Category 5 Maria Threatens Catastrophic Damage in the Caribbean

Thank goodness science allows us to have advanced notification of hurricanes so some preparation can be made. Really horrifying to think of these things striking w/o warning.

by Alex Johnson
Sept. 18, 2017 11:58pm ET

Maria blew up from a tropical storm into a major Category 5 hurricane in barely more than a day, bearing down on Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands with catastrophic winds so strong that some areas could be uninhabitable for months, forecasters warned Monday night.

Maria made landfall on Dominica, an island of 72,000 people in the Lesser Antilles, at 9:15 p.m. ET, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said. The island's prime minister, Roosevelt Skerrit, wrote on Facebook that his roof was gone, that his home was flooded and that he was "at the complete mercy of the hurricane." A few minutes later, he reported that he had been rescued.

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With hurricane-force winds likely to continue across both territories for as long as 24 hours, forecasters said, Maria was shaping up late Monday to be even more destructive than Hurricane Irma, which killed at least 70 people across the Caribbean and the Southeastern United States beginning in late August.

"These winds will bring catastrophic damage," the agency warned. In tandem with rain as heavy as 18 inches and storm surges forecast as high as 9 feet, conditions could leave parts of the U.S. territories "uninhabitable for weeks or months," it said.

Kenneth Mapp, governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands, suspended all Irma recovery efforts to shift the focus to preparing for Maria, while President Donald Trump declared states of emergency in both territories on Monday. The Coast Guard said it was moving personnel, cutters and aircraft in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico to protect them from Maria and to position them for quick search-and-rescue missions.

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2017/09/18/hurricane-maria-category-5-dominica-irma-path-2017/#564204fa601b

Eric Mack
Sept. 18, 2017

While you were going about your business Monday, Hurricane Maria rapidly intensified from a category 1 storm to the category 5 monster with 160 mph winds that is now bowling over the Caribbean island of Dominica.

As of 5 a.m. Atlantic time on Monday, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) in Miami reported that Maria's sustained maximum winds of 90 mph put it at the high end of a category 1 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale. The NHC's 8 p.m. report put Maria at a category 5, making it one of the more rapidly intensifying storms in recent memory.

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A recent paper by MIT's Kerry Emanuel found that Atlantic hurricanes that intensify quickly like Harvey and Maria may become more common thanks to climate change.

"...the incidence of storms that intensify rapidly just before landfall could increase substantially by the end of this century, and as rapid intensification is difficult to forecast, there is a risk of an increased frequency of poorly anticipated, high-intensity landfalls, leading to higher rates of injury and death."

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