Florida’s U.S. senators are calling for the “cavalry” – in the form of the U.S. military – to help in Puerto Rico, which was hammered last week by Hurricane Maria.
Florida’s economy has long thrived on one import above all: People. Until Irma struck this month, the state was adding nearly 1,000 residents a day — 333,471 in the past year, akin to absorbing a city the size of St. Louis or Pittsburgh. Every jobseeker, retiree or new birth, along with billions spent by tourists, helped fuel Florida’s propulsive growth and economic gains. Yet Hurricane Irma’s destructive floodwaters renewed fears about how to manage the state’s population boom as the…
When hurricanes strike Florida, sports fade on the priority list as they should. Hurricane Matthew has done significant damage, but fortunately our state avoided a catastrophe. A few sports events, such as LSU vs. Florida, were postponed, but other than that the lives of athletes or programs suffered no lasting damage. Matthew was thought to possess the threat for damage equal to that of Hurricane Andrew in 1992. In the end, whether in sports or real life, there is no…
By Seth Borenstein — AP Science Writer Winds whipped around my pulled-tight raincoat with a fierce noise as pieces of a giant red sign my newspaper installed atop its office tower littered the ground around me. After what seemed like an excruciatingly long wait, Hurricane Andrew had arrived. Hours and days later I would see how deadly those winds were, how vast the devastation they caused. I would cry as I watched Andrew’s child victims trying to cope with upside-down life in…
A new but controversial study asks if an end is coming to the busy Atlantic hurricane seasons of recent decades. The Atlantic looks like it is entering in to a new quieter cycle of storm activity, like in the 1970s and 1980s, two prominent hurricane researchers wrote Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience. Scientists at Colorado State University, including the professor who pioneered hurricane seasonal prognostication, say they are seeing a localized cooling and salinity level drop in the North…
