The World Meteorological Organization announced this week that it will retire three names. Erika and Joaquin are the 79th and 80th storm names to be removed from the Atlantic list.
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The organization retires the names of storms that were deemed to be destructive. The storm caused more than $16 million worth of crop damage in Puerto Rico.
Goodbye and good riddance Joaquin, Erika and Patricia.
As predicted, last year’s Atlantic hurricane season ended up with below average activity.
The country most affected can request that the storm’s name be removed from use to avoid confusion caused by a future storm having the same name.
Erika and Joaquin join a long list of notorious retired names including Hurricanes Andrew, Sandy, Katrina, Charley and Wilma.
Joaquin was a hurricane that impacted the Bahamas and is responsible for taking the lives of 34 people, 33 of which perished as a result of the El Faro cargo ship sinking in the area.
Joaquin inundated parts of the Bahamas with catastrophic storm surge and was the strongest hurricane to impact the Bahamas since 1866.
Hurricane Patricia, a late October storm, had winds that were measured at 215 miles per hour.
Patricia was a late-season very intense hurricane that intensified at an extraordinary rate in the eastern Pacific. Another fatality was reported in Haiti, where one person was killed in a mudslide triggered by the storm’s rains. Its Category 4 winds battered the central and southeast Bahamas.
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Later that same month, Hurricane Patricia became the strongest hurricane on record in the Western Hemisphere after reaching maximum sustained winds of 215mph (345kmh). Up to 3,500 homes were damaged.
