The mid-Atlantic and the nation are about due for a hurricane.
In the last two years, no hurricanes have made landfall in America, according to the National Hurricane Center.
“We’ve never gone three years in a row,” said Gary Szatkowski, chief meteorologist in the National Weather Service’s Mount Holly office.
Because of a warmer Atlantic Ocean, which helps feed hurricanes, and other factors, forecasters are predicting an above-normal number of hurricanes this season. As the number of storms increase, so does the chance that one will make landfall in the continental United States.
A hurricane hasn’t slammed into New Jersey since 1903. Recent close calls include Hurricane Floyd, which arrived in the Garden State as a torrential tropical storm in 1999, and Hurricane Gloria, which skirted the Jersey Shore in 1985. But New Jersey’s luck may soon run out.
“People need to remember that New Jersey is not hurricane-proof,” said Ocean County Undersheriff Wayne R. Rupert, a deputy emergency management coordinator in the county.
“We can have one brush us,” he said. “We can have a direct hit. We can get an awful lot of damage from a hurricane and we have in (the) past, nothing too recent.”
Szatkowski said roughly one out of three hurricanes that forms in the Atlantic basin makes landfall somewhere in the United States — the Gulf Coast or East Coast.
"The humidity this year is unbelievable! And it's not even Summer yet!"
Source: MyCentralJersey.com
