Last week Hurricane Humberto hit landfall in south Texas and devastated small towns such as High Island. Sadly, High Island the sleepy beach town of only a couple hundred is where my cousin Ketan Gandhi has a gas station and food mart. His home and store were seriously damaged in the flash hurricane. It was fun to see him on the online news clips though. High Island was without power for a week, and volunteers and National Guard and Red Cross people have arrived to help. It is wonderful to hear about that.
Hurricane Humberto was a flash hurricane, meaning it his land without warning and with winds speeds of great strength in less than 16 hours. Experts are concerned that there is a trend in recent years of hurricanes with greater frequency and magnitude. Many scientists and observers are putting climate change and hurricanes together now. Perhaps the coming years will continue to see the problem get worse, as warmer waters in the Gulf of Mexico fuel stronger and more common hurricanes and storms.
"Everyone is scratching their heads and thinking, 'Wow, that's weird,' ''says Jeff Masters, a hurricane expert with the Weather Underground Web site. "There have been 27 Category 5 hurricanes since 1944, with eight of those coming in the last five years," says Masters. "That's a lot of Cat 5's in a short time."
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