The Next Disaster: Hurricanes

Hurricane forecasters learned a major lesson from Superstorm Sandy. A decision to discontinue hurricane advisories may have prompted some people to underestimate the storm’s impact.

FOX News Radio’s Eben Brown reports from Miami in our series “The Next Disaster”:

Sandy taught everybody a hurricane doesn’t need to be a hurricane to wreak havoc. As the storm lost its tropical winds, the National Hurricane Center did what it always does, it ended the watches and warnings, leaving local forecast offices to track and advise the public about what would really be a winter storm.

(Knabb) “Sandy last year posed some very unique forecast and warning challenges; a situation that hadn’t quite ever presented itself before and that our system wasn’t quite ideally set-up to address.”

Richard Knabb heads up the National Hurricane Center here in Miami, and thinks an NHC advisory would have helped encourage more people to prepare. So they’ll do it now.

(Knabb) “Number one is, that, going forward, even if that happens… A hurricane or tropical storm is no longer technically a hurricane or tropical storm anymore… Post tropical… We can continue to issue National Hurricane Center advisories. It will say post-tropical whatever, but we’ll continue to write the advisories whereas in the past, we wouldn’t.”

In Miami, Eben Brown, FOX News Radio.