The 2017 Atlantic hurricane season, which officially ends on Thursday, will go down as one of the most expensive in American history. The notorious storms of 2017 -- hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria -- may have had innocuous names. However, they flooded America's fourth-largest metropolis, cut a swath of destruction across the Caribbean before hitting Florida, and cut off power to the entire island of Puerto Rico, respectively.
The costs of the storms that hit the U.S. are still being tallied, with some analysts claiming that it was the most expensive hurricane season on record. Steve Bowen, a meteorologist with the insurance company AonBenfield, said that his company's calculations show that direct damage and business interruption losses from 2017's many storms will put 2017 in second place, behind 2005, once adjusted for inflation.
SEE ALSO:San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz talks Puerto Rico's recovery with Stephen ColbertIt's possible that ranking will change, however. "There remains so much uncertainty with the three big storms (Harvey, Irma, Maria), and insurance claims continue to be filed and processed," Bowen said via Twitter message.
"A big component to the direct damage losses remains business interruption, and especially in the case of Maria in Puerto Rico, those direct impacts remain ongoing," Bowen said.
"The 2017 season is going to end near the top on an economic and insured loss basis once all is said and done. Regardless of what metric is used to determine 2017's ranking... the season was extraordinarily costly and will be used as one of the benchmark years against which future seasons are compared," Bowen said.
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Puerto Rico still has not woken up from the nightmare caused by Hurricane Maria. It's been 71 days since Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico as a Category 4 storm, but residents there are still struggling without access to electricity, as well as other basic services.
As of Thursday afternoon, electricity generation on Puerto Rico -- which is not the same as the percentage of people who are receiving power -- stood at 65 percent. About 7 percent of Puerto Rican residents are without access to safe drinking water, according to the territory's website. Repairs are still being made to electricity and transportation infrastructure in the U.S. Virgin Islands and other areas that in many cases were hit with two major hurricanes in a row.
The Trump administration's response to Hurricane Maria, especially when compared to the mobilization mounted in the wake of other storms that struck the U.S. mainland, is widely viewed to be abysmal.
Even veteran hurricane forecasters were stunned by the beastly storms that prowled the Atlantic Ocean this season. Hurricane Harvey, which made landfall in southeast Texas on Aug. 25 as a Category 4 storm, resulted in the heaviest rainstorm ever recorded in the country. The storm inundated large swaths of the Houston metro area, dumping as much as 5 feet of rain over the course of a few days.
Such unprecedented rainfall turned highways into raging rivers, flooded petrochemical plants, and destroyed tens of thousands of cars, homes, and businesses.
Harvey was followed by another Category 4 storm, Hurricane Irma, marking the first time the U.S. has been hit by two Category 4 storms in the same season. Irma reserved it greatest ferocity for islands in the Caribbean, practically wiping out the island of Barbuda, and stripping the lush vegetation of the Virgin Islands bare.
Hurricane Irma remained a Category 5 storm with maximum sustained winds of 185 miles per hour for a consecutive 37 hours, a new world record, and also broke the record for the strongest hurricane observed in the Atlantic outside the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea. Based on its windspeed, it also tied for second on the list of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes of all-time, behind Hurricane Allen in 1980.
Then came Hurricane Maria, which rapidly intensified on September 18, and also raked parts of the Leeward Islands and Caribbean. Maria caused widespread damage when it hit the tiny island of Dominica as a Category 5 storm, and became the strongest hurricane to hit Puerto Rico since 1928.
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The Atlantic season kept setting records into October, when Hurricane Ophelia became the strongest storm to form so far east in the North Atlantic.
By reaching Category 3 intensity, Ophelia also became the sixth major hurricane of Category 3 or greater to form during the 2017 season. Hurricane Ophelia underwent a transition into a powerful hybrid, and then a non-tropical storm, that struck Ireland with winds as strong as 119 miles per hour.
While the hurricanes of 2017 were fierce, none of the Category 4 or 5 storms hit without extremely accurate warnings. In fact, preliminary data from the National Hurricane Center show that storm track forecasts for hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria were about 25 percent more accurate than average.
Storm intensity forecasts, however, remained a bigger challenge, as some of these storms underwent periods of astonishingly rapid intensification that defied expectations.
For millions from Houston to St. Johns, the off season will be spent rebuilding and attempting to get their lives back to normalcy. Meanwhile, hurricane forecasters will work to improve their techniques and computer models in time for next year.
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