# Natural Disasters and North America **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 17, 2005, 2:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-disasters-and-north-america/322104 "2005-09-17T14:21:17Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![PigBoy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/97f17d/32.png) [@PigBoy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PigBoy)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2005, 4:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-disasters-and-north-america/322104/21 "2005-09-23T04:08:30Z")
> [@eleanorigby](#): > > Ok-this is probably a stupid question. > > Why no hurricanes for Oregon and say, Seattle? Has Los Angeles ever been threatened by one? > > I am sure this has something to do with the way a hurricane is formed and grows but my son asked me this today and I couldn’t answer him factually. So, why only hurricanes in the Atlantic/Gulf region? > > Sorry to make this Americ-centric and all, and it is slightly OT, but I do really want to know… Disclaimer: I am not any kind of meteoroligist and possibly don’t know what I’m talking about. For one thing, I assume it has something to do with cool water temperatures, which are killer to hurricanes. There are hurricanes that form in the east Pacific, but like all hurricanes their movement is generally westward, so not that many hit the west coast of North America to begin with. To directly hit a place like Oregon, one would have to actually loop all the way around and somehow still be a hurricane in the end (which I’m guessing is probably an impossible scenario due to the ocean temperatures and other weather patterns I don’t know about). I think East Pacific hurricanes do curve northward sometimes, impacting Mexico, but a storm moving straight toward the northwest U.S. in that direction would of course not survive all the way up the west coast over land. I don’t know about Los Angeles, but I have a source that says “a few have hit California,” wherever and whenever that may have been. ---
**Author:** ![stochastic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e19b73/32.png) [@stochastic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/stochastic)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2005, 4:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-disasters-and-north-america/322104/22 "2005-09-23T04:23:40Z")
> [@eleanorigby](#): > > Ok-this is probably a stupid question. > > Why no hurricanes for Oregon and say, Seattle? Has Los Angeles ever been threatened by one? > > I am sure this has something to do with the way a hurricane is formed and grows but my son asked me this today and I couldn’t answer him factually. So, why only hurricanes in the Atlantic/Gulf region? > > Sorry to make this Americ-centric and all, and it is slightly OT, but I do really want to know… Actually, L.A. has been hit by a hurricane (in 1838) and has come close several times since then. Check out [this PBS](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elnino/dispatches/dispatch980211.html) site for more info on the histroy of CA hurricanes and why they’re not common. ---
**Author:** ![stochastic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e19b73/32.png) [@stochastic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/stochastic)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2005, 4:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-disasters-and-north-america/322104/23 "2005-09-23T04:24:53Z")
histroy = history, of course ---
**Author:** ![eleanorigby](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/ee7513/32.png) [@eleanorigby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eleanorigby)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2005, 1:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-disasters-and-north-america/322104/24 "2005-09-23T13:48:35Z")
Jesus. Linda looks like all kinds of hell. I was going to make the point that Maine has had hurricanes and is as far north as Seattle, but then memory of the Gulf Stream kicked in. Thanks much for the info–I will now educate my son! (love this place…) ---
**Author:** ![August\_West](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/august_west/32/18069_2.png) [@August\_West](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/August_West)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2005, 2:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-disasters-and-north-america/322104/25 "2005-09-23T14:29:28Z")
Here is an interesting map I found the other day while noodling around on the web, it shows the number of billion dollar climate and weather disiaters in the U.S. from 1980 to 2003, state by state. It makes me glad that I live in WI. ---
**Author:** ![August\_West](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/august_west/32/18069_2.png) [@August\_West](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/August_West)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2005, 2:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-disasters-and-north-america/322104/26 "2005-09-23T14:30:30Z")
:smack: And of course I forgot the link [Map](http://www.millennium-ark.net/News_Files/UN_Images/Disaster_State_Map.jpg) ---
**Author:** ![Cartooniverse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cartooniverse/32/3084_2.png) [@Cartooniverse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cartooniverse)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2005, 4:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-disasters-and-north-america/322104/27 "2005-09-23T16:13:14Z")
Excellent cite. Man, if I could find a worldwide map like that- then one that didn’t pay attention to dollars but instead to lives lost, why we’d have something ! \<—scurries off in a crab-like yet intellectually envigorating manner to Google. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2005, 5:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-disasters-and-north-america/322104/28 "2005-09-23T17:11:56Z")
