Date added: Friday September 15, 2006: 1215am EST

Gordon Still Major 'Cane

TS Helene Slow to Strengthen

Florence Hits Newfoundland

also

Jeff Flock: "A Hurricane By Any Other Name..."

By HurricaneNow.com
Chief Correspondent Jeff Flock

Gordon

It's hard to say we've had a light hurricane season with Ernesto, Florence and now Gordon as hurricanes and the last of these still hanging on to its intensity as it spins out in middle of the Atlantic. While it's no land threat the satellite presentation has been impressive. Not so much for...

Helene

This tropical storm has been slow to anger. Some dry air has been introducing itself into the system which has dampened intensification, though conditions should be more favorable as time goes on. The National Hurricane Center continues to see a hurricane of good size and intensity sometime in the next 3-4 days. It remains too early to say how far west it will make it. Bermuda should not be ruled out and at this point neither should the east coast of the US, though this remains unlikely. By the way...

Florence

It may have ceased being a tropical system days ago but the folks in Newfoundland got their own hurricane of a system as the storm did a pretty good job of lashing the southern part of the country. Hurricane force winds whipped the coast and Weather Underground's Jeff Masters posted this link to damage reports from the Halifax Chronicle Herald.

A Word From
Correspondent Jeff Flock

And Even Worse...

What Florence did to Newfoundland is a reminder that it doesn't take a hurricane to produce hurricane-like damage. As you'll read in this section of HurricaneNow.com describing why we do what we do, my first memory as a child is of Hurricane Donna hitting New Jersey in 1960. But my most vivid childhood weather memory was the "Great March Storm of 1962." Sometimes called the "The Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962," it was one of the most destructive systems ever to hit the Mid-Atlantic states. In fact it is listed as one of the ten worst storms to have hit anywhere in the United States in the 20th century. It did $80 mil. damage in 1962 dollars, in New Jersey alone, destroying 45,000 homes. It ripped apart some of Atlantic City's "Steel Pier" and the famous horse "Misty of Chincoteague" made famous in the children's book, survived the storm by being brought inside a house. Perhaps you or your children also read "Stormy, Misty's Foal," which was about Misty's foal born just after the storm.

I still have a picture book of the Great March Storm's damage put out by the local newspaper and the aftermath sure looks like a hurricane went through. I always thought of it as a hurricane but it was in fact a "Noreaster." Though no where near as bad, that's some of what the folks in Newfoundland got from the former hurricane Florence. It demonstrates that just because a storm is no longer "tropical" (or a so-called "warm core" storm fueled by the ocean's heat) it can still be just as powerful.