HURRICANE SEASON UPDATE

Larry Madrid, MEG president, attended the Florida Institute of Consulting Engineers’ Transportation Conference in Orlando in May, 2013 where hurricanes were on the list of hot topics. The Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) pays a lot of attention to hurricane preparedness, especially when it means evacuating parts of the State of Florida for safety reasons and using state and federal highways as evacuation routes. FDOT emergency coordination staff were recently briefed by Dr. William M. Gray, the nation’s foremost hurricane expert, who says there is a 50 to 70% change of hurricane landfall this year in Florida. Incidentally, Mr. Madrid met Dr. Gray earlier this year, when he presented at the 2013 Windstorm Conference. Dr. Gray and his protégé, Philip Klotzbach, PhD, were still completing forecast models at that time, but released their pre-season report in April 2013. For the past 5 or 6 years, Dr. Gray says, Florida has been “very lucky” to avoid the path of a hurricane, so statistically it is just a matter of time before we have a major hurricane coming our way. It was also pointed out that 66 percent of Floridians live in a Cat 5 surge zone, so a catastrophic hurricane would likely have serious flooding damage along with the extensive wind damage. Best be prepared! The most highly respected forecast of the Atlantic hurricane activity and 2013 landfall strike probability can be found at The Tropical Meteorology Project.