#37 Postby Teban54 » Wed Aug 30, 2023 10:57 pm
Some of my thoughts on possible retirement of Idalia, as people are debating it in all different places.
The idea of a "$10 billion price tag" for US retirement was mentioned a few times, and often supported by the existence of several damaging, billion-dollar storms post 2008 that were not retired by the US.
Here's a list of storms since 2009 that made between $1 billion and $10 billion in damage in the US, but did not receive a request for retirement by the US: Lee 2011, Isaac 2012, Imelda 2019, Hanna, Isaias, Sally, Delta, Zeta and Eta 2020, Elsa, Fred and Nicholas 2021, Nicole 2022.
However, the US did submit a retirement request for Fiona 2022 for its impacts in Puerto Rico, where it made $2.5 billion in damage (more than its monetary damage in Canada). Ultimately, Fiona's impacts in Canada were enough to be retired, but even if it went out to sea, it could still have been retired by the US.
Admittedly, this is a different case due to PR not being part of CONUS, and I'm not sure if it was because local officials in PR asked the US committee members to submit the retirement request on their behalf. But it at least suggests that the US does indeed consider retirements on a case-by-case basis and not have a flat threshold on price.
I also think the sparse population in the landfall region, while hopefully keeping the price tag down, should absolutely be factored into the decision for retirement beyond monetary damage. Suppose Idalia had the same cost as Sally ($7.3 billion, costliest hurricane to not be retired). Then the fact that Idalia hit a much smaller population would suggest that it hit a lot harder, had more severe localized impacts and is a more historic storm compared to Sally. Those people, despite being smaller in number, had their lives affected much more by Idalia, which is a much stronger argument for retirement than Sally had.
Also note that almost all the billion-dollar unretired storms I listed above either hit densely populated areas that have generally seen stronger storms before, and/or were overshadowed by other more significant US storms in the same year, and/or had questionable association between the name and the impacts (Lee, Imelda).
While Idalia may be a more borderline case for retirement than originally thought (thankfully), I still think it does warrant retirement based on what we know now. At least if it started with a more easily replaceable letter.
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