The Weather Notebook: 1999 Weather Review: Was Hurricane Floyd A Dud?

1999 Weather Review: Was Hurricane Floyd A Dud?
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Dave Thurlow, Host

OK, so it wasn't the end of the world. But Hurricane Floyd did a lot more damage than you might think. Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow from the Mount Washington Observatory and this is The Weather Notebook.

1999 September 15, 2015 UT. Data from NOAA GOES satellite. Images produced by Hal Pierce, Laboratory for Atmospheres, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

Floyd was a monster storm as it approached the East Coast. It triggered the largest peacetime evacuation in U.S. history. Over two million people fled the coastline from Florida to New England. Floyd even gave Mickey Mouse a day off, as DisneyWorld closed for the first time in its 28-year history.

But Floyd didn't strike at its strongest, when its top winds were at 155 miles an hour. Instead, it made a right turn and then skirted the East Coast, making only a brief landfall in North Carolina. Some of the people who fled Floyd were irritated. Some news media called the storm a big, overblown dud. But was it really?

In fact, Floyd took more lives in the U.S. than any hurricane since Agnes in 1972. Floyd killed more than 60 people, most of them in North Carolina. That's where the storm did its worst--but not because of its wind or storm surge. Instead, Floyd dumped buckets of rainfall on top of ground already saturated by Tropical Storm Dennis several weeks earlier. More than 20 inches of rain fell in some spots, and in this flat delta, the water had no place to go.

The floods of Floyd didn't look as dramatic on TV as the winds of a storm like Andrew. But this washout of a storm washed away more lives than any U.S. hurricane in recent memory.

Thanks to contributing writer Bob Henson and for more information on Hurricane Floyd, visit our website at mountwashington.org. The Weather Notebook is underwritten by Subaru and the National Science Foundation.