Harvey, Irma and Maria: Their names are no more

Goodbye and good riddance. The names of last year’s monster hurricanes — Harvey, Irma and Maria — will never be used again after they were officially “retired” Thursday.

The hurricanes killed hundreds of people, caused more than $200 billion in damage and brought misery and hardship to millions of Americans. The World Meteorological Organization also retired Nate, a hurricane that hit central America as a tropical storm, killing dozens, then hit the Gulf Coast.

Harvey, a Category 4 storm that hit Texas with winds of 132 mph, killed 68 people and dumped historic amounts of rain on Houston. With damage of $126 billion, it’s the second-costliest hurricane in U.S. history, behind Katrina.

Irma lashed the Caribbean and the U.S., making seven separate landfalls as it tore across the islands and the Southeast USA. A Category 5 storm at its height with winds of 178 mph, Irma

killed more than 100 people and devastated the island of Barbuda and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Maria, with winds of 172 mph at its height, ravaged the island of Dominica as a Category 5 on Sept. 19 and later struck Puerto Rico as a high-end Category 4 hurricane, producing catastrophic damage to the U.S. territory.

The meteorological organization retired the four names from its rotating list of hurricanes and tropical storms in light of the death and destruction the storms caused. The organization reuses storm names every six years in lists for the Atlantic and eastern Pacific basins. The nation hardest hit by a storm can request the storm’s name be removed.

The removal also avoids confusion caused by a future storm having the same name. In 2005, five storm names, including Katrina, were retired — the most for a single season.

The list from 2017 will be used again in 2023. The organization will replace Harvey with Harold, Irma with Idalia and Maria with Margot. Nate will be replaced by Nigel.

This year’s Atlantic hurricane season officially begins June 1 — with Alberto.

In all, 86 hurricane names have now been retired. When a storm name is retired from the Atlantic’s list, member countries of the meteorological organization from that region select a new name. For Atlantic storms, the name can be French, Spanish or English, reflecting the languages of countries in the path of hurricanes.

In 1953, the U.S. began using female names for hurricanes and, by 1979, male and female names were used. The names alternate between male and female. There are no Q, U, X, Y or Z names, because of the lack of usable names that begin with those letters. If more than 21 storms form in one season, such as in 2005, the Greek alphabet is used to name additional storms. There are separate lists for typhoons in the western Pacific and tropical cyclones in Australia and the Indian Ocean.