The 2009 hurricane season officially began on June 1. Now I'm not a big hurricane fan, having had to work through (and live after) Hurricane Ike last September. However, I will admit I'm looking forward to this season, and for a very pathetic reason: This year I'll have a storm named after me.
Yep, Danny will be the fourth named storm of the 2009 season. It's not the first time my moniker has lent itself to a storm name, but I'm hoping I'll put in a better showing than the last few times I've been around. (Now that is wrong on so many levels...but I digress.)
For those of you who don't know, if a storm is strong enough to cause serious damage, its name is retired. That applies to both tropical storms and hurricanes. (It's why there will never be another Andrew, Allison, Katrina, or Ike.) If not, the name comes back six years later.
Danny debuted in the 1985 hurricane season. If I knew it, I don't remember. It might have had something to do with the fact I was living in Colorado at the time, a locale not normally concerned about hurricanes. As it turns out, Danny hit the Gulf Coast at Lake Charles, Louisiana, as a category 1 hurricane, weakening as it headed through Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, and into the DC area, finally falling apart just east of New York. Whatever Danny did that year, it wasn't enough to warrant retiring the name.
By the time 1991 rolled around I was living in Houston. My best friend, who lives in Denver, and I had a great time joking about how we both were appearing in the hurricane lineup. Bob became a hurricane which ended up tearing up the East Coast rather respectably, and remaining organized as it crossed the Atlantic, finally petering out just before hitting Spain. (Sounds just like Bob.) Danny stayed a mere tropical storm, dying out in the middle of the Atlantic and never making landfall anywhere. (Sounds just like me.) Bob was retired; Danny was not.
In 1997 Danny was on the list again. I remember people at working warning "me" not to do any damage or I would never hear the end of it. No worries. Danny made landfall off the Alabama/Mississippi coastline as a weak category 1 hurricane, then quickly pulled back into a tropical storm, watering the South before tracking a nearly identical path to the 1985 storm of the same name. This time the storm fizzled in the mid-Atlantic. It meant Danny was due for yet another repeat performance.
In 2003 Danny again reached category 1 status. Alas, it was a waste. Danny formed in the north Atlantic and just circled around a bit before it gave up the ghost. Never even touched land.
So what can I expect from my namesake in 2009? If the track record is any indicator, I expect to be back again in 2015. That wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, though. Do I REALLY want people looking at my name and putting it in the same category as an Andrew or Katrina? So maybe putting in an appearance for the heck of it and coming back every six years is a blessing, for me and for those affected by tropical storms and hurricanes.
For more information on this year's hurricane season, check out
Stormpulse.com.
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