As hurricane season dawns, good news is hard to find

If the return of the “loop current” isn’t enough to give Louisianans nightmares, how does a longer and more active hurricane season sound? What about the prospect of Category 6 hurricanes?

If tropical weather makes you hyperventilate, stop reading now because hurricane season is here and all the news so far is bad.

In 2020, southwest Louisiana was assaulted by the most ferocious hurricane to hit our state since the Civil War.

In 2021, southeast Louisiana was assaulted by the most ferocious hurricane to hit our state since 2020.

We’ll have to pray that 2022 spares us another Laura or Ida, because so far the forecasts have been disheartening from the bureaucracies and academics who do such a great job monitoring tropical weather. They’re our friends, but they have had little encouraging to say.

Let’s start with the Loop Current, a pool of warm tropical water that acts as a steroid for storms. Nick Shay, a professor of oceanography at the University of Miami, says the Loop Current is penetrating unusually far into the Gulf of Mexico for this time of year.

The Loop Current was blamed for fueling Hurricane Katrina, which remains the nation’s costliest natural disaster even though it took place 17 years ago.

Another disquieting development is that weather forecasters are thinking of extending hurricane season into May because storms have been jumping the gun and spinning up in the second half of the month. That hasn’t happened yet, but in the meantime, the National Hurricane Center has decided to issue storm forecasts beginning two weeks before the season gets underway on June 1.

Not to mention storms’ growing ferocity. Last week, The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projected yet another above-average hurricane season, including up to six major hurricanes and 14 to 21 named storms. NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said his agency is 65% sure of its forecast for an above-average hurricane season.

And there’s still more bad news.

Category 5 hurricanes pack winds of 157 mph or more, but now some scientists say that stronger storms are going to call for a revision of the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale to include a new Category 6.

“It has been argued by some that there’s no need for a higher category than ‘5’ because a ‘5’ causes total destruction,” Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, told USA Today. “That’s less true now with the more resilient infrastructure that we’re creating, and there is a qualitative difference in the impact of a 157 mph weak Cat 5 and a 185 mph monster Cat 5.”

Hurricane Dorian, which pounded the Bahamas in 2019, was such a storm, with sustained winds of 185 mph and gusts to 220 mph, reports Scientific American. Hurricane Rita in 2005 featured winds up to 180 mph.

Louisiana is still toiling to recover from the 2020 and 2021 storm seasons, and federal help has been slow to arrive in struggling communities like Lake Charles and Houma and Thibodaux. More than 9,000 households are living in trailers or mobile homes provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency or the state.

There is one piece of good news though: Seventeen years after Katrina, the network of levees, gates and floodwalls designed to protect the New Orleans area is finished. More than $14 billion buys a lot of flood protection, but we’re not in a rush to see it all put to the test.