The summers of 1995 and 1996 were the most active consecutive hurricane seasons on record. Media coverage was intense. Human casualties were extraordinarily light because the storm caused little flooding in populated areas and the National Hurricane Center forecast the storm track accurately. Good forecasts offer both motivation to act and time to prepare for the event. Intelligent preparation can reduce human and material losses, even though most property and many people cannot be evacuated from the path of the storm.
Hurricanes can be deadly and expensive.
Even now in developing nations, where warnings may not always be timely or accurate and evacuations are difficult, hundreds of thousands of people died in a single tropical cyclone landfall as recently as 1970. As warnings in the U.S. improved, loss of life declined but monetary losses continued to increase. According to the National Climate Data Center, hurricanes caused six of the eleven weather disasters in the 1980s and early 1990s that cost the U.S. economy more than a billion dollars. These features are common to all tropical cyclones. Hurricanes take their circular shape from the orbits of air moving in gradient balance around the low atmospheric pressure at the vortex center.