+title: What's the probability of another hurricane similar to Maria striking Puerto Rico in 2018?

+subtitle: A work in progress

+copyright: (c) 2018 Michael Roberts, all rights reserved
+email: michael@vivtek.com

+date: 2018-03-25

What's the probability of "another hurricane like Maria" hitting PR/USVI in 2018?
+url: https://www.quora.com/What-s-the-probability-of-another-hurricane-similar-to-Mar%C3%ADa-
striking-Puerto-Rico-and-the-USVI-s-in-2018

Good question. What does that even mean? I'd have to say it means something approaching the
destruction caused by Maria, and my gut feeling is "about 5% in any given year",
because these catastrophes seem to be roughly about 20 years apart.

But we do actually have data that we can use to answer this question:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Hurricanes_in_Puerto_Rico

Let's extract a database, shall we?

Deaths are just those in P.R., to the extent that's reflected. Damage is in dollars at the time. Some
hurricanes listed (like the Great Hurricane of 1780) didn't affect Puerto Rico
all that directly (no landfall), so I'm going to skip those.

+hurricanes:#
name year damage deaths url
TD9 2003 $20k 0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Depression_Nine_(2003)
TD15 1970 $65m 18
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Depression_Fifteen_(1970)
San Narciso 1867 $6.45m 211 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1867_San_Narciso_hurricane

TD15 in 1970 was "one of the worst disasters in Puerto Rican history". 17 inches of rain fell in
Jayuya in one 24-hour period.

There was a Puerto Rican tradition of naming hurricanes after the saint's day on which the hurricane
made landfall on the island. Maria would be "San Eustacio" or "San Eustaquio".

San Narciso "ruined agriculture of the island of Puerto Rico, causing a great economic crisis. The
hurricane and various other factors contributed to the discontent on
the island that erupted into the Grito de Lares of 1868." Damages were estimated at 13 million Spanish
escudos. Converting that to dollars is problematic, but:
+url: http://www.historicalstatistics.org/Currencyconverter.html
Here, we can convert one Spanish peseta to one US dollar in 1867 by means of Swedish consumer prices.
Or, apparently, gold, which is probably a better benchmark.
A peseta was 0.1986 dollars, then. But how many escudos to the peseta? Well, Wikipedia gives us a
clue:
+url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_escudo
Money in Spain went through a lot of changes during the colonial period, but the silver escudo of 1864
to 1869 (and thus in 1867) was worth 2.5 pesetas when pesetas were introduced.
So 13 million escudos * 2.5 pesetas/escudo = 32.5 million pesetas, times 0.1986 dollars/peseta = $6.45
million, in 1867. (Thus the Wikipedia page for the storm is wrong, as it
cites damages of $1 million).

+url: https://web.archive.org/web/20110723234534/http://www.cienciapr.org/news_view.php?id=672
In the first century of colonization, the island experienced seven hurricanes between 1526 and 1530,
five of which occurred in a space of nine weeks in 1530.
This was one of the main reasons why many Spanish colonists emigrated to the continent, with the
consequent depopulation and impoverishment of the island.

Just posted to FB:

" There's an interesting question on Quora: "What’s the probability of another hurricane similar to
María striking Puerto Rico and the USVI’s in 2018?" My gut feeling,
since we have a major storm roughly every twenty years, is 5% in any given year, but I'm reading up
on it.

To a certain extent, the history of Puerto Rico *is* the history of hurricanes. The word "hurricane"
itself actually comes from a native Puerto Rican word - the Taino
god of storms was named Hurakán. The Spanish adopted the word, and it made its way into the other
European languages from there.

In 1530, five hurricanes hit the island in the space of nine weeks. So many Spanish colonists left
for Mexico that year the island was thrown into poverty.

The San Narciso hurricane of 1867 ruined the harvest throughout the island, "causing a great
economic crisis", and constituting one of the factors in a popular uprising the following year.

Basically, I figure we're doing astonishingly well in recovering from Maria, given this context. I'm
going to keep reading, and maybe I'll do an article.

Etymological note:
+url: https://www.thoughtco.com/where-does-the-word-hurricane-come-from-3443911
" Our English word "hurricane" comes from the Taino (the indigenous people of the Caribbean and
Florida) word "huricán", who was the Carib Indian god of evil.

Their huricán was derived from the Mayan god of wind, storm and fire, "huracán." When the Spanish
explorers passed through the Caribbean, they picked it up
and it turned into "huracán", which remains the Spanish word for hurricane still today. By the 16th
century, the word was modified once again to our present-day "hurricane."

(Hurricane isn't the only weather word with roots in the Spanish language. The word "tornado" is an
altered form of the Spanish words tronado, which means thunderstorm, and tornar, "to turn.")

+url: https://www.etymonline.com/word/hurricane
" sea-storm of severest intensity, 1550s, a partially deformed adoption of Spanish huracan (Gonzalo
Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdés,
"Historia General y Natural de las Indias," 1547-9), furacan (in the works of Pedro Mártir De
Anghiera, chaplain to the court of
King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella and historian of Spanish explorations), from an Arawakan (West
Indies) word. In Portuguese, it
became furacão. For confusion of initial -f- and -h- in Spanish, see hacienda. The word is first in
English in Richard Eden's
"Decades of the New World":

These tempestes of the ayer (which the Grecians caule Tiphones ...) they caule furacanes.

OED records 39 different spellings, mostly from the late 16c., including forcane, herrycano,
harrycain, hurlecane. The modern form became frequent from 1650
and was established after 1688. Shakespeare uses hurricano ("King Lear," "Troilus and Cressida"),
but in reference to waterspouts.

+url: http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/B4.html
" Subject: B4) What is the origin of the word "hurricane"?

Contributed by Chris Landsea (NHC) and Neal Dorst (HRD)

"HURRICANE derived from 'Hurican', the Carib god of evil...

alternative spellings: foracan, foracane, furacana,
furacane, furicane,furicano, haracana, harauncana, haraucane,
haroucana, harrycain, hauracane, haurachana, herican, hericane,
hericano, herocane, herricao, herycano, heuricane, hiracano,
hirecano, hurac[s]n, huracano, hurican, hurleblast, hurlecan,
hurlecano, hurlicano, hurrican, hurricano, hyrracano, urycan,
hyrricano, jimmycane, oraucan, uracan, uracano"

From the AMS Glossary of Meteorology

It should be noted that the Carib god 'Hurican' was derived from the Mayan god 'Hurakan', one of
their creator gods, who blew his breath across the Chaotic
water and brought forth dry land and later destroyed the men of wood with a great storm and flood.

+hurricanes:#
name year damage deaths url
San Ciriaco 1899 $20m 3369 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1899_San_Ciriaco_hurricane

San Ciriaco is the hurricane I've read most about previously. It hit hard in Ponce; 500 people died
here. All telephone, telegraph, and electrical services
were lost (I know how that feels now).

+hurricanes:#
name year damage deaths url
San Felipe II 1928 $50m 312 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1928_Okeechobee_hurricane
San Ciprian 1932 $30m 225 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1932_San_Ciprian_hurricane
Bertha 1996 $7.5m 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Bertha_(1996)
Betsy/Santa Clara 1956 $40m 16 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Betsy_(1956)

Betsy was the first hurricane in Puerto Rico to have a warning on television.