to 5 p.m. on Water Island.
- Sunday: 1 to 5 p.m. at Christiansted National Park, St. Croix.