HURRICANES

I have been watching with interest the storms that have been brewing and/or hitting the U. S. this season. One reason is that we visited New Orleans in June and witnessed firsthand the destruction of Katrina and the reconstruction that is taking place there. We saw the canals, levees, and pumping houses that were so much in the news a few years ago. We, like everyone else in the country were very relieved that they were spared the worst scenario this year.

Another reason I have been so interested is because I have again booked a condo for November at our favorite beach, Cape San Blas, Florida, where they are rebuilding the beaches that were so devastated by the Hurricane Opal a few years ago. According to the blog about the progress of the reconstruction, so far the new beaches have held up well and work is continuing.

On a lighter note, in thinking about these storms, I have wondered about the names given to them. Who in the world comes up with them? Gustav? What kind of name is that? So I did a little research. (Don’t you just love the internet?)

In the first place, they used to always have a woman’s name. I guess the people (surely all of them men) who did the naming finally got wind of the fact that women resented it that there were no male monikers, so in 1979 they began to include men’s names. David and Frederic occurred that year and were placed on the “retired” list because they were destructive. (Hurricane names are retired when they are “deadly or costly”.)

But back to the selection of names. Some of them seem so bizarre. I mean Beulah, Agnes, Cesar, Flora, Hortense, Ione, and Roxanne are not your basic American names. Nor is Opal, Klaus, Lenny, Ivan, or even Katrina, probably the most famous of all, in recent years anyway. I would be willing to bet that that name quickly became unpopular for girls born in the U.S.

But finally I read in my research that because there are other countries besides the U. S. that are affected by these storms, there are three languages that the names are selected from, English, Spanish, and French. So if some of these names sound foreign to us, they are!

So there’s your little mini history lesson on hurricane naming; some old, retired teachers just don’t know when to quit!!