The Daily Feather — The Benign Hurricane Danielle of 1998
There are times you don’t want to see your name in the headlines. On August 21, 1998, a tropical wave surfaced off Africa’s west coast. While initially disorganized (aren’t we all at times?), the system was upgraded to Tropical Depression Four in the early morning hours of August 24th. Determined to make her mark in the history books, she intensified to a sufficient degree to earn the name Hurricane Danielle, the fourth storm of 1998’s Atlantic season. Luckily, disorganization dogged Danielle, which failed to make landfall but rather battered Great Britain with rain as an extratropical system at a cost of $50,000, a shadow of the damage exacted by Danielle’s predecessor. Category 2 Hurricane Bonnie walloped North Carolina, inflicting severe crop destruction, killing five people, and causing $1 billion in losses. This year’s Atlantic season is off to a late start – Hurricane Don was the first to be named last month. Despite the lack of headline grabbers, on August 10th, the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration upped its prediction for the season from ‘near-normal’ to ‘above-normal.’ We could be in the path of 2-5 major hurricanes.
Unlike Hurricane Danielle’s rounding error of a cost, Tropical Storm Hilary out of the Pacific is expected to rack up $2 billion in losses. According to Axios, the first tropical storm to hit Southern California in 84 years has put 43 million under tropical storm warnings while 27 million in six states as far north as Idaho were under flash flood warnings. Viva Las Vegas could get two inches of rain, half a year’s worth, with this one event. At $35 billion in 2023’s first half, thunderstorms have already racked up more than twice the average of $17 billion over the same period in the prior decade. OK, we admit it, we were part of the Weather Channel’s weekend ratings bonanza. It beat watching the Yankees.