Hurricanes headline this edition of Today in Weather History…on September 20th…
…1908: A devastating hurricane struck the Louisiana coast, coming ashore 50 miles west of New Orleans, near Houma around 8pm. The hurricane was as intense as the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 with a central pressure of 931 mb. 350 people were killed as a large section of the Louisiana coast was inundated. Storm surge reached 15 feet in the Timbalier Bay area.
…1974: As Hurricane Fifi tracked along the north coast of Honduras, the Category Two hurricane resulted in disastrous flooding that killed over 8,000 people. Up to twenty four inches of rain fell on the moitainous terrain causing incredible flooding an dlandslides. Choloma, Honduras was struck by a huge mudslide at dusk on this date. The mudslide formed a dam that trapped the raging flood waters. When the dam finally burst, the flood waters devastated the city. About 2,800 people or half the town’s population perished in the tragedy.
…1998: Hurricane Georges reached peak intensity as a strong category 4 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 155 mph and a central pressure of 937 mb about 300 miles east of the Lesser Antilles. Georges would go onto kill over 600 people in the Caribbean, eventually making landfall on the U.S. Gulf Coast in Mississippi.
…2005: Hurricane Rita intensified rapidly as it passed through the Florida Straits about 50 miles south of Key West. A storm surge of up to five feet affected the Keys, overwashing US-1 in some locations. It was the beginning of an astounding intensification that saw the storm deepen from a Category Two to a Category Five storm in twenty four hours. The central pressure in the storm would drop from 965 millibars to 897 millibars in twenty four hours.
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