> [@](#): > > Here is an interesting map I found the other day while noodling around on the web, it shows the number of billion dollar climate and weather disiaters in the U.S. from 1980 to 2003, state by state. It makes me glad that I live in WI. On the other hand, Wisconsin gets plenty of blizzards. Blizzards will tend to be underrepresented on that map, since they don’t usually cause much infrastructure damage, but they do often have a fairly high death toll. ---
**Author:** ![micco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5f8ce5/32.png) [@micco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/micco)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2005, 5:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-disasters-and-north-america/322104/29 "2005-09-23T17:17:52Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Blizzards will tend to be underrepresented on that map, since they don’t usually cause much infrastructure damage, but they do often have a fairly high death toll. And they probably have pretty high economic cost in lost work and productivity that may be hard to quantify as reliably as physical damage. ---
**Author:** ![Saltire](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/saltire/32/553_2.png) [@Saltire](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Saltire)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2005, 5:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-disasters-and-north-america/322104/30 "2005-09-23T17:27:15Z")
I’m not a real weather buff, but I do live in Washington, so I can sort of comment on why the Northwest doesn’t seem to get hurricanes. We do have a warm water current (The Japan Current, I believe it’s called) that hits us and drives most of our weather systems. But it isn’t the same intensity of warm you get in the Caribbean. We often get storms that carry “hurricane-force winds”, defined, I believe, as sustained winds over 70 knots (or maybe it’s 75). However, these storms are not organized as the spiral powerhouses that hurricanes are, so the energy is less. They look, on sattelite photos, more like a single arm of a spiral. We rarely get winds above 120 or so. Another reason you don’t hear much about severe weather in the Northwest is that most of the population is inland. Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia, Portland, Eugene are all a considerable distance from the Pacific. Puget Sound is nothing like the ocean it connects to, and the Columbia river (where Portland is) is even less ocean-like. Vancouver, British Columbia is on the coast, but the giant Vancouver Island blocks a lot of the worst weather. The coastal region is mostly small tourist destinations and logging towns. They’re pretty used to the weather. The worst that usually happens is some of the many rivers will flood for a few days after a serious rain. [There have been a few spectacular things: in the early 60s the cruise ship Catala was anchored in Grays Harbor and was run aground in Ocean Shores by a 100+ knot storm (it rusted on the beach for decades), and in the 40s (I think) a storm collapsed a bluff, dumping the largest hotel on the Washington coast and the only high school in the north half of the county (both in Moclips) into the ocean.] Pretty much every year, some evil weather happens somewhere in this country, and I am once again glad that our region may be known for its rain, but it rarely kills people. Mostly, we worry about tsunami and earthquake, both of which have a high probablility of hitting us, but have not done so in any really severe way since the area was settled by non-Natives. And there’s always the chance one of these volcanoes will erupt in a catastrophic way (something much worse than 1980’s St. Helens blast is always possible). ---
**Author:** ![ITR\_champion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c67d28/32.png) [@ITR\_champion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ITR_champion)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2005, 6:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-disasters-and-north-america/322104/31 "2005-09-23T18:13:57Z")
From the PBS site above: > [@](#): > > Normally, hurricanes that form in the Pacific off Mexico strike the west coast of Mexico or, most often, move out to sea. They almost never reach the US because they must pass over cool water, which cuts off their energy source. Until this year, hurricanes had affected the American southwest only three times in the 20th century. In September of 1932 a hurricane moved up the Gulf of California, producing gusty winds and heavy rainfall in the Arizona desert. In September of 1939, a tropical storm slammed into San Diego with winds of 52 mph south of Los Angeles. And in September 1976, a hurricane gusted to 76 mph at Yuma, Arizona. Generally the hurricanes in the Pacific move out to sea because the current pushes them out. The current at the relevant latitudes pushes westward across the Pacific. There is a contrary current pushing eastward farther north in the Pacific, but the water up there is not warm enough to spawn hurricanes. At least not right now. In his science fiction novel _Mother of Storms_, John Barnes hypothesized that serious global warming could push temperatures in the north Pacific high enough to sustain a hurricane, and that a hurricane would thus be able to cycle back and forth across the Pacific for the entire summer, growing all the while. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/natural-disasters-and-north-america/322104.md?page=1)