REDHurricane wrote:Xyls wrote: ??? Since when are hurricane names retired due to "academic reasons", even Patricia (2015) who would be the one example of where this was cited still did a fair amount of damage in Mexico. Lee is neither that unique nor that damaging. I don't think we Canadians will be requesting retirement. I could see Idalia go either way as it is a very borderline case imo.
Fair point -- personally, though, I think they should at least take a look at retiring Lee 2023 primarily to avoid confusion in the future with a possible Lee 2029, where we could have people searching up "Hurricane Lee" and seeing "Massive Category 5 Lee sets near-record for rapid intensification, heading towards Caribbean" when in reality Lee 2029 could end up peaking at 75mph and posing no threat to land. Yeah, Lee's impacts by themselves weren't severe enough to warrant retirement, but I feel like there's so many extra male "L" names available that the name Lee could be very easily replaced without causing any major problems.
Honestly, if Lee is going to get retired, than it should get retired over the 2011 version of storm which killed 18 people and did 2.8 billion dollars in damage as it caused catastrophic flooding across the northeast. But if we are going to start retiring past storms than I can think of several others that should go before it... (Alberto 1994, Gordon 1994, Alex 2010, Karl 2010) But this is opening a can of worms of retroactively retiring a bunch of names and this would become a mess so I doubt this is going to happen.