Highlights of Hurricane Dean

(2007-08-22 14:50:00.0)

In just five days starting on Thursday, August 16, Hurricane Dean, the first North Atlantic hurricane of 2007, grew from a tropical depression to a monster, category 5 storm 400 km (250 miles) across while making landfall twice and leaving a path of destruction stretching from the Caribbean island nations of Martinique, St. Lucia, Jamaica, the Caymans, and others to the Yucatan peninsula and the Mexico mainland. As expected, Hurricane Dean unleashed its physical forces on the affluent as well as the poor and vulnerable populations such as the Mayans in Mexico. It did not respect political boundaries, time of day, or state-of-readiness in the countries and communities along its path. Lady luck only smiled twice: Jamaica missed a direct hit, and Majahual, the location of landfall in the Yucatan peninsula, is a sparsely populated area. The physical effects that Hurricane Dean unleashed at various locations along its long path included: sustained winds reaching as high as 270 km/hr (165 m/hr), storm surges of as much as 5 m (18 feet), heavy rain fall of as much as 20 cm (8 inches), tidal changes of as much as 3 n (9 feet), flooding in low-lying areas, and landslides. The socioeconomic impacts included: extensive economic losses in the billions, deaths, injuries, collapse and damage of houses, loss of function of community infrastructure, loss of agricultural and cash export crops, and extensive evacuation and displacement of people away from their livelihoods. Attention to emergency response was heightened in every nation and community along Dean’s path by the memories of past hurricanes and tropical storms (e.g., Tropical Storm Jeanne in Jamaica, Hurricane Wilma in the Yucatan peninsula, and Hurricane Rita in Texas). Hurricane Dean made history from scientific, technical, political, and emergency- response perspectives. From a scientific perspective, it had the third lowest pressure (960 millibars) when it made landfall on August 21 at Majahual in the Yucatan peninsula as a category 5 hurricane. From a technical perspective, state-of-the-art Doppler radar technology was augmented by observations from the International Space Station to track Hurricane Dean 7/24. From a political perspective, campaigning for an August 27 election in Jamaica was suspended and Mexico, the Governor of the state of Texas and the President of the United States developed legislation to facilitate pre-disaster preparation, and USA, and Canadian leaders met in advance to improve coordination. Emergency response was normal in terms of advance preparations and evacuation being the standard risk reduction procedures, extraordinary in the sense that 50,000 tourists were safely evacuated from Mexico’s resorts; and unique in the sense that advanced preparations included the shuttle Endeavor docked on the International Space Station until August 19 and advance evacuation included at least 18,000 workers from 400 oil and gas production facilities in the Gulf of Mexico, with an accompanying huge loss in revenue due to loss of production. Early estimates of insured losses in the Caribbean alone range from $1.5 billion to $3 billion USD. Loss of life was amazingly low, about 50 people, due to the value added by waning systems